Bluegrass legend Alice Gerrard celebrates her 90th birthday

Alice Gerrard is still going strong heading toward her 90th birthday. The pioneering songwriter, singer, and multi-instrumentalist has been passing along and preserving old-time Appalachian and bluegrass music for 60 years.

Gerrard got her start in the 1950s with the groundbreaking duo Hazel & Alice with Hazel Dickens. They were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2017. Artists from Emmylou Harris to The Judds have cited the duo as an influence and inspiration.

WUNC’s Eric Hodge spoke with Gerrard ahead of her 90th Birthday concert on July 13 at the Martin Marietta Center in Raleigh.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity. You can hear the full interview by clicking the LISTEN button at the top of this post.

I hear you’re not into tributes and lifetime achievement awards. That makes sense since you’re still writing and performing. Did it take a lot of arm twisting to convince you to do this show?

“Well, not a whole lot. I mean, it sounded like it might be fun, but I wasn’t thinking of it really so much as a tribute. It kind of turned into a cast of thousands. So, we’re going to have to deal with that. But it’s going to be fun. Fun is the operative word.”

Phil Cook and Tatiana Hargreaves are among the musicians joining you for the concert. I know they are inspired by you, but what do you enjoy about playing with musicians from another generation?

“It’s lovely because I can say, ‘Hey Reed, would you tune my guitar while I talk?’ Because I can’t talk and tune at the same time and he’s very good. So, I can do things like that. If I drop something, they’ll rush over and pick it up. They keep things together for me.

It’s really nice. Plus, they are such great musicians and my friends, and I just love them to death. And so, we have a good time when we play music together.

Your new record “Sun To Sun” opens with the title track which takes politicians to task for not doing more to stop gun violence. Musically it sounds happy. Is wrapping a serious subject in a jaunty tune a subversive way of presenting a message?

“I suppose it could be. I wasn’t thinking in those terms, but I did put on the slower version of it. It was sort of like a bookend and it’s a much slower, pensive version of it with the same song.”

If “I Could See Your Face Once More” sounds like a goodbye to a dear person in your life and the pedal steel is so mournful. As a listener, music can really help me deal with loss. Does it do that for you as a performer?

“Absolutely. And when I’ve had losses or breakups or things like that in the past, I don’t want to listen to a square dance fiddle tune. I want to listen to George Jones or Etta James or people who can really sing a sad song. That’s what you want to hear. Don’t give me happiness, give me the sadness.”

Does it rekindle sadness every time you play it?

“Well, I think it’s very therapeutic. I was on tour with a woman from the border town, and her name was Lydia Mendoza. She sang corridos, those long ballads in Spanish, and she was such a soulful singer and she got out there and she sang these songs every night because we did the same things every night.

“I asked her, ‘Lydia, how do you get so much feeling into these songs every night?’ And she just said — and I’ve never forgotten this — she said she puts herself into the song, right into it. And she’s surrounded by it and that’s how she can do that. She just, every time, she can feel the emotion, she can feel what was going on in the song. I feel like that’s often what does happen when you sing these songs and it’s kind of cathartic in a way, too.”

I love the video you made for “How Can I Keep From Fishing” where you’re alternating between working at a desk and throwing a line into a river as your dog looks on. Where’s your favorite fishing hole?

“I am not a fisherperson. Two of my grandkids love to fish and when they would come down to visit me, we’d always go to the Eno and there used to be a dam there, which has been torn down. They’d stand out on the dam and cast in. And so I was very close to fishing through them, but I would sit there and read a book.

“But I loved that song. The song was not mine. It was a song that was given to me after a concert many years ago near Bozeman, Montana. And this person — and I can’t remember anything about the person — came up and gave me these words and said, ‘I think you might like this song,’ and so it’s on a piece of paper I took it home, it went into piles of paper.

“But recently, I just found it again, and I read the words and I said, this is a really neat little song. It was to be sung to the tune of ‘How Can I Keep From Singing,’ which is an old gospel song. So, I worked with that concept a little bit. And then I started trying to find out who this person was that had written this and given it to me. I called the Bozeman Folk Society, but they did not know. So, I just had to say, unknown. If whoever hears it, if they know who it is, let me know.”

During the pandemic did you really teach your dog to
bring you a beer from the refrigerator?

“Yes, my dog did it. I got the idea from a friend, Peter McLaughlin, who taught his dog to do that and showed me a video of his dog. I said, ‘Oh man, Polly could do that. She’s so smart.’ And I just worked on it and then I was doing a little online Zoom concert one evening and after I finished the concert, I just took the laptop downstairs, and I had Polly go do the beer thing and it was a big hit.”