- "Shaped by Sound" combines performance and conversation to capture the depth of the North Carolina music scene.

From an early age, Alice Gerrard has studied, played, and preserved American folk music.

After almost 80 years, she's become one of the foremost historians and archivists of the genre.

She's a Grammy nominee, a folk hero, and an absolute legend.

Today, on the "Shaped by Sound" podcast from Durham, North Carolina, we're in conversation with Alice Gerrard.

Alice Gerrard from Durham, North Carolina, thank you for being on "Shaped by Sound."

- Thanks so much.

It's lovely to be here.

- I heard that you recently had a birthday.

- I did.

I hit my 90th.

- I heard you had quite a party.

- It was a big party in Raleigh.

We had a concert and... - [James Mieczkowski] Yeah.

- Friends came down and played music.

It was great.

It was a lot of fun.

- [James] It sounds like fun.

- Yeah.

- So I maybe wanna start our conversation today with sort of, what is your relationship to music?

- Well, I'd say I'm a musician.

- Yeah.

- But it's been a personal relationship, but I think it is with almost all musicians that whether it's classical music or... You have a personal relationship that's both emotional and lots of things, I think.

But because, you know, if you love what you're doing, if you love the music that you're playing, and that's probably the closest thing you can do, is love your music that you make.

But it's more than just the music too, it's where the music's coming from, because I didn't...

It doesn't just happen from the air.

The music that I play comes... You know, I think of it as sort of coming from the ground.

It comes from communities, it comes from...

It's the Southern music, is what I'm talking about.

Southern, and I call it Southern traditional music, whether it's country, whether it's bluegrass, whether it's blues.

So it's hard to define, I mean, as I said earlier too, people have tried to define it for a long time.

But my relationship to the music was shaped by the music, I would say, and by the interest in where the music came from.

You know, who were the people that played this music?

And what did they do in everyday life, you know?

And how come they played this song?

Or that tune or whatever.

And if they learned it from somebody in their community, which was generally the way it went, it could have been their parents or it could have been a neighbor.

And that's how things got around back in the day before tape recorders.

And my interest has always been more than just the music, it's the context of the music too.

And I know that, you know, people who play classical music, they know who the composers were, they know their names, they know, you know, where they lived and the times they lived in.

And that's what I was interested in, in listening to traditional music too, where did it come from?

Where did it come from?

- And it seems like, so that's been a pretty fluid journey for you?

- Yeah.

Yeah, it has been.

- [James] Yeah.

- And it started, I guess, just because... Well, one big, huge bombshell was "The Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music."

And I was in school then, in college, and met people who were getting interested in traditional music.

And somebody loaned me his copy of "The Harry Smith Anthology," and it was like, "Oh my God, this is amazing music."

And then I started looking for it in the college library, and I found this '78 recording of a woman by the name of Texas Gladden from Saltville, Virginia.

It was an old ballad called "One Morning In May," and she just had this beautiful, hard kind of voice, it had a lot of nail-you-to-the-wall kind of quality to it.

And it was a great story that she was singing about too, and so I tried to learn that, and then, you know, I tried to start teaching myself to play the banjo.

And then we started looking around, it was in Yellow Springs, Ohio, we started looking around to see whether there were people who played this music, 'cause a lot of people came down from Kentucky to Ohio and made their homes there, they migrated there.

There were people around the community that played, so we started looking for some of those people.

And some of them were right there at the college, the janitor played the banjo and stuff like that.

- It seems like this is a very pivotal moment in your career, is hearing this thing for the first time, these recordings for the first time.

- [Alice Gerrard] Yep.

- And you just got, like, jettisoned out into this whole different universe.

- And I wasn't the only one.

It's exactly right.

I mean, other people...

It came out, I think, in 1952, and it was also a time when a lot of people like me, not from traditional backgrounds, were hearing it and just being so turned on by it.

And they started playing mandolins and banjos, and they lived in New York City and they lived, you know, other places that you wouldn't say were necessarily California in the traditional sense.

- [James] Right.

- But then you can't say that 'cause I lived around Washington DC for many years, and people from the South moved up there a lot to get work.

So there were Southerners all around there, you know, who played.

And, you know, when you move, when you migrate, you bring your culture with you.

And so they brought music, and every little place you'd go, there'd be some little band playing bluegrass music in the bar or on the corner, or you'd have a little bit further up in Maryland where a lot of people migrated from North Carolina, like Ola Belle Reed and her family, and the Lundies from Southwest Virginia all moved up there and started playing music around there and started opening parks.

They called 'em country music parks where people could go and hear, traveling musicians would come through and stop there and play.

And Ola Belle Reed was a banjo player and a singer and a songwriter, who died fairly recently, but she moved up from somewhere around Sparta, North Carolina, I forget exactly where.

And with her family, and so there were lots of these people, and they were all making music.

