Tom Paxton and John McCutcheon

Tom Paxton and John McCutcheon (photo credit: Michael G. Stewart)
Tom Paxton and John McCutcheon (photo credit: Michael G. Stewart)

Two of folk music’s most celebrated songwriters, Tom Paxton and John McCutcheon delve into their vibrant songwriting partnership. They reflect on the influence of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, the 1960s Greenwich Village scene and the origins of timeless songs like ‘The Last Thing on My Mind’, ‘Ramblin’ Boy’ and ‘Christmas in the Trenches’.

Jason: I wanted to speak to you both because the first thing I heard was the title track of your new album ‘Together’. It’s one of the most beautiful songs I’ve heard in a long while. Where did the spark of that song come together?

Tom: Oh, thank you. Do you remember?

John: I don’t exactly remember but I remember coming upon that line ‘We can’t go through this door together’. I just thought, we’ve got some here.

Tom: Yeah, we do.

John: I think both Tom and I are of an age, he’s much more of an age, where we’re looking at love songs that talk about that kind of, long companionship. When you’re young and in love, that’s where all the songs are, right?

John: So it’s been kind of fun. Hell, we just wrote a song today about giving up the road. [Tom laughs]

Tom: One of those fairy tales. [laughs]

John: Well, it’s interesting because it’s not very often that either one of us come in with a fully fleshed out idea. Sort of like, here’s a thought and let’s see where we go with it. We share enough of the same kind of attitude toward writing that we end up finishing one another’s sentences sometime.

John: The poet Billy Collins had this great line that, you really hit your stride when your pen is no longer a dictation device but a flashlight. There’s a lot of these songs where we don’t really know where we’re going. What would happen if this happened?

Tom: I still remember the last line of one of his poems. It went “Down the dangerous halls of high school.” College never felt dangerous to me. But high school was like a minefield! [laughs]

Jason: How long have you guys been songwriting? I know that this particular batch, some of it is from the pandemic, but were you writing much before that?

Tom: We wrote exactly one song before, and it was about 20 years ago.

John: It was in England. It was 30 years ago.

Tom: Yeah, we were in the car.

John: It was during the Anita Hill hearings. But it was really the pandemic and Zoom technology, I think it changed songwriting for a lot of people because in the past you had to be in the same room.

Tom: Yeah, you had to get together.

John: You were in the Brill building or you were on Music Row or whatever. And for two guys who are road warriors, we weren’t often in the same town on the same night.

John: So this has been a blessing and I can see how some people wouldn’t take to it, but it’s been pretty easy for us.

Tom: Yeah, it has been.

Jason: Where did the spark of you two collaborating come together? Were you in contact quite a bit before that or…?

Tom: No!

John: We always enjoyed one another company when we found ourselves at the same festival or someplace else

Tom: That would mainly be it. This is great. So with this technology, I actually feel like I’m in the same room with John. There’s nothing to be gained, really, by going to all the trouble to get together physically. There’s nothing to be gained from that that we don’t have with this technology.

John: Also we’re really focusing on doing this during this time. We went out on the road for four or five days to help promote the album. And we didn’t do any writing. On the road, we were too busy getting to the gig. Where were we going to eat and talking sports.

Jason: The range of topics on the album is a real sample of life and different themes. It’s very varied. ‘Invisible Man’ is a great case in point. That’s shining the light on people that you may not notice that you should see all the time, but you don’t really see.

John: You almost get used to making value judgments about whether this person is worth paying attention to. That makes your world really, really small.

Tom: John can tell you that both of us were strongly influenced by an album called The Weavers at Carnegie Hall. Christmas Eve, 1956. I heard it in, say, March of 57. I was at the University of Oklahoma. It had a profound effect on me. I already loved folk music, but here was an album with the breadth of the focus of that album was all mankind. You had an Indonesian lullaby, you had the ‘Rock Island Line’, you had ‘Kisses Sweeter Than Wine’. There wasn’t anything you couldn’t sing about. The whole experience of life was to be sung about, not just romance, although there was ‘Kisses Sweeter Than Wine’, which is a pretty damn good love song. I think John felt the same. That’s what we love about folk music. It’s about the whole experience of living.

John: Now in 1957, while Tom was at the University of Oklahoma, I was in kindergarten. [Tom laughs] I was about five or six years away from my introduction to folk music. I was 11 years old. My mom made me sit down and watched the March on Washington, which was the first thing in American history that was broadcast live on every channel. And even at 11, the Civil Rights Movement was on the news every night. But this was this gathering with speeches and homilies and then music, everything from Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson to Peter, Paul and Mary and Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Odetta and Len Chandler. To me, this was connecting this music to something beyond self-promotion. You were connecting it to something that was happening in the world. It was participatory. That really resonated with me.

