In 2012 John McCutcheon released an album honoring Woody Guthrie’s 100th birthday. In 2015 he released an album in memory of the 100th anniversary of labor songwriter Joe Hill’s execution by the state of Utah. Then in 2019 he honored Pete Seeger’s 100th birthday by gathering many of his music friends and putting new twists on Seeger classics.
This year, John McCutcheon has mounted another centenary project, this one remembering an iconic fiddle contest in the small Appalachian town of Mountain City, TN. The album Long Journey Home arrives on September 5, 2025.
McCutcheon says:
I was introduced to Mountain City as an 18-year-old, thanks to a Folkways recording, Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley’s. I was a fledgling banjo player and this sounded like the kind of music I wanted to play.
Though he traveled South a couple of years later, fell in love with the region, and never left, it took him nearly forty-five more years to finally get to Mountain City.
He explains:
My wife, children’s author and storyteller, Carmen Agra Deedy had been there and planted the seed for an Arts Center in the town. She brought me there to do a benefit to raise money for the Center. It was love at first sight and I’ve been back there many times since.
The 1925 convention brought together prominent Country musicians of the time. Many fiddlers showed up in early May of 1925 to compete for a $10 gold piece.
McCutcheon sets the scene:
There’s a famous photograph taken that day that almost every fiddler knows. It was like the Woodstock of early county music. Seems like everyone was there: Carson, Clarence Ashley, GB Grayson, the Fiddlin’ Powers Family, Uncle Am Stuart, the Hill Billies, Charlie Bowman, Dud Vance, and more. There’s a giant mural of that photograph on the side of the Arts Center.
Many musicians were thrilled to participate in this new collection. Stuart Duncan and Tim O’Brien joined early on. Old Crow Medicine Show not only signed on but offered their studio to record many of the tracks. IBMA Fiddler of the Year Becky Buller, Blues man Sparky Rucker, guitarist Molly Tuttle, Jake Blount, and Bruce Molsky all lined up. Tray Wellington & Victor Furtado and Mountain City native Kody Norris offered their music. And Cathy & Marcy’s Old Time Coalition and the Earl White String Band rounded out the lineup. Finaly, McCutcheon added the piece of music that first captured his attention decades ago, Clarence Ashley’s “Cuckoo.”
McCutcheon provides some context:
An inconvenient truth about the 1925 convention is that is was co-sponsored, in part, by the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. That famous photograph contained no Black or female fiddlers. But this collection shows just how much things…everything!…have changed. Here we have nearly equal numbers of men and women featured. Black and white musicians playing together. This is a picture of the old-time and bluegrass music community today. Song titles are changed, lyrics are rewritten, and some songs are simply excised from the repertoire because they are outdated, offensive, or just plain wrong. This is what happens in culture. It grows and changes, evolves and resurrects.
All the musicians agreed that any profits generated by this recording would benefit the Arts Center in Mountain City, celebrating their past while building their future.