The Stoneman family from Southwest Virginia moved up to the DC area.

And so you couldn't turn around, you know, you couldn't put your arm out and turn around and not hit somebody who had moved up there.

- And you were a part of that scene.

- Yes, and so... - Well, a question for you about that.

I mean, at the beginning of your career there, what were you sort of trying to do?

Like what was your vision?

- Well, it wasn't a career.

- A career with quotation marks, I guess.

- I didn't even really have a vision, that's part of my issue, I think.

I mean, I just wanted to play the music.

I wanted to play the music and I wanted to, you know... And I figured I'd get married and I'd have some kids, and that's sort of what happened.

But there wasn't a plan for my career.

That wasn't the day [indistinct].

It was "Father Knows Best," and "Leave It to Beaver," and, you know, that was your... You know, those kinds of scenarios were what you... Women in particular sort of had in their face all the time.

And of course, you know, other things influenced them too.

You know, you didn't need a career, your husband would work and bring home money.

You could just stay home and take care of the kids and cook and clean the house.

So that's sort of where I was, but there was something in me that didn't just wanna do that, and I wanted to play music.

And there were a lot of other people we'd have...

I married Jeremy, the friend who loaned me his "Anthology of American Folk Music," in college.

And he played music too and loved it, and so a lot of our friends, we'd have a party or something, and it was always a music party.

We never had a party where you just stood around and drank cocktails and chatted.

- Well, that sounds boring.

- Yeah, I know.

So everybody played music, they'd bring their instruments over and you'd take turns getting up.

And we had Bill Clifton's wonderful old song book that he had created, and we'd be on the music stand and we'd get the words and start singing songs.

And so there were lots of people around in the same sort of orbit we were in around the DC area who were also doing lots of things.

Well, of course, there was the... Archie Green was around there for a long time, who got the Folk Life Center started.

And there was Pete Kuykendall, who was a musician, but also started the magazine Bluegrass Unlimited.

And at the beginning, I was at their first meeting they had, trying to find out if they could help bluegrass music by having a magazine, and, you know, bringing people from all around who were in different places and played different kinds of bluegrass, and whether they could bring them together with this magazine and have a column on where people are playing and review recordings.

And it came about, Pete started that magazine.

So there was stuff going on, you know?

The Washington Folklore Society would bring people in.

John Jackson, who was a African American guitarist and also a grave digger, by the way, that was his profession, lived in Northern Virginia, and, you know, he would come in and do a concert for the Folklore Society.

And they just did what they did, it wasn't... You know, they just played and people just listened.

- Right.

- And of course, Elizabeth Cotten lived there.

She grew up here, or near Carrboro, and had moved and moved and was working as a domestic around Washington DC.

And venues were starting to open up, like the Cellar Door and several others.

You know, they had places for jazz.

I remember seeing Jovin Nudie and Stephane Grappelli at this club on Wisconsin Avenue somewhere in DC, I forget the name of it.

I don't think it's there anymore.

So there was a lot going on.

And then when Ralph Rinzler moved to town, he was hired by the Smithsonian to start a festival of American folk life, so that just brought in so much more.

- As all these people are bringing in new energy, new Life, what were you starting to see and feel yourself, right?

As you're getting into this whole new world of music that's just kind of coming up from the ground, as you were kind of saying earlier.

What was that like, that you were feeling?

- Honestly, what I was feeling was I just wanted to learn it, learn more, and play it.

And it didn't go much beyond that.

But then I met another person whose family had moved up to Baltimore from West Virginia.

Her name was Hazel Dickens.

And almost her whole family had moved up to get work, including her, sort of at the end of the 1940s, I guess, World War II and lots of factory jobs and things.

And so I met her through...

I don't know how I would've met her, except that a friend of ours who was Mike Seeger was working at a TB Sanitarium for his alternative draft stuff.

One of Hazel's brothers was a patient there and heard Mike sort of doodling around on his mandolin one day and came down and said, "Oh, I like that music.

I play music too."

And then they got to be friends and he took him over to their house for dinner one day and Hazel was there.

And I just remember Jeremy at some point telling me, is talking about stuff around there and he said, "And there's this little skinny girl you need to meet.

She's got a great, big voice."

And it was true, that was Hazel, and so that's how I met Hazel.

And then she'd come to the parties too, and we just started singing together, and it kind of was nice, you know?

But I was listening to her for a long time before I ever opened my mouth.

- Why is that?

- Because one of the things that is a...

The first most important thing if you're trying to learn this music is to be able to listen to it, and take it in, and have it become a part of you, and then, you know, that comes to play when you open your mouth or pick up your instrument.

So I was listening to her sing for a long time, and you listen to people all the time, and there's so much alike between what one person does and what another person does.

Then we started singing a little bit together, somebody probably said, "Hey, why aren't you girls singing?"

And so we did, and then we just started doing more and more.