The Weavers were a little before my time, I eventually heard that album and went [makes gesture of this blows my mind]… This band doesn’t even exist anymore and it’s groundbreaking. I heard Pete by himself mainly. But yeah, it’s the same thing. You go to a bluegrass festival and everything you’re going to hear is bluegrass. You go to a folk festival and you’re going to hear bluegrass and you’re going to hear tuvan throat singers, and you’re going to hear Martin Carthy, Tom Paxton and you’re going to hear the Georgia Sea Island Singers. It’s a celebration of how rich and diverse we are. The first guitar book I ever had was the Woody Guthrie songbook. And Woody wrote about everything. He wrote love songs, historical songs, topical songs, he wrote kids songs and it was like, it gave permission by his example to explore everything.

Jason: You’ve done a great version of ‘This Land Is Your Land’, a full album of Woody’s material. Was that you connecting with some of the great songs that he did?

John: I learned to play the guitar from the Woody Guthrie songbook. I thought it was a guitar instruction book. I didn’t know who Woody was when I was 14. It’s interesting because I thought it was this guitar instruction book because the first page was all chord grids. I said, oh, look, here’s how you make the chords. Here’s 50 songs to practise on. And I thought, okay, well, I’m going to learn the first song because that’s the easiest, and it’s going to get a little more complicated.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise, no, it was alphabetical. And it wasn’t until three quarters of the way through this collection and got to ‘This Land Is Your Land’ that I thought, oh, he’s the guy who did this song. Who knew? So for Woody’s 100th birthday, I really felt like this is a debt I owe. But then it started a trilogy because I did another album of Joe Hill songs on the 100th anniversary of his death. Then I did a whole album of Pete’s songs on his 100th birthday. So in 14 years, I’m going to do an all Tom Paxton album but Tom will still sing it with me.

Jason: What about Pete Seeger? I know that both of you knew him, but Tom, it must have been quite an amazing moment when Pete was singing a few of your songs live with ‘Ramblin’ Boy’ being very notable. That must have just been staggering.

Tom: It was staggering and what I took it to mean was I was going to be able to keep doing this. It was like getting my ticket punched. I must be doing something right if Pete is singing my songs. I’m just going to carry on. I don’t mean to make it sound casual. I was thunderstruck by what that meant. It meant I was on the right path.

John: Also, Tom, what it meant because Pete was singing it, he was teaching these songs to other people. The first time I ever heard a Tom Paxton song was on that Carnegie Hall, ‘We Shall Overcome’ album. ‘What Did You Learn In School Today?’ and ‘Ramblin’ Boy’. Peter was like, “Hey, join in now.” That meant that not only was Pete singing it, ordinary people were singing his songs. That’s even more important than having a big hit on your own.

Tom: At the 1966 Newport Festival backstage, there was a long stair up to the stage. I was going up the stair to the stage to do my set. Coming down the stairs was the preeminent folk song collector Alan Lomax, whose father was before him, a collector of folk songs. He was coming down and I was going up. He said, “You’re on the right path.” That’s all he said to me. I thought, OK, I’m on the right path. It matters to us when we’re young, our steps are more tentative than they are later. We’re kind of easily shaken by the wrong message. So to get the right message from authoritative sources, it means everything.

Jason: There were so many great songwriters in the 60s? What was it about that period that brought so many to the fore?

John: Well, I think that if you actually look at it in comparison, there weren’t a great number of songwriters in the Greenwich Village era. That’s what makes Tom’s stuff so special. It was plain spoken. He built on his fellow Okie, Woody and had something to say. But he could also be funny, which didn’t happen enough and still doesn’t happen enough. For me, it was really Woody, who was the first songwriter. I grew up in northern Wisconsin. It’s a bus ride to Greenwich Village. So I was in the flyover folk music country. I started with Woody and then eventually Pete. As I’ve told Tom before, I didn’t even know groups like the Kingston Trio, the Limelighters and the Chad Mitchell Trio existed. I went down the traditional music route and I was writing songs. I was really writing terrible songs. I still write terrible songs, but I know I know when to put them in the bin.

