A boundless voice: At 87, Mac Wiseman is still a bluegrass musical maverick
September 23, 2012
Bluegrass Hall of Famer Mac Wiseman is a big man, though surveying his size won’t get you far in comprehending his musical enormity.
Wiseman is 87, and his history as a former member of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, as an original member of Flatt & Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Boys and as a solo headliner at hundreds of bluegrass festivals through the decades means folks are apt to characterize him as a bluegrass artist.Ask around town this week, as the International Bluegrass Music Association gathers in Nashville for its annual conference and awards show, and you’ll find plenty of bluegrass banjo pickers happy to claim him as part of the family.
But while Wiseman is a much-celebrated bluegrass lynchpin — and certainly a part of the family — he’s not a bluegrass artist. He has spent a musical lifetime defying the genre’s implied limitations — instrumentation, song selection, harmony-heavy choruses and the like — and embracing every opportunity to wrap his spirited, twangless tenor around songs of many stripes.
Across 65 full-length albums, he has created the most diverse catalog of all the pioneering, first-generation bluegrass vocalists, winning a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship, as well as the admiration of legends.
“Mac is one of the heroes,” says Kris Kristofferson, the Country Music Hall of Famer whose “Me and Bobby McGee” is among Wiseman’s favorite songs to sing. “Having Mac cut ‘Bobby McGee’ was one of the highlights of my life.”
“I was never a dyed-in-the-wool bluegrass fan, but I’m a fan of Mac’s,” says Kristofferson’s Hall of Fame peer Merle Haggard. “When I was young, he had a hit song on ‘Love Letters in the Sand,’ and I just loved that. Maybe someone tried to put him in that bluegrass box, but he is so much more than that. Mac’s is a great, great voice.”
It’s a boundless voice, capable of delivering traditional bluegrass songs that are characterized by simple chord progressions and sparse, acoustic instrumentation but that is also at home delivering dozens of other song forms.
And if you ask Wiseman about the “bluegrass” characterization, he’s fully capable of smiling sacrilege.
“Just frankly, the bluegrass connotation got in my pocket,” he says, sitting in his home, which doubles as a music office, near Percy Priest Lake. “Country radio stations, what they termed as bluegrass, was Monroe and Ralph Stanley: nasal, high and squeaky.
“I’ve got a lot of good friends that are banjo players,” he says. “But I hate a damn banjo.”
‘The voice with a heart’
Wiseman doesn’t really hate a banjo, and he collaborated with Monroe and fully appreciates Stanley.
Plus, he doesn’t waste time hating much of anything. He’s even thankful for the polio that crippled him as a child because it took him out of the farming fields and into bed, where he spent time learning to play guitar.
Wiseman’s countenance is more seraphic than spiteful. He’s not a grouch; he’s a gray-bearded cherub. But banjo players do sometimes get on his nerves, especially when the banjoist clutters up the vocalist’s melody with clusters of clatter.
Across all styles and genres of music that are sung, Wiseman believes the melody belongs to the voice. A child of the fields, Wiseman’s voice isn’t a field holler. He enunciates. He is mannered and kindly. He does not assert; he conveys. His is, as a radio disc jockey asserted long ago, “the voice with a heart.”
“It’s identity,” he says. “The voice mightn’t be good, but it’s different. I didn’t care whether it was ‘The Waltz You Saved for Me’ or a rock tune, I did it my way. I wanted them to know it was my record.”
Wiseman’s mark on the music world goes beyond his voice.
He was a founding board member of the Country Music Association, serving as the first treasurer after the organization’s 1958 inception. He was a record executive, a producer, a disc jockey, a promoter and plenty more.
Long, long ago, he came to the conclusion that variety and open-mindedness were more rewarding than battering away at a small niche.
And so he recorded with father of bluegrass Bill Monroe, with big band luminary Woody Herman and with Americana kingpin John Prine. Wiseman recorded versions of Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again,” the Kingston Trio’s “Scotch and Soda,” Gordon Lightfoot’s “Rainy Day People” and Cowboy Jack Clement’s agreeably loopy “Johnny’s Cash and Charley’s Pride.”
Wiseman sang Kristofferson’s hippie freedom anthem, “Me and Bobby McGee,” at Monroe’s bluegrass festival, and sang old-school country song “Jimmie Brown, The Newsboy” at Carnegie Hall.
“I wasn’t trying to prove a point,” he says. “Just trying to be versatile.”
All that resulted in a voluminous catalog of material: 65 full-length albums filled with an uncommon diversity of songs and sounds.
“It’s not bluegrass music,” says 650 AM WSM air personality Eddie Stubbs, who co-wrote the liner notes of “’Tis Sweet to be Remembered,” a six CD boxed set that is the first of two Wiseman collections on Bear Family Records. “It’s Mac Wiseman music.”
From under the snake to Carnegie Hall
“It’s been a blessing in a lot of ways, that polio leg,” Wiseman says. “That might sound strange.”
It does sound strange, the notion that a nerve-battering, potentially fatal infectious disease could be a good thing for a child.
But the polio that struck Wiseman at 6 months old meant he spent many hours in introspection while other kids were playing or, as was often the case in the rural Shenandoah Valley town of Crimora, Va., working on the farm. But the introspection and the music went hand in hand.
