A Q & A with Alice Gerrard on her new release, ‘Bittersweet’

by Kim Ruehl, for FolkAlley.com

Alice Gerrard has played with some of folk music’s great legends: Hazel Dickens, Mike Seeger, Elizabeth Cotten. Her career has spanned a half-century and touched upon the realms of country, bluegrass, and old time, influencing generations of players and songwriters alike. But, it wasn’t until this summer that she ever released a solo album of all original songs. As she told me in a recent interview, it was an idea she first heard during a week at MerleFest a couple years back, when Laurie Lewis offered her producing skills to the project.

The result is a lovely, catchy, stirring disc full of great story-songs. From lusty love songs to ruminations on life, love, purpose, and death, Bittersweet makes clear why Alice Gerrard’s legend is so hugely influential. Of course, she was helped out by some of folk and bluegrass music’s most talented players: Stuart Duncan, Bryan Sutton, Rob Ickes, and others. But, at the core, it’s just a collection of great songwriting.

Recently, Gerrard was nice enough to hop on the phone and discuss the album, as well as her remarkable legacy as a folk music trailblazer during her collaboration with the late Hazel Dickens:

Kim Ruehl: Is Bittersweet something you’ve always wanted to do, or is that something you just started thinking about recently?

Alice Gerrard: I have thought about it over the past number of years… I wanted to do an album of all originals, rather than having them mixed in with other stuff. I’d been feeling more and more that way. Then Laurie Lewis talked to me several years ago at Merlefest about the possibility of her producing an album of all my originals, and that seemed like a good thing to do. But I was busy, she was busy. We talked about it briefly and then it lay there for a number of years until a couple other people talked to me about doing the same thing. So, I went back and talked to Laurie because she was the first one to ask me about it. I had a few [original songs] here and there but never put them all together before this, in one cohesive album of solo material.

KR: Sometimes you can tell songwriters are telling a story about someone else, and sometimes you can tell they’re relating a more personal tale. But, I think sometimes it’s hard to tell which you’re doing.

AG: I think it’s both. I guess most of these are [other people’s] stories. “Lonely Night” is certainly more of a personal tale. “Play Me a Song I Can Cry To” is based on a woman who came when I was having a music session with Tommy Jarrell, she came in and plopped herself on the couch and said, “Play me something I can cry to. I just want to cry.”

“Sweet South Anna River”, that was about something Elizabeth Cotten said to me one time about how she didn’t want to be buried when she died. She wanted to be floated down the river, and then all her friends could stand and wave at her as she floats by.

“Sun Keeps Shining on Me” was about my own experience from a long time ago, when I was just getting over something and somebody came into my life and it was pretty nice…

So, I guess I’d have to say most of these songs are telling stories, but they’re based on my experiences, like driving around in the country and seeing these old abandoned houses. One time a friend and I went to find the home of a very old, famous fiddle player. We found his old house and that’s the house that was in my mind when I was writing “Tell Me Their Story”. That was a big, old abandoned house, overgrown. It had a broken window with a curtain in the window. I was thinking of the person who lived in that house, and other places you pass when you’re driving through the country and see abandoned houses. [They’re abandoned] either because the people built a nicer home nearby or they’ve been thrown out because the house was repossessed, or whatever the reason. I always wonder, what are those people’s lives like? Who lived there?

KR: You’ve been plugged into the folk and bluegrass worlds for a long time. What do you think of how that’s evolved, what younger folkies are doing now?

AG: I think there’s a real revival. I don’t really think in terms of the folk music world so much as bluegrass, old time, country of all kinds. Whether it’s Tex-Mex or African-American or whatever, I think there’s a real revival of interest in roots music. There are a lot of younger people really holding the line on tradition and also experimenting with it. It’s kind of exciting. One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of younger musicians are incorporating singing into it. Before, they were mostly drawn to the instrumental side of [traditional music]. But now they’re doing the traditional singing, too, which is great.