American Folk: John McCutcheon's Mightier Than the Sword

The concept behind John McCutcheon’s Mightier Than the Sword has not been tried often enough—to take the words of literature as lyrics or inspiration for the music of an entire album. For instance, Greg Brown offered Songs of Innocence and of Experience, his beautiful settings of William Blake’s poetry. Thankfully, McCutcheon embarks on this process to put music to the words of the pen.

(This concept always makes me think mistakenly that Nanci Griffith did this on her Other Voices, Other Rooms, but that album disappointedly has nothing to do with Truman Capote’s novel).

While McCutcheon works with an incredible collection of authors—their words or their help in the songwriting, the music actually sounds tired overall. Many tracks just stay within the middle of the singer/songwriter sound, the emotional peaks and valleys removed.

With that caveat out of the way, there are some great songs that prove the pen is indeed mightier than the sword—and the pen combined with the guitar has enough might to “kill fascists,” as Woody Guthrie said. McCutcheon, in fact, takes the handwritten lyrics of Guthrie’s unpublished song, “Old Cap Moore,” and gives it a melody well-within the Guthrie tradition. In doing so, we get to hear a tender, “power to the proletariat” folk song championing a Robin Hood of the bakery.

McCutcheon takes inspiration from Sister Helen Prejean’s book to deliver the country mourning blues with bluegrass harmonies of “Dead Man Walking.” He enlivens the story in a different way than the movie and retains a sense of how Prejean embodied the Gospel—even as the call-and-response chorus says, “Quiet on the tier/There’s a dead man walking.”

“Good Ol’ Girls,” inspired by author Lee Smith, is a “Green Grass Grew All Around” fiddle tune with a sound reminiscent of Peter Mayer’s playful, reeling guitar style. Co-written with Smith is “Single Girl,” a country, slinking tune about always needing a man—and not one of them truly being any good you.

The pair of tunes inspired by Wendell Barry offer a self-conscious, if not Christ-conscious, outlook on the today’s world. There’s the hymnic “Jaber Crow’s Silly Song about Jesus,” the words omitted from Berry’s Jaber Crow novel, in which the speculation about “what kind of car will Jesus drive” causes Crow to realize just how much we try to make Jesus into our image. Inspired by the same novel, McCutcheon wrote “It’s the Economy, Stupid,” a spoken, group chant over jazzy musings and muted trumpet, a beat poet’s social criticism which makes us second guess the providential nature of the presidential office.

Mightier Than the Sword opens with “Our Flag Was Still There,” co-written with Barbara Kingsolver, based on her essay of the same name. It’s a commentary on progressives who have retreated from patriotism in response to the right wing’s franchising of the stars and stripes. However, musically, there’s a “God bless the USA” sound to the chorus that makes it hard to hear the commentary. While McCutcheon’s voice here sounds like John Gorka, the song lacks Gorka’s wry witticism in his voice, how Gorka is able to unleash irony.

Thank you to John McCutcheon and Appalseed Productions for the review copy.