John McCutcheon at the Ark

continued

folklore was standing just to one side on a North Carolina stage. But others reflect more deeply on the tradition of folk music McCutcheon inherited. Growing up in Wisconsin, he went to the Marathon County Public Library in search of folk songbooks and found only one, a collection of Woody Guthrie songs.

At the time he didn’t know who Guthrie was. The songs were in alphabetical order, so it wasn’t until three-quarters of the way through that he realized he was dealing with the creator of “This Land Is Your Land.” But he was impressed by the way Guthrie’s songs covered life’s entire spectrum: “What was most curious is here was a love song, followed by a kids’ song, followed by a historical song, followed by a nonsense song, followed by an angry song. So I guess when I started writing my own songs—about a day later—I just realized you write about everything.”

McCutcheon’s hundreds of songs have lived up to that aim. He has a cheerful way of dealing with family matters that has led him into a second career as a performer of children’s music, and he can pack the slow turning of the gears of generations into spare images. His various antiwar numbers have the knack of seeming rooted in a sacredness of everyday experience—a quality that has made him one of the few performers who has often sung antiwar songs for groups of veterans.