So I got really attracted to Appalachian stuff. When I was 20 hitchhiked down to see the likes of Roscoe Holcomb and the Carter Family and so on. That’s where I’ve lived ever since. And my first real songwriting hero that I spent any time with was Jean Richie. I loved her stuff because it all sounded like traditional stuff and what better? ‘Last Thing On My Mind’. It’s a great song. It’ll be sung long after the name Tom Paxton is gone and forgotten. Jean’s songs, I defy people to say this is a traditional one and this is a composed one for her. I really loved that. So that was my songwriting path and it was inevitable that Tom and I were going to run into one another.

Jason: The song ‘Complete’. I’ve read that it’s got a connection or was inspired by Johnny Cash. Is that right?

Tom: Yeah, that’s one of the very few songs that I’ve written where I’m Tom Paxton. I use the first person all the time, but it’s almost never myself. But in this case it was. The engineer who recorded a couple of albums I did in Nashville had engineered these last sessions of Johnny Cash. He told me that Johnny had recorded two or three of my songs. So far the only one I know is ‘I Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound’. That’s the only one that’s been released. The other stuff’s in the vault, and who knows eventually they’ll come out. I knew Johnny very peripherally. I only met him a couple times. He used to come in The Gaslight back in the early 60s in what we now know was his worst period. He was skinny as a rail because of all the pills he was doing. He had not had his renaissance yet. But he was a gentle man. He was a direct man and he took you as you were. I just liked this man. So I was absolutely thrilled. It’s one thing to hear myself sing it or someone else sing it or tiny Tiny Tim sing it. But to hear [sings] I can’t help but wonder where I’m bound… That’s just a once in a lifetime kind of thrill.

John: Well, also those were the late albums that Rick Rubin produced. They were really fantastic, just direct. Here’s a guy who’s still at the height of his powers, but with that world weariness. Johnny was special.

Jason: ‘The Last Thing On My Mind’ came up and there’s been so many different interpretations. You mentioned that you were blown away by Pete singing quite a number of your songs. What’s your feeling of the various versions of that song, country versions, everyone’s got a different spin. Are you pleased that it’s interpreted in different ways?

Tom: Well, the one I’m thrilled with now is Dolly Parton singing it on the tribute album for Doc Watson. That performance has just got a Grammy nomination, which I just think it’s just too exciting. She’s up against Chris Stapleton and Jolly Roll. I don’t know who else, but it’ll be very hard, even for Dolly Parton to win that one. But it’s a beautiful version. Her original hit version with Porter Wagner was almost bluegrass. It was quite uptempo. There’s a YouTube clip of her backstage at Merlefest with Doc Watson singing it the way Doc sang it, which is more the way I sing it, a slower version.

John: It’s a heartbreaking song. I lie in my bed every morning without you. Oh come on.

Tom: Yes it is, every song on my breast dies a borning. There’s so many really good versions of that song. I think that Judy Collins was the first one to record it. She recorded it and I didn’t have a deal yet when I wrote it. I wrote it just in time for my first album with Elektra. There was a version that The Seekers did. Judith Durham, what a voice. There are hundreds of clips on YouTube of people, amateurs singing it because they love it. Now and then I’ll go on YouTube and find a song on mine and see how many covers there are. It’s astonishing, but nothing to equal ‘The Last Thing On My Mind’, that’s the one everyone records. It embarrasses me to say I wrote it in 20 minutes. It just came flowing out. That’s virtually a first draft. Oh, to be young and write them like that. [laughs]

Jason: I’d like to clarify this, because of information on the internet and it’s very hard to determine what is actually correct. Some say it was your response to Bob Dylan. Is there anything in that?

Tom: No, there’s no truth to that at all. As a matter of fact, it started melodically. I had learned a different way to play a G chord than the songbooks, the instructions book would tell you. And this way, you hold the G on the sixth string and the first string, you hold the G and move your first and second fingers to make a C chord. And you can go from the C to the G and back very easily. [John plays the riff] If you had listened to what John just did, you can hear the first line of the melody. It’s just that your ear will pluck it.

The only song like that would be ‘Ramblin’ Boy’. A month or so before I wrote it, I’d heard first Dave Van Ronk and then Bob Dylan sing this traditional song, ‘He Was a Friend of Mine’. A beautiful song of friendship and of death that really moved me. Then I sat down one night at The Gaslight with a little shirt pocket notebook. And in between sets, I wrote three lyrics that night. And the first and the third were just awful. But the middle one was ‘Ramblin’ Boy’. It was because I’d heard that song and it was almost my homage to that song.

