CD Review

McCutcheon, John
Storied Ground
(Rounder)

In his new collection of songs, Storied Ground, McCutcheon continues his struggle on behalf of working people against oppressive economics and a dehumanizing culture. The album raises some difficult issues about folk music, and I apologize in advance for my awkwardness in trying to address them. The basic problem with Storied Ground is that there are no stories. Instead McCutcheon continues to use people and events as examples to make a point, and he often misrepresents them in the process.

The opening song, for instance, "Jericho," was written on the 40th anniversary of Rosa Parks' civil disobedience. But, like the mass media, he disingenuously paints her as a regular working woman at the end of her rope who makes an impulsive, heroic decision. In fact, Parks had already become very active in the nascent civil rights movement and her sit down was a planned, heroic act of civil disobedience. The song goes on to celebrate another small rebellion - a 1937 auto workers sit down. Again, this apparently spontaneous action ignores years of organized union activity. These are simple people who suddenly and instinctively know the right thing to do. Still, when McCutcheon wants to tell a story, he can do it very well:

February came cold in '37
The worst they'd seen in years
Down at Fisher No. 1
It was engine blocks and gears
They checked the foreman, they checked the clock
They checked the lock on the door
They looked each other straight in the eye
And then they sat down on the floor.

The last verse, unfortunately, drops the format of zeroing in on specific historic moments and reverts to the pathetic picture of a generic Mexican mother and infant trying to cross the border. But the song has already lost its focus. The chorus, evoking the march around Jericho that made walls tumble, is just not the right metaphor to use after two verses about sit-down actions. And then the last chorus throws in a seemingly gratuitous mention of Cape Town...

The second song, "Vultures," is a diatribe against the sex, violence and voyeurism of pop culture - as if pop culture were not popular. As if it were not the entertainment of the people he's fighting for. As if the legacy of traditional folk music itself were anything but sex and murder. Instead, he champions boutique-like bookstores like the one in "Closing the Bookstore Down" or the one he sits in front of on the cover photo. But isn't it condescending to villify the makers of this pulp (would this include all the workers who write it, lay it out, manufacture it and truck it?) while portraying the consumers as innocent or indignant victims? As much as we might like to deny it, somehow Jon Benet, O.J., Lady Di - Lord Randall, Alison Gross, Omi Wise - these people and their stories are wrapped up in our collective psyche. The only question is, who will exploit this and for whose ends.

As always, McCutcheon's great gift is his musicianship, but this CD, like other recent ones, is too slickly produced for all the simplicity and grit he celebrates. It slips into the easy-listening, soft-rock bin.

McCutcheon is a great man and has worked tirelessly for many good causes, and great songwriters have praised his work. But I think most of the songs here contradict their own agenda in a more fundamental way. Folkies have argued for years over whether it's appropriate to write from the point of view of another person - usually the question is whether a (straight, white, middle class, male) writer can adopt/usurp the voice of someone who is a member of some currently oppressed group whose plight they want to address. The answer, I've always argued, is that it is the artist's prerogative to adopt other voices, to have no bounds or bonds on the imagination. BUT - with that imaginative prerogative the artist has a responsibility to take the time to fully imagine his subject: to turn the character of a song into a truly individual human being with an independent existence. A miner can't just be Joe the Miner, complaining about the woes of his class, or St. Joe stocially mouthing the ideals of the genteel songwriter. A quilter can't be just grandma filled with patience and quiet folk wisdom, a young Mexican mother wading the Rio Grande can't just be Rosalita filled with hope and fear. These depictions reduce characters to stereotypes with no existence beyond their political category. And no amount of "poetic" detail can undo this if the detail only functions as allegorical symbols. In "Two Foot Seam," McCutcheon's miner sings:

Way back 'fore the sun come up
I could smell his coffee in an old tin cup
Half an hour 'fore the rooster crowed
Heard that truck rattle down the road
Men grew up to go on down
Digging coal in the underground
Kids running free each night would dream
Of living their lives in a two foot seam

As fine and specific as this description is, it does not create a character. This is Joe speaking about life in the mines - any mine. Nothing else in the song picks up on the claustrophobic terror of that great image of "a two foot seam." (note: compare with Patrick McGuigan's song "Dynamite" in Fenario 101) The way he talks telegraphs rural, uneducated, but that's just part of the stereotype. What's worse is that when this man remembers his own father, the only details the speaker gives - his old shirt, the hymns he sang, the old tin cup - show us only that he was poor, overworked, pious, martyred: St. Joe the Anthracite. Later we learn about the songs he loved to sing, but it's just a list of our most classic spirituals - and that's the singer's identity and contemporary perspective bleeding through. Didn't he sing in a particular way? Didn't he have his own way of way of holding a coffee cup, his own childhood memories, a single foible or fault, something you'd notice about him that he himself remained unaware of, something you yourself might have overlooked until you stopped to remember carefully? Without these kinds of surprises, ironies and ambivalences, these men are not father and son and neither man has a voice of his own. They are simply mouthpieces, dehumanized and exploited by the writer as surely as their real counterparts are reduced and exploited by the bosses. So Mallett's "Walkin'" is more compassionate than McCutcheon's "Two Foot Seam," though it offers no saints and makes no plea for justice.

Unfortunately, not many McCutcheon fans will buy this argument - it's become a popular style of political folk music. So if you like McCutcheon, get this new record and sing your heart out for a better world. I'll sit down and have a beer with Dave Mallett - if I can find him.
-HB