Folk music in Appalachia is usually a family affair, handed down from father to son, mother to daughter, shared via backyard parties, kitchen jam sessions, or old-time fiddler conventions. For breakout Americana star Dori Freeman, this is the world she grew up in, singing old songs with her father Scott Freeman and her grandfather Willard Gayheart. It was in this spirit that all three of them gathered in the frame shop that Willard owns near Galax, Virginia, along with producer Teddy Thompson, New York recording engineer and producer Ed Haber (Linda Thompson, WNYC), and Dori’s husband Nick Falk, to record an album of Willard’s originals and favourite songs. The resulting album, At Home in the Blue Ridge, coming May 24, 2019, on Blue Hens Music, is Willard Gayheart’s first solo album, an “about time!” moment in his 87 years.
Over two days, the family gathered to play Willard’s songs, crowding around mics and recording everything live. When a customer came into the shop looking for a frame or one of Willard’s original pencil drawings (he’s an internationally renowned pencil artist known for his bucolic drawings of the region), Willard would get up from the recording to go help them out. This isn’t music made for stages, or made for commerce, it’s music made for family, for sharing a common experience. “It was a special thing to get to do,” Dori explains. “I’ve been picking with him and my dad for a long time, since I was a teenager, but hadn’t recorded anything like that with both of them. Plus it was great to get to work with a lot of originals that he had written over the years.”
From the album, listen to Robin D below, talking about the track Willard recalls:
“We had just gotten out of the studio for our third record with the Highlanders, and we hadn’t picked out a photo for the cover. Our mandolin player lived up in Charleston, West Virginia, and we had a show up there. When we got up there he said, ‘You know there’s a boat up here that sits on the Kanawha River named the Robin D. It’s a stern wheeler… a beautiful boat… and if we can get on there and get our picture taken we could call the record Get on Board with the Highlanders.’ So we went there and the feller that owns it took us on board and showed us all around this beautiful boat. We found out that he built that boat himself with a small crew. The man said that when he finished he wanted to sail that boat down the Kanawha to the Ohio River, then to the Mississippi, and to the Gulf Mexico, just he and his wife. Well, she kinda’ fell out with him because he spent so much time building that boat and she never would step foot on it. And I felt, well, maybe there was a song in it some place. So I ended up writing that song a couple years later after we used that photo for the cover.”
On a portfolio featuring 87 of his pencil drawings published under the title “New Art of Willard Gayheart”, the Appalachian Journal commented “Gayheart imparts a special personal warmth and empathy to his graphite depictions of his friends and neighbors…Willard Gayheart does himself proud in this important collection of regional art with appeal and worth reaching far beyond the mountains of western Virginia”. By the sounds of this album, his managed to capture in sound what he’s been capturing with that pencil all these years.
At Home in the Blue Ridge is released 24 May via Blue Hen Music: https://bluehensmusic.com/