The more you speak with Martha Scanlan, formerly of the celebrated Reeltime Travelers, prominent contributor to the Cold Mountain soundtrack, and new solo artist on Sugar Hill, the more obvious three things become. One, she is delightful company – she laughs easily, tells a good story, seems to love being right where she is at the moment but wouldn’t mind being somewhere else, back home in the hills of East Tennessee or maybe on the road toward Montana, whose endless horizon suggested something to her about how wide imagination can be. Two, she’s reluctant to talk about the words she writes for her songs. Anything else is fair game, including the sound of her music – the fiddle, dancing or sad; the old parlor piano; the clawhammer banjo. But on lyrics, she prefers to let the picture paint itself. No matter. Her debut, The West Was Burning, combines music that rises from way back in the American soul with lyrics that have her “riding on a troublesome vine” (“Set Me Up High”); hovering past last call and mourning how “Saturdays are used-to-be’s, like old Christmas trees when Christmas has come and gone” (“I Don’t Even Have to Ask”); turning the simple act of taking a walk into a moment of romance, singing “turn the corner, it’s as quiet as a stone/Just our footsteps on the frozen snow” (“Walkin’”). All of this she delivers in a voice that’s as beautiful and enigmatic as her poetry. She can be teasing, witty, fragile, and wise, all in the space of a verse and chorus. Martha’s singing eases into the embrace of two living legends in roots music, Levon Helm (of The Band) and her producer- Appalachian/Cajun virtuoso Dirk Powell. Adding to the warm, intimate sound are friends Amy Helm and Glen Patscha from Ollabelle. But we mentioned that three things distinguish Martha Scanlan, and this last is the most important: For her, music isn’t about building a career or winning accolades, though she has done both in the space of a few years. It’s about seeking authenticity in life. It’s what drew her to early Van Morrison, tragic Irish ballads, and Dylan and Cash singing “Girl from the North Country,” while her friends in high school herded toward Top 40. It inspired her to leave Minnesota and settle in Montana, where she taught herself guitar while working as a counselor for troubled youth in a wilderness program. Impulsively, she moved to East Tennessee to get closer to the Appalachian music she loved and, eventually, to help launch the Reeltime Travelers. Their first album made its way into the hands of the producers of the Down from The Mountain tour, T-Bone Burnett and Bob Neuwirth. The band was quickly asked to join several of the tour dates with greats like Ralph Stanley and Alison Krauss. This led to Martha and the Reeltime Travelers being selected to perform a gospel tune for the Cold Mountain soundtrack and to join the subsequent Great High Mountain Tour. For six years, until they disbanded in early 2005, the Reeltime Travelers enjoyed critical respect and support from fans of traditional music. But it was Martha who caused a stir at the 2003 MerleFest by winning first and second prizes in the bluegrass and country division of the Chris Austin Songwriting Competition. That says a lot for the quality and purity of Martha’s work. Recording the tracks on The West Was Burning began with what Scanlan calls a “cosmic kick in the pants.” While traveling on the tour bus with friends Ollabelle, Scanlan found herself just 10 minutes from the home of Dirk Powell. The two had always had a connection and interest in traditional music, landscape, and belonging, and after a late night jam Martha asked Dirk to produce her record. “Dirk and I planned to do some of the recording at Levon’s studio in Woodstock. I didn’t quite feel ready so I was half thinking we’d just mess around with some of the songs, but it ended up being a really magical experience, one of those times when the music’s really cooking and you stay up late and keep playing. I think that looseness and joy comes through in the recording. It was like going to fiddle contests in North Carolina,” she smiles, “where you see how traditions are handed down from generation to generation. You could see that same thing when Levon was listening back to Amy’s drum track on ‘Went to See the Gypsy’.” And so, with hardly any preconception, The West Was Burning came together, just as a group of players might conjure a reel at a pub or a waltz at a mountain wedding. It is, in that sense, as organic as an album can be, as contemporary as the edgiest roots music, yet spellbinding as an echo from times nearly forgotten. “I don’t want to say what my songs are about,” Martha sums up, almost apologetically. “The thing is, they change so much when I play them and interact with people; they end up being about different things. At the same time, I feel like each one is a painting of a particular place and time, like an image I have of snow falling up at Levon’s place …” That is why The West Was Burning is so hard to forget: The songs adapt, as songs must to endure in tradition. And they’re captured too, like a painting in a frame or the sound of Martha Scanlan in our memory.

The West Was Burning, 2007

09-09-2010 Sisters, OR
Sisters Folk Festival