And then we were at a party near Georgetown, and it was just by happenstance, a couple of friends, Peter Siegel and David Grisman, were coming down to a bluegrass festival that was out in the country somewhere in Maryland, and it got rained out.

And so Peter heard about this party happening with music, and he came over there and we were singing something together.

And he said, "Oh, I really like that.

Why don't you guys do a record?"

It was like, "Oh my God."

You know, so that was kind of the first inkling that we might do something like that.

And eventually, we did.

- Yeah.

- We did make a recording for Folkways Records, but we still...

I mean, Hazel always had a day job, you know, she was working eight hours a day.

And I had, by that time, four kids.

We had just kept playing music, not thinking about... You know, 'cause playing professionally meant touring, and, you know, she wasn't gonna do that.

The money you could make playing music would not be enough to...

It wasn't like a day job.

- Yeah.

But you were writing music together though, at this point?

- She was writing some music, and it didn't really happen until a little bit later.

Maybe she did sort of off in her bedroom, you know, write some songs.

I'm not sure about that.

I would say she probably did.

But the first time it sort of came out in the open, this friend of ours named Anne Romaine, she was from Gastonia, North Carolina, but she was down in Atlanta during the late fifties, early sixties, and working for the Civil Rights Movement along with Bernice Reagon and other people.

And so she and Bernice thought it would be a really good idea to have a tour, you know, of Black and white musicians traveling in the South, and do concerts and workshops and things like this that spoke to the lives of people, the work of people, who lived in the South.

And Anne's a real go-getter, she was a real go-getter, you know?

So she and Bernice came up with this idea, and they both had contacts within the Civil Rights Movement and at various colleges and places near Blackey, Kentucky, where, you know, there's a lot of work going on, anti-strip mining stuff going on.

And so they made the contacts and Anne would call people up and get a job, and then she'd hire people, she'd hire musicians.

And if you look in the Wilson Library in the Southern Folk Life Collection, some of those letters between the musicians and Anne, 'cause there were no telephones, so she'd write a little note saying, "Hey, Doc Bogs, could you come on April 27th for about a week to go on the tour?

And, you know, if you can catch the bus from Norton to blah, blah, blah, blah, then somebody will pick you up in Nashville," which was there at the time.

And he would write back and say, "If you ask me, I'll come."

And then he'd figure out a bus schedule.

And so it was all by wrote, you know, they contacted each other by letter.

And even sometimes, very occasionally, by phone, but it was almost always by postcard or letter.

And so she put together these tours and, you know, I think back on who was on those tours, and it was just like the most amazing thing.

Like, she had us, but before she had us, she had Bessie Jones from the Georgia Sea Island Singers, she had Johnny Shines, who was a blues player from Deep South, a fellow from Kentucky by the name of Nimrod Workman, who was an old coal miner.

Mabel Hillary, who was a great singer, and just so many people.

Elizabeth Cotten went on, Ola Belle Reed went on.

Sometimes, if we were playing someplace where somebody lived, like Bill Monroe lived near Nashville, tried to get him to come and be on the concert, which did happen often with some of those people, they'd come and just be on for one concert.

We'd travel around and play, and it was play in different communities, and sometimes at a college concert if you had a contact there.

You know, especially during the Civil Rights Movements, there were a lot of organizations, you know, SNCC and SOC and different ones that would sponsor such a concert at their college or community.

We'd all sit on the stage at the same time and get up, do our thing, and then sit back down.

Everybody would join in sometimes.

But it was an amazing thing, and nobody had ever done this really before.

There's an interesting film called "Two Trains Runnin'," with an apostrophe, because there's another one called "Two Trains Running," which is not the one I'm thinking of.

But it was about the sort of parallel paths of the people, the folkies who had heard "The Harry Smith Anthology," and somehow were thinking, "Maybe some of these people are still living."

And they started to go look for them in the South, where they found out where they had last lived or, you know, whatever.

And then they'd go there or they'd ask a neighbor, but it was sort of parallel with the Civil Rights Movement in the South.

We'd travel around in this van, you know, just bumping around over these back roads.

We'd eat at restaurants.

And if anybody in the tour...

I remember Elizabeth Cotten, we'd stopped one time and we were thinking we'd go eat at this restaurant, and she kind of looked out, you know, "I don't think we should stop here."

And you always...

If they smelled something funky about the place, if the African Americans didn't wanna stop there, there was a good reason not to stop there.

We had a great time.

We had a really good time.

- It sounds like it.

- [Alice] Yeah.

- Well, I wanna circle back quickly to you and Hazel.

- Yeah, and Hazel and I did those tours, and that's what I was getting back to your point about that it was political in nature.

And so I think that this is one of the things that sort of gave Hazel permission to sort of find her political voice, and that's when she started writing a lot of songs like "Black Lung," and different ones.

- Now the song "No Never No," y'all wrote that together, is that right?