Jason: On the new album there’s ‘Life Before You ‘, another take on something that could be a love song, but there’s always something different, a twist, there’s always something to get you interested.

Tom: I still remember when we were writing that, both of us. We got to that point and one or the other of us said, what if we did this?

John: What if this isn’t what it appears to be?

Tom: Yeah, I couldn’t be happier with the way it came out. There’s a wonderful singer in Nashville named Amy Speace. She’s a friend of all of ours and she’s gonna record it. When she heard it, we got to that point, she went, ah! [laughs]

John: She won’t do that on the recording though. No, no!

Tom: I hope not. But I hope the people who hear it go like that.

Jason: Another thing that connects you is that you’ve both written children’s songs that don’t patronise children. They’ve got fun in them, it just fits that well. And John, one of the key ones for me was ‘Howjadoo’.

John: That’s a Woody Guthrie song. It all goes back to Okemah. I did that album in 1983, and I was a new father, crazy about my first born son, still am. But I wanted to do a first birthday present for him. So I decided I was going to do a kids album. I’ve never done a kids album before and not very many people had. Pete had done one or two, Woody had done a bunch. But there wasn’t really a children’s music market at that point in the United States. All the great Canadians, Raffi, all those people, they hadn’t invaded the US yet. So I listened to what was out there and a lot of it was really unmusical and kind of condescending with a lot of emulators and funny voices and stuff like this. I thought, well, this isn’t what I want.

I went to Rounder and they said, oh, good, a kids album, it’ll be half the budget. I said, no, it’s going to be twice the budget because we’re going to have rock and roll. We’re going to have Cajun music, we’re going to have some bluegrass on here, we’re going to have real musicians and we got to give our kids the best. And of course, there have been a lot of great family musicians. And part of it was how much disposable income does the average five year old have? It’s the parents who are buying these recordings. I remember saying that I wanted this to settle the argument in the car about what the family was going to listen to on the way to summer vacation. So that would be something that the parents would like and the kids would like and it wouldn’t drive everybody crazy. I think Tom has the same attitude. Yeah, I love kids. I love talking to kids. And never talk down, never. They have important things to say. And they can turn into songs.

Jason: ‘The Marvelous Toy’ is a fabulous example of that. Do you remember the origins of that Tom?

Tom: Yes, I was still in the US Army. I was in the clerk typist school, which was an eight week school in a blazing summer in New Jersey. There was a typing class which was mandatory, two hours a day, four days a week in this sizzling barracks converted into a classroom with no AC of any kind. I, like about five or six of my colleagues there, could already type and we were forced to do it again. Learning to type is pretty boring stuff, doing it again will kill you! So I stopped doing the exercises and used the typewriter to write letters home to everyone I ever knew and made up silly poems.

And one day I wrote the lyrics to ‘The Marvelous Toy’. Why I have no idea. Unless about 30 years later and thought I wonder if I was in my unconscious was reacting to the sound of all the typewriters around me? That’s the best I’ve come up with. But it just came straight out four verses and chorus and the original noises were different than the ones you hear. Although he doesn’t even remember the conversation, my friend Noel Stookey from Peter, Paul and Mary, was a new friend of mine at that time. I was coming in from Fort Dixs to the Greenwich Village every weekend. I sang it for him and he loved the song. Of course eventually, Peter, Paul and Mary recorded it. He said I think the sounds could be better. Why don’t you? So I changed the sound in 10 minutes and the rest, as I say.

But where it came from, I have no idea, write a song like that in the middle of an army base. And it’s important to know that I wasn’t really anti-military. I have always respected the army. I was doing well in the army. I was there, live for six months and then reserves. I think I’m still in the reserves. But it’s a mystery, a nice mystery, where’d that song come from? I don’t know. But I’m glad it shows me.

John: I think almost every writer you talk to will have some kind of story. ‘Christmas In The Trenches’ was almost a first draft. I’ve had see I’ve had this theory that God went around for centuries whispering into people’s ears [John mouths the opening to Beethoven’s 5th Symphony] da, da, da, da, dah, until a deaf man heard him

Tom: Yeah! [laughs]

John: Neither Tom or I are woo-woo kind of guys. We don’t think that there’s a muse out there that sprinkles fairy dust on us. Like the song says, you’ve got to do the work.

Jason: Were you reading, John, much about the First World War during that period?

