In rare circumstances, a person can point to a single moment in which their eyes were opened to an event that changed his life. For John McCutcheon, the moment was in his family's living room on a hot afternoon in August 1963. He was eleven.
"My mother was watching the March on Washington on television," McCutcheon says. "This music happened. It was everything from Marian Anderson to Mahalia Jackson, and then came Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary. I was fascinated by this music that was both ancient and urgent at the same time."
That telecast was McCutcheon's introduction to folk, and the bug that bit him that day is still with him, half a century later. On Friday, December 12, he joined WUOT All Things Considered host Brandon Hollingsworth for a conversation about the craft of music, how to tell stories through songs, and viewing music as the connective tissue that links us all.