With his astonishing 34th recording, Passage, folk music stalwart John McCutcheon comes full-circle. He joyously returns to many of the Appalachian sounds and themes that marked the music he played and loved music when he first came into international prominence. With a core band featuring mandolin ace Tim O’Brien, fiddler Stuart Duncan, and bassist Bryn Davies, McCutcheon adds his own vocal, fiddle, banjo, octave mandolin, hammer dulcimer, guitar, piano, jaw harp, and harmonium skills. Singers Kathy Mattea, Suzy Bogguss, and Mollie O'Brien round out the singing duties. But at the center of this all-star cast of musicians are the songs themselves. Rich, diverse, rooted, moving.
Pointedly contemporary, the opening cut, One More Day, is written from the perspective of one of the surviving miners in the Massey explosion in Montcoal, WV just this past spring. End of the World is the story of a Vietnamese-American shrimp boat captain in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf oil spill. Las Damas de Blanco t