At the age of 89, bluegrass and old-time music pioneer Alice Gerrard is still going strong, and her vitality recently was on display at AMP, where she and her band played two-hour long sets consisting of instrumentals, classic tunes, and original songs.
Even today, country and bluegrass still struggle with issues of gender equity. (For an excellent discussion of these issues, see Marissa Moss’s Her Country.) When Gerrard and Hazel Dickens started playing together in the mid-’60s, the bluegrass world was overwhelmingly male-dominated. The duo, who were unafraid to tackle women’s and feminist issues, blazed a path for many of the women who play this kind of music today.
But Alice’s music isn’t only of historical interest. Earlier this year, she released a new album, Sun To Sun. She’s still tackling issues of the day, like trans rights, and doing so with wit and gentle humor. In her second set, she talked about how North Carolina, where she currently lives, passed House Bill 2, which requires people to use the restroom of the gender indicated on their birth certificate. In response, she wrote “Keep It Off The Seat,” which encourages people to use whatever restroom they feel comfortable with, as long as they do as instructed by the song’s title.
Stream Sun to Sun by Alice Gerrard on Spotify:
Introducing her first song of the evening at AMP on April 6, Alice told the audience, “The first sounds I heard in old-time music were unaccompanied vocals.” When she was playing in Bozeman, Montana, someone handed her a sheet of paper with the lyrics to “How I Can Keep From Fishing?” which was to be sung to the melody of “How Can I Keep From Singing?” Alice and her band opened the show with fine vocal harmonies.
From vocal harmonies, the show went all the way in the other direction, to the banjo and fiddle instrumental “Snowbird In The Ashbank.” After the song, Alice introduced a couple members of her band, Tatyana Hargreaves on fiddle and DeShawn Hickland on pedal steel. DeShawn, she mentioned, is going to be joining Cirque De Soleil for its western-themed show (as a musician, not an acrobat, though I would be interested to see someone play pedal steel while also working the trapeze).
Over her long career, Gerrard has crossed paths with many musical legends. One of those is Bill Monroe, who is considered the father of bluegrass. Bill gave Alice and Hazel the song “The One I Love Is Gone;” he only wrote one verse, and Hazel and Alice added a second. The next tune of the evening was “The More I See of These Cowboys,” by the Texas songwriter Leona Williams.
Like everyone else, the Covid epidemic deeply affected Gerrard. She mentioned losing a favorite cousin (although they actually passed from other causes.) That inspired “If I Could See Your Face Again.” After that was a cheerful instrumental written mandolin player Reed Stotts, “December Daisy.”
As you can imagine, someone who’s been in music for as long as Alice has a wealth of great stories, and getting to hear some of them made this a special evening. Gerrard was friends and toured with the great blues-folk artist Elizabeth Cotten, who is best known for “Freight Train.” Once, they were coming back through customs from Canada, and Elizabeth was asked if she’d bought anything. She answered that she’d gotten a piece of pie, but it wasn’t very good. Another time, Cotten told Alice that, when she died, she didn’t want to be buried. Instead, she wanted to float away down a river while her friends waved to her song. That image inspired Alice to write “Sweet South Anna River.”
Watch Alice Gerrard perform “Sweet South Anna River” live at Augusta Vocal Week on YouTube:
There were a few songs from the new album during the show. In the first set, she played “Maybe This Time,” which is about second chances. The second set included the title cut. The first set rounded out with fiddler Tommy Jarrell’s “Payday At The Mill” and “Come Along Baby” by Tex Williams.
During the intermission, the band mixed with audience members. When they came back, they opened with the instrumental “Bluegrass Stomp.” The second set featured an appearance by a special guest, singer Wendy Hickman, wife of DeShawn. “How Now, Brown Cow” came to Alice after she overheard a man saying he needed to get either a wife or a cow. “Michigan Sky,” a song she recorded with the Harmony Sisters, is, presumably, about the sky in the Great Lakes State. Of “Young Days,” Alice said, “As I get older, I write songs about getting older.”
The second set also included another song with just vocal harmonies, “Remember Us Always,” and the classic folk tune “Old Jim Crow.” For her encore, she played “Get Up In The Morning and Do Right.” This finished off an evening of fine picking, great songs, and wonderful stories. We are very lucky that Alice Gerrard is still making music and playing for us, and I hope she can keep doing so for a good long while more.