“I was ill a lot,” he says. “Had pneumonia six times because of weakness from the leg. My dad would set that phonograph on the corner by the wood stove and give me the old records that were worn or scratched. I listened to those records over and over, trying to understand what they were saying.”
Meanwhile, Wiseman’s mother, Neva Ruth Humphries Wiseman, would quilt or crochet, stopping to write the words to radio songs into ring-backed composition books.
Later, Wiseman’s polio leg kept him from getting a job at chemical plant Merck and Co. when he applied in 1943.
“I decided on the music thing when Merck and Co. turned me down,” he says. “I was really low. I could have crawled under the proverbial snake with my top hat on.”
Wiseman wound up attending the Shenandoah Conservatory of Music in Virginia with help from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which later became the March of Dimes. (See, another polio blessing.)
At the Conservatory, Wiseman excelled at a radio course and wound up with a 1944 offer to join WSVA in Harrisonburg, Va., where he played pop and country records, read the news and farm reports and pitched products. He was effective at all of this, due in no small part to that sterling voice, an instrument that soared through Virginia — and soon, on radio waves in Maryland and Tennessee.
Among his fans were Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, who vacated their positions in Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys band and formed the Foggy Mountain Boys in 1948, with Wiseman singing high harmonies and booking the group’s concert dates.
This was Wiseman’s first foray into what would later be known as “bluegrass” music. (Bluegrass had been invented, but not named, onstage at the Ryman Auditorium in December 1945.)
In 1949, Wiseman hired on with Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, singing some lead and some harmony, touring and playing the “Grand Ole Opry” for the first time.
With Monroe, Wiseman recorded now-classics, including “Traveling this Lonesome Road” and “Can’t You Hear Me Callin’,” but he departed the band at the close of 1949 and set off on his own.
Wiseman was soon noticed by Randy Wood, who offered an independent record deal on Gallatin-based Dot Records. On Labor Day weekend of 1951, Dot released Wiseman’s first single, “’Tis Sweet to be Remembered.”
The song was a career-maker, though the “Billboard” charts did not reflect that: Charts were inexact in those days, a frustration for those seeking to make comparisons between artists of different musical eras. Wiseman notched only three Top 20 country hits in his career, yet he was popular enough to maintain a substantial national and international presence. Most Mac Wiseman records were sold via mail order or from merchandise booths at concerts, and none of those sales were reflected on the “Billboard” chart.
His standing in the industry was illustrated by his place on the CMA’s original board. Wiseman was respected as a full-time artist, but also as a record executive at Dot (he began directing the country division in 1957). Nashville industry brass figured he could aid a genre that was facing a commercial onslaught from rock ’n’ roll. It’s telling that by 1958, Wiseman was thought of as a mainstream country artist, though by then he was already exploring folk and gospel forms as well.
In the 1960s, Wiseman became a mainstay on the folk festival circuit, and he worked college campuses at every opportunity. Truth told, he worked everywhere at every opportunity, traveling without a bass player so he could cram songbooks and albums atop the car where other bandleaders strapped an acoustic bass.
“We’d sometimes play these ‘B’ westerns,” he says, remembering the days when he’d “open” for a flick at a drive-in movie.
“We’d usually play from the top of the concession stand. Once in a while, they’d have a three-foot stage across the bottom of the screen, and no rail on it, buddy. ... You have to be damn careful you didn’t step out in space. People didn’t applaud; they’d honk their horns.”
It wasn’t all college coffeehouses and drive-ins, though. In 1962, Wiseman played Carnegie Hall on a bill headlined by Johnny Cash, and Wiseman wound up with top reviews in The New York Times.
‘A different world’
Today, Wiseman’s immobility prevents him from traveling, and he no longer performs. He still works to popularize his music via his Wise Records, most recently issuing “The Mac Wiseman Story,” a six-disc boxed set that features albums he recorded for CMH Records in the 1970s and ’80s. He also has a new DVD collection called “Legacy: Mac Wiseman — An American Treasure.”
He has collaborated with Walt Trott on an as-yet-unpublished biography, and he is in the middle of a preservation project that finds him documenting some of the songs he’s known since childhood.
“I’ve got a couple hundred more I want to do, if my voice holds up,” he says.
If Wiseman doesn’t record those songs, we’ll likely never hear them. They are pieces of the unchronicled past.
“It was a different world back then,” says Haggard, 12 years Wiseman’s junior. “And I liked it better.”
Part of that old world still lives at Mac Wiseman’s house. There’s a polio-damaged leg that doubles as a life’s great blessing. There’s a mind’s eye that sees the lovely, unlittered, billboard-free Shenandoah Valley of the 1930s. There are 13 ring-backed notebooks filled with song lyrics logged by a mother’s careful hand.
There is a big man of bigger impact, a man whose voice helped shape a musical genre but who refused to work within any genre restrictions.
Oh, and there’s not a banjo in sight.
Contact Peter Cooper at 615-259-8220 or pcooper@tennessean.com.
Link to original article (and more pictures/video): http://blogs.tennessean.com/tunein/2012/09/23/a-boundless-voice-at-87-mac-wiseman-is-still-a-bluegrass-musical-maverick/
No comments:
Post a Comment