Right by Her Roots: Americana Women and Their Songs

Introduction: The Art of Digging

1 ✻ ✻ ✻ Introduction The Art of Digging It is May 2005. Twenty-five-year-old Abigail Washburn is flying on a plane to somewhere, quite possibly China, turning over in her mind the debut album she has just recorded—Song of the Traveling Daughter. She realizes there is still one more thing she needs to add to its rejuvenation of American old-time and Asian folk flavors, its lyrics in English and Chinese, its cosmopolitan spirit: a little bit of background—her background, the story of what this music is all about, and how it came to mean something to her. So she writes a note. It will be the first thing people see when they open up the CD booklet: “I was born in Illinois. I’ve lived a lot of places since then, including China.”1 Two sentences in, and already she has supplied both a point of origin and the sense that her journey has ranged far from it. “Living in China, immersed in a culture so different from my own, became not only a voyage from home, but also a discovery of home,” she continues. “Many things took on new meaning to me: biscuits and gravy, soda pop, stars and stripes, bluegrass, 2 ✻ Right by Her Roots ✻ rap, NASCAR, wide streets, suburbs, individual debt, and civil rights—all things seemingly uniquely American. When I returned to America, I wanted to continue the exploration, to delve deeper into the roots of things American—so I bought a banjo.”2 As she writes these words, Washburn has a hunch: while the use to which she is putting that banjo may seem a little unorthodox , hearing how she arrived at her approach to music making will strike a chord with people. They will, she believes, understand her desire to grasp hold of sturdy roots as she makes sense of change in her life. Shaken by the Roots Washburn is hardly the first person for whom rootedness has intertwined with mutability. The United States is a nation of immigrants, people who thoroughly and completely uprooted themselves to get here when they did, and people willing to do the same to get here now. Those who were not immigrants were slaves or native peoples, and in their cases, the uprooting was certainly not by choice; even their memories of their roots were assailed with imperialistic, whitewashing force. Americans ceased living rooted, rural lives close to their blood and cultural kin a few generations ago, when survival required migrating to not-so-rural places where there was work to be found. A great many baby boomers grew up in postwar suburbs without the sort of robust communities that had once done so much to shape how people saw the world and their places in it; folk music scholar Robert Cantwell has shown that this had more than a little to do with many of the middle class and college age among them seeking out folk music from before their time.3 In this present time, we all but expect American youth to have to, or want to, leave the places where they grew up. In all, life in our Internet age feels supremely fragmented. Social networking sites offer the chance to “reconnect” with some long-lost friend, lover, classmate, or third cousin, but ✻ Introduction ✻ 3 often, in the end, such sites just remind us how very disconnected we really are. And lots of people are intent on reaching further back—well beyond the ranks of the living and online profile-updating—through Web sites that will, for a monthly fee, help them unearth generation after generation of their family roots. In 2010 alone there were two television shows that did just that—albeit with a tad more glamour and editing—for celebrities: network television’s chipper Who Do You Think You Are? and public television’s serious-minded Faces of America.” With anxiety percolating nationwide over the subject of immigration , the question of where people came from has become an especially loaded one. Popular music has also reached something of a conflicted juncture. Since the ’70s singer-songwriter era, performers have emphasized the personalness of their material. The tendency has escalated in recent years; Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor, authors of Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, point out that in 2004 three of the pop albums to hit number one bore the artificially intimate titles of Autobiography...