- No, that's an old... That comes from a book that I found in a thrift store, it's called "Heart Songs," and apparently a lot of people have them.

But it's a wonderful old book that's full of songs.

- And you found it in a thrift store?

- In a thrift store.

- How cool.

- And in that book was this song called "No Never No," and it had music written out to it and it said it was collected by somebody or other, I don't remember.

And so I went and... And I really liked the words, you know, it was like, "These words are cool," you know, it's like an old ballad.

Sort of scary words.

But then I started to pick the tune out on the piano, and it was kind of, "Oh, this is a terrible tune.

I don't like this tune at all."

So I made up another melody for it.

So that's my music and the words come from the "Heart Songs," book.

But Hazel and I first recorded that with a group that we played with a lot called the Strange Creek Singers, which was Hazel, me, Mike, Tracy Schwartz, and Lamar Grier.

And we toured a fair amount with them.

But, yeah, that's where we first recorded that song.

- When you play it now, what does it remind you of?

- I'm very drawn to the sort of lonesome sound of old-time music and bluegrass music.

- What is the lonesome sound?

- Well, it's been defined sometimes as the high lonesome sound.

And if you listen to somebody like Roscoe Holcomb or Texas Gladden, who was the first person I heard do that one morning in May, your voice, it's a very keening sound.

You hear it...

I've heard it a lot.

Well, there's a woman, an Irish singer by the name of Margaret... Oh God, - Margaret won't be mad.

- Margaret Barry.

B-A-R-R-Y.

And she's sang... Like, you could listen to her, and a lot of those old Irish singers had that same quality, you know, that keening voice, somewhat embellished.

And that the whole idea of embellishments comes... Oh, I have no idea from where, but a lot of 'em are used in Irish singing, and a lot of them are used in African American singing, and, you know, you hear the twists and turns that people put in.

And the way they come into a phrase and go out of a phrase, you know, comes from probably so many places, it's hard to say it came from one place.

- [James] Right.

- Yeah.

- So when you're thinking about, when you're playing this song and using this high lonesome sound, are you kind of tying that back to you learning music, and understanding it, and playing with Hazel, and, like, figuring out this voice for the first time?

- Yeah.

Yes.

Finding your voice is a whole nother issue.

But, yes, I was trying to find my voice, and I did eventually find my voice, but it was also learning to absorb the sounds of the music and the way of singing without sounding phony with it.

So it becomes part of you at some point.

And that's why I say, you must listen.

You know, you can't write this stuff down, there's no system of notation that we have that allows for all the little...

The notes between the notes, the embellishments, the slurs, the whatever you wanna call 'em.

At least not yet, that I know of.

I think Alan Lomax may have been trying to do something like that before he died, but I'm not sure.

- But you were listening to Hazel for so long.

- I listened to her for a long time and she really had those... She had a very high voice.

She used embellishment a lot.

Just knew how to sort of grab the most out of a song.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Do you think that songs have lives?

- Yeah, they do have lives.

I mean, I can still listen to...

I mean, if people sing them or play them, they have lives, and so it's continuing, you know?

And when we used to go visit some of the older musicians, and we were young at the time, we were going to visit them, they were old at the time.

And it was...

Almost a hundred percent of the time, they loved having people come, because I think in some way in their lives, they felt like their music would go on, you know, because other people were interested in it and doing it.

And there was an old fiddler around Galax that I spent a lot of time with, named Luther Davis.

He was in his nineties when I first met him.

But he would sometimes say, "Oh, you know, I get kind of depressed 'cause there's nobody around anymore who's lived through what I've lived."

And it was true, there were very few people in their nineties around there.

But he also was delighted to have these young people coming to visit him and learn his tunes.

And I think it was a two-way street, you know?

We brought him joy, he gave us joy, you know?

Kind of.

And so I think these things live on with the people who sing them and make them.

- Right.

And hopefully keep passing it down, right?

And so sort of with a song like you have, like "Remember Us," are you sort of channeling that idea where it's these people that you've met and got to learn from and be so, I guess, you know, excited about their history and their culture, is that sort of what you're channeling there?

- Well, that's part of it for sure, but then other...

I think sometimes about, you know, there's a lot of talk about reparations and the people who actually built this country, which was not...

I mean, to begin with, it was African Americans working on plantations in the South, as far as the Southern music goes.

And so there's that too and thinking about, "Oh, so many people came here from other places and they died in the process," you know?

Enslaved people were thrown overboard, you know, or they just died from the conditions of traveling.

Immigrants coming had a hard way to go, but they're the people who built this country, and so that's part of it too.

And then... - And they built this music.

- They built this music.

Yeah.

- So that's sort of kind of carrying that forward in a way.

- And that's kind of what I was channeling there.

- Yeah.

I wanna ask you a little bit more about sort of where you are right now, because you've had this sort of incredible journey of documenting, and preserving, and playing with all these artists.

- Mm-hmm.

- And it seems as though, you know, even just having a conversation with you now, that you still look up to those people.

- Oh, yeah.

- But now it seems to me, you know, like you've... Like people are looking up to you.

- It's surprising, isn't it?

- I don't know if it's surprising.

- I found it to be.

Like, "Really?"

But, yeah, I'm sort of learning to kind of accept it, you know?

Embrace it or whatever you wanna call it.

- I'm wondering what's it like to play with people that are younger than you and are excited as you were when you were first finding this music and really getting embedded in it?

- I really love playing with the people that I'm playing with.

I suppose there might be younger people that I wouldn't enjoy playing with so much, but I love playing with these guys.

And it's cool and I like it, and they're great musicians, and so that's a good thing.

And they can pick something up off the floor for you if you drop it.

My dog can do that too, by the way.

- Right.

Well, 'cause we were kind of talking about how this music is so generational, and I just think that's so interesting that... 'Cause when we're just talking, it seems as though, you know, your recounting of it and your memory of it is that you wanted to preserve that in such a big way.

And do you feel like people are doing that now?

- Yeah, I do.

I feel like they're preserving it and they're taking it further too, in some ways.

And they're finding more about the real history of the music and it's coming to light in a lot of ways.

A lot of people are saying, "Well, you know, country music."

It's been a white industry for so long, except maybe for Charlie Pride and DeFord Bailey, who was the first Black person on the Opry.

And now they're finding lots of...

They're being much more inclusive about country music now than they used to be.

And I think it's true with bluegrass music too, it's just kind of finding more out about it and keeping those things alive.

You know, pushing the boundaries sometimes, and sometimes holding the line, sometimes going over the line, you know?

People who hold the line, they just don't want it to be any different.

And then there are people who are pushing the line, or people who are doing both, they're holding the line here and they're pushing the line there.

And as long as people are doing that, it's gonna live and it'll grow and it might change a little bit, you know?

And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

- But hopefully we can hear this years from now.

- Absolutely.

- Yeah.

- Oh, yeah.

Well, with places like the libraries, I mean, you shouldn't think of this music as just something that only stays in a library, like the Wilson Library, the Southern Folk Life Collection, they're hanging onto this stuff.

And in some remote day when everybody's dead or nobody has decided to take up singing this music or whatever, playing it, you can go there if somebody gets interested and you can find it.

So it's great, I think it's the Library of Congress and Wilson Library and places like that.

- And hopefully at a concert venue near you, right?

- Absolutely.

- Yeah.

I wanted to kind of bring it back to North Carolina for a second.

So you've had this sort of history kind of in DC and across the country, in the South, but you started to call North Carolina home in the early nineties.

- Right.

- And what has that experience been like for you, kind of coming here and sort of embedding yourself and working with artists here?

- I first moved to Nashville after I got divorced.

We were living in Maryland, which was old home place for me.

I decided to go to Nashville and stay with Anne Romaine for a while and just see what the music scene there was gonna be like if I wanted to stay there.

And so I went there and stayed with her for several months, maybe five, six months.

And it was really fun living there, but I really missed...

It's all about doing business there.

- Right.

- Doing bu'ness.

And I just wasn't into that, there wasn't a lot of old-time music happening at that time.

Now there's tons of it, but not back then.

And so I had a couple of friends who were living up in Galax, Virginia, and they said, "Well, why don't you come?

If you wanna learn the music, why don't you come and live in it?"

Something like that.

- [James] It makes sense.

- And so I said, "Okay."

So I went there and spent eight years there.

And then when I started the Old Time Herald, I started it up there.

- And just for reference, the Old Time Herald, that is a magazine that you created?

- [Alice] Yes.

- From scratch?

- From scratch.

- Never made a magazine before?

- Never made a magazine before.

But I knew a lot of people to call and say, "How do you do this?"

So it was a lot of fun.

But there was nobody, nobody, technology had not come to Galax.

There were no computers, basically.

And it became clear very quickly that I was gonna need some kind of a computer, 'cause I was making labels out by hand, typing 'em on a typewriter.

And so a friend of mine told me, he said, "Yeah, why don't you get an Atari?

'Cause it's got a good mailing list program on it."

I said, "Okay, I'll do that."

And so I sent away for one, it came in, and then I was sitting there trying to figure out how to use it, you know?

But I had a friend who lived down in Chapel Hill, who was a Commodore person.

Many people might not even know what those things are now.

But I would load my Atari in the car, drive down to Chapel Hill, take it into her house, she'd set me all up, and I'd go back to Galax.

And that's how it went for a while.

We did become a nonprofit.

A friend of ours helped us with the legal stuff.

But then we needed a board of directors, and then, you know... And so we didn't do that for a while, I was just saying, "The money comes in, the money goes out.

The money comes in..." So, nonprofit.

[James and Alice laughing] The money doesn't come in.

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

But, anyway.

And you have to account for this money some way or the other, you know, you can't just spend it and not account for it.

So then that's why I moved down here.

- [James] Yeah.

- I didn't wanna go...

I wanted to be close to where Galax, I wanted to be able to come back and visit people, and I had a little place that I was renting for $50 a month and my landlord said I could keep it and come back.

And so I went down and then we...

There was the Sounds of the South Conference, did you ever hear that?

It was a big, huge event here sponsored by, I guess UNC, I'm not sure who, Southern Folklife Collection maybe.

So they had a big hoopla, a weekend long thing with music and workshops and things.

So I took that opportunity to have a meeting with a lot of the people who were coming to that, like Archie Green and the guy from England who started the Old Time Music magazine, who had purple hair, I can't remember his name now.

- Purple hair?

- I know, back in the day it was usual.

- How progressive.

- But it was Great Britain- - And you've got a little bit in yours right now.

- Yeah, that's true.

- It looks good.

- I said if I'm gonna go white, let's spoof it up a little bit.

Okay, so we had this big meeting at somebody's house, and they all came and they said, "Well, the first thing you gotta do is separate your money from the magazine's money."

And then said, you know... And it became clear that the thing I should have done was talk to people before I started this magazine, to see if it was viable and how much money we'd need and blah, blah.

The usual way you start things up.

And I didn't, just, you know, a couple of friends gave me each a thousand dollars, and with that we started the magazine.

But then, as one of the people pointed out, if you had done that, you probably would've never started it because it would've been so overwhelming to think about.

- [James] Right.

- Which I think is probably true.

- Sometimes you just gotta jump off the cliff, right?

- Jump off the cliff.

Yeah.

- I guess, well, just metaphorically, right?

But... - Yeah, but being here enabled us to have a board, raise some more money, get a Mac, we got a Mac computer 'cause it had a PageMaker program on it, and you could lay out the magazine with PageMaker.

I don't guess they have that anymore, do they?

- They do, but it's... Yeah, it's... - Something else.

- It's... Yeah.

- Anyway, so I learned to do that with a little grant money.

Somebody from the... - Mm-hmm.

- Who knew how to do it came and showed me how to do it.

There were good reasons for being here, but the part of the reason I chose here was because I knew a lot of people who lived here already, I wasn't moving into a place where I didn't know anybody.

There was a lot of music happening here too, with the Red Clay Ramblers and the Fuzzy Mountain String Band and, you know, people doing the same things.

That was why I moved here.

I moved to Durham 'cause it was cheaper than Chapel Hill.

- And it's probably still the case.

- [Alice] Probably still, but... - And maybe not for long.

- [Alice] It's kind of gone... Yeah.

- So you were nominated for your first Grammy in 2014.

- Was it '14?

I can't remember.

- Well, your record "Follow the Music," came out.

- Was that in '14?

Okay, that's right, I guess.

- But you have sort of this group of folks that came to that record, MC Taylor, the Cook Brothers, Libby Rodenbough, Andrew Marlin of Watchhouse.

They all played on that record or influenced that record?

- No.

No.

What was happening, I was working, they hired me at Duke for one semester to be the Layman Brady person at the Center for Documentary Studies.

I taught for one semester, whatever I wanted to teach.

So I just talked about...

Taught something about traditional music and gathering it, collecting it, or just doing it and something like this.

And I could get guests to come in, so, you know, Spots would come in, he's a record collector.

And a woman named Elaine Perky, who was activist in the coal mine scene there in West Virginia, she came in and sang.

And then each evening, there'd be a little concert with the person who was there.

And it was really fun, but at the time, MC was a folklore graduate student at UNC, I believe.

But he was working at Duke as the sort of receptionist and person that you first met when you walked in the door, at the doc study center.

And so he's the one that suggested making a record, and he wanted to produce it.

So I was like, "Really?"

You know?

What is there here?

I just wasn't sure.

But, yeah.

- [James] But he saw something.

- He did see something.

And then he put the band together, which was Phil and Brad Cook.

Well, Phil plays everything.

- Yeah.

They're so talented.

- So, Andrew, we did a concert with Andrew out in Oregon someplace, years ago, but he was not on this recording.

And, you know, I had a few other people on, Rayna Gellert played on a couple of things, my friend Gail Gillespie played on something.

And so I had a few people in too, besides the stuff they did.

- [James] Yeah.

- That was Mike's project.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it seems like it was both of yours.

- Well, it was both of ours.

He'd come over and sit in the kitchen and he'd say, "Okay, play me something," and I'd play him a song and he'd say, "Oh, let's do that one.

That's a good one."

And that's how it went until we got the repertoire together.

- Yeah.

And then, you know, it came out into the world and people came to it.

- I know.

How awesome.

- What was that like?

- It was...

It's not the kind of thing I usually go to.

You know, it's incredibly huge.

And my kids, a couple of my kids came out with me, and one grandchild came, and they really enjoyed it.

But it's a huge thing, you know?

But it was fun too.

I wasn't gonna go, but that was the first... You know, I didn't wanna go to that thing.

But then people said, "You gotta go.

You gotta go.

You gotta go."

So I went and I'm glad I did.

- Good.

- Yeah.

- Are you a fisher, fisherman, fisherwoman?

- No.

I borrowed all the gear for that from a friend of mine named Anya, who is a fly fisher woman.

And she gave me all the vest and the line and the pole and everything, I just stood there and went... - But you wrote a song, I mean, you have a song about it.

- No, I didn't write that song.

- You didn't write it, but you play it.

- Yes.

- What brings you to that?

Like, why play it?

Why sing it?

- Oh, I just love... Well, it was years ago that a friend and I were doing a concert out in Montana, and after the concert, this person came up and said, "Here's this song, and I think you'd really like it."

And it said... And I think it had the person's name on it, but I don't know who it was, that person had not written it.

Or maybe they had.

Yeah, they must have written it.

But it was to the tune of, "How Can I Keep From Singing."

To be sung to the tune of "How Can I Keep From Singing."

So he handed it to me.

It could have been a she, I'm not sure.

I don't remember.

And I took it home and it went in the pile of paper, you know, the ever present pile of paper.

And recently, somewhere in the last year or two, I ran across it and I said, "Oh, man, I like this.

This is a cute little song.

Let me try doing it with the tune of 'How Can I Keep From Singing.'"

So I just sat there and did it, and it kind of worked out.

So then I got Tatiana Reed involved in it, finding some parts.

And that's what we liked.

And it's just a kind of a cool little song.

- [James] Yeah, it is.

- And it came from fishing.

Wanna quit?

Go fishing.

Yeah.

I think a lot of people can identify with it.

- [James] Oh, for sure.

Especially if you're out there doing it, right?

Because there's some sort of meditation to it that you really are drawn to, versus, say, going after that thing that might be elusive.

- I know.

- A question that I like to ask people is, how are you shaped by sound?

Is there a way that you feel like you are?

- I think I'm shaped by this music that I've chosen to live with and work with.

And it's shaped me, I mean, my life, in a way, in the way I live, with friends, you know?

In the same way that, you know, having a dog and doing sports with my dog has shaped me and brought other friends into my life that are dog people, you know?

And there are some music people who are dog people, but, you know, probably few.

But it's shaped everything I do.

I mean, it's shaped the work that I've done, chosen to do, and the music I've chosen to play and to identify with in a lot of ways.

- As you kind of look back on that, what are you seeing?

As you're seeing this, as you're just saying yourself, it sort of shaped your identity in many facets.

And how do you react to something like that?

Like, how does that make you feel?

- Well, I feel like in some ways, my identity was in play before.

My parents were both musicians, but my mother played the piano.

She was a really good piano player and singer.

She and her sisters had a traveling quartet called the Symphony Sisters Quartet.

And then my dad was a singer.

He came from England.

And they used to have parties, music parties.

And I can remember as a kid, you know, sitting on the stairs, listening, people would come over and bring their violin and they'd play together and, you know, sing stuff together.

So I grew up with a sense that music is something you can do at home.

You can sit around and play it.

It's not something that has to be in a movie, on a stage, you know, it can just be something that you do because it's fun and it brings friends together, and so that was in me from the very beginning.

But the kind of music I chose was not the music that they did.

And I just...

But I think that sense of music that you can make really came into play in the music I chose to do, which is also music you can make.

You don't have to be able to read music to do this music.

You don't have to have a clothespin on the street on your music stand, like my friend who played in a string quartet and they'd go into San Francisco and stand on the corner and they had music with clothespins and they'd sit there playing there.

And they weren't looking at anybody until one day they saw somebody who happened to be from around the Bay Area who had formed this, it was one of the early Bay Area string bands, and they were there playing on the street.

No music, just playing and singing, looking at the audience, reacting to the audience, you know, having a good time, no papers flying off into the San Francisco wind, you know?

And she was like, she tells me, she said that was her big [indistinct].

I mean, she's a classical pianist, a classical cellist, she took up the fiddle, she said, "I wanna do this music."

And she still does classical music, and her kids are great musicians too.

But, yeah, so it's kinda like... - Is it a bit like you do, there's no boundaries?

The limits are sort of there, but not totally identified?

- Yeah, it might be a little.

I mean, I know what I like and I know what I don't like.

I really like this one.

And it can be... Like, one of my favorite songs that I just pulled up recently was The Harmony Sisters, the women I used to play with a while back, Irene was one of those people, and we used to do the song called "Lucky Old Son," which was a Tin Pan Alley song written by a couple of people.

I've got the names, but I don't remember them.

And, you know, we just found... We just did that song with the guitar, two guitars and three voices.

You know, so it just depends on what you hear.

But I think also that I've been drawn to...

The songs I listened to as a teenager in high school, which was not old-time music or Roscoe Holcomb or Elizabeth Cotten or anybody, it was like Patti Page or The Nature Boy, you remember Nature Boy?

- The Nature Boy, I remember, I don't think it's the same one that you- - But there was a guy called Nature... - You know what I'm talking about?

♪ There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy ♪ - Okay.

- That one?

- Yeah.

Well, it's funny 'cause I know that from actually something totally different.

- Oh, yeah.

- It's "Moulin Rouge."

I don't know.

- Oh, okay.

- I guess that was adapted for that in some other way as well.

- But it was Frankie Laine or somebody who first sang it.

And Rosemary Clooney doing "Come out of my House," where there was a harps accord, you know, I just love that sound because it was different, you know?

From the crooners.

- [James] From everything else.

- Yeah, the Bing Crosbys and... - Alice, I think we've come to sort of the end of our conversation for today.

You've been a lovely guest.

Thank you so much for joining us.

- Sorry, I've got the early morning frog.

- Oh, well, did you have coffee today?

- No, I didn't have coffee.

- Hmm, well.

- But I should drink more water.

- I wanted to leave you with any...

If there's anything else that you'd like to say?

- Well, so we talked about "Remember Us," "Fishing."

"Sweet South Anna," I think, would be a good one because I wrote that song because I was a friend of Elizabeth Cotten's and I talked to her a lot.

I was doing interview...

When we both lived around DC, I was interviewing her for notes for her last recording that she made, which is called "When I'm Gone," "You're Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone."

And she just happened... We talked about a lot of stuff, but she happened to mention that when she died, she didn't wanna be put in the ground, that there's something about that she didn't like.

But then she told me that what she would like is to be laid out on a river, and she'd go floating down the river, just floating down the river, and all her friends would be standing on the bank waving as she went by.

And so I said, "Oh my God, that's a great picture."

And so I thought, "Well, I'm gonna try to write a song about that."

So that's where that song comes from, thanks to Elizabeth Cotten.

I don't think she ever got her dream.

- Really?

- No.

She didn't go floating down the river after death.

- Bummer.

But, you know, is that definitive?

We don't know.

- Oh, no, we know.

- Oh, darn.

Well, maybe metaphorically, we could say that her songs are gonna continue to flow.

- Yeah, yeah.

- For as long as we can hear them.

Is there anything else you'd like to speak to, sort of specifically?

We talked about "Fishing," and "Remember Us."

We didn't really talk about fiddle tune now, maybe that's something that we'd like to talk about.

- Well, the fiddle tune that I think I'm gonna play is from the old man Luther Davis that I was talking about earlier.

- Yeah.

- I learned it from him, although a number of people did it back then.

And it's called a "Little Black Dog Come A-Trottin' Down the Road."

And there was this old lady banjo player, a friend of mine named Birdie Mae Dickens, and she played the song on her banjo too.

And she'd always say, "Oh, yeah, let's play that 'Little Black Dog.'"

And then she'd say, "Little black dog come a-trottin' down the road, lifted up his leg, shot sugar in the gourd."

Then she'd go... [Alice humming] - [James] Are you gonna do that today?

- Yeah, maybe.

I dunno.

I'll probably do that.

Yeah.

And then the "Sun to Sun" is just a song I wrote in response to gun violence.

- Yeah.

And it seems like that's also sort of a...

Beyond just the gun violence part of it, I feel like there's just a lot of other things that have just been so troubling.

- Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

- I mean, just in the world that we live in, period.

As we're trying to interpret it and understand it, it just seems so... Like, here's another thing, right?

- Yeah.

- Beyond just the gun violence of all this that's happening, it seems like, "Okay, great.

On top of that, there's this."

- Exactly.

- I would like to also just mention, today you'll have Tatiana Hargreaves playing.

She's gonna be playing the fiddle.

- [Alice] Playing the fiddle and singing.

- And then we've got Rebecca Branson Jones on the pedal steel.

- Pedal Steel and banjo.

- And Reed Stutz on the mandolin and banjo.

- Yes.

That's it.

We... Yeah.

- They're all amazing people.

- Yeah.

I agree.

- They seem to just love playing with you.

- Well, I hope they do.

I feel like they do.

And I love playing with them too.

- Well, good.

Well, Alice, thank you so much for being here today.

- Thanks for having me.

- We appreciate it.

Thanks for joining us on the "Shaped by Sound" podcast.

If you'd like to hear some of the songs we discussed today, you can find them on our website at pbsnc.org/shapedbysound, or find us on the PBS North Carolina YouTube page.

Thanks for listening.