John: Not at all. I was doing my second album for Rounder and they wanted a Christmas album. And I’m sure that what they expected was Hark the Herald Angel Sing and Good King Wenceslas on hammer dulcimer. I was two weeks away from recording it, from going into the studio. I just felt that there was something that was missing. I was playing in Birmingham, Alabama at the University Concert Hall. I was in my dressing room and this old black woman who was a custodian just kind of burst into the room because she didn’t know anybody was there to clean the room. We were both surprised to see one another. We got to talking and as you do if you like people and are not afraid of strangers we started talking and eventually started telling jokes. And it came time where someone stuck their head and said two minutes. I said, “Okay, we got time for one more. Give me your best one.” She said, this isn’t a joke. It’s my favourite story. And she told me the story of the World War One truce. I’d heard the story before and it was like it was presented to me. I wrote it during the intermission singing it during the second set that night just because I was like, oh, this is what this album needs. Something to really tie the whole spirit of the season together in a kind of apocryphal but powerful way.

Jason: When you came over to Europe, you met some of the soldiers involved in that, didn’t you?

John: I was playing at the Tønder Festival back in 88 and there were these four old guys who just kept showing up at all my sets. Because they were far afield. They had to walk everywhere. They would come in late and I would see this little bevy of old guys tottering around and they would have had to have been in their 80s to be old enough. They were teenagers when they fought. I met them and I was gobsmacked to use a popular English term.

I had never thought that I would ever meet anyone. If you write a song, as both Tom and I have done, that is based on an historical event and then you meet someone. Or you write a song about a fisherman and then some fisherman comes up to you and says man, that’s my life thank you. I don’t think you can ever be grateful. At the time there’s a million things I would like to have asked and said to those men that night. But it’s an amazing story. It’s interesting that in England I understand it’s taught in history classes. In Germany even though they started the evening with the singing and it was a German soldier who came out into no man’s land and initiated the meeting there, they worked real hard to keep it quiet. The whole story is breaking down the anonymity that makes war possible and that’s a dangerous thing.

Especially in World War I, where it was a war that didn’t need to be fought. Since then I’ve read a lot of history, especially around this event. In fact, somebody found it in a drawer, he was a furniture refinisher, he showed up at one of my shows in Ohio, he said, “I have something for you. I found this lining a drawer of a chest of drawers I was asked to refinish. And it is the January 1st, 1915 front page of the London Daily Mail. Which was the first newspaper reporting of this event. And it was on the front page. it’s obviously historical fiction when you’re writing a song. But you try to be as true to what it’s supposed to be as you possibly can. Also not a museum piece. You’ve got to make it something that still has meaning for us today.

Tom: About three years after 9-11, I wrote ‘The Bravest’. I did a show in Pennsylvania, the same theatre, John, where we recently did our… I sang the song that night, and then afterwards I was making my way up to the lobby to sign CDs. A fellow interrupted me and shook my hand. He said, I was in the North Tower, and you got it right. It leaves you gasping for something to say. So this is something that I teach my students, I tell them, find something in the paper that moves you to any emotion at all. It can be hilarity. Usually it’ll be something more like sorrow or anger. But find a story and then put yourself in that story, either as an eyewitness or as one of the principles in the story. Woody did that. Woody was not in Ludlow, Colorado, when the National Guard fired on the miners, but he writes it in the first person as if he were. And this is art, this is permitted. We can place ourselves anywhere we want.

John: The thing that Woody did that is really instructive is he was very cinematic. Again he wasn’t in Calumet, Michigan for the 1913 massacre. He wrote that after reading a book by a woman who was there and yet he’ll still say “I’ll take you through a door and up a high stair”. Immediately everyone who hears that line sees the stair, sees the door. See what the movie is. It’s a great way to write, to actually occupy the space that you’re writing about.

Jason: Tom, ‘Whose Garden Was This?’, was that an example of you reading something and then building on that?

Tom: No, that was writing to order. The first Earth Day in 1970 April 21st was it? I think it was the Solstice. I was asked to write something for that occasion and I wrote it for a teach-in at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, sometime shortly before Earth Day. This was going to be the first teach-in on the occasion. Then I sang it on Earth Day itself. I was in Union Square in New York and I’d been asked to sing in Evanston and I thought to myself I don’t have a single song for this occasion. I’d thought I better get busy and write one. So that’s what I wrote. I thought I would do it once or twice and I’m still doing it.

Jason: Was it Dame Vera Lynn, the British singer…

Tom: She was involved in the development of that song. I had already recorded the song with three verses. And I had signed a five year contract to write for United Artists. I was going into their office in London every day and writing with a fellow named Ed Welch. The office manager was a man named Roger Welch, who was Vera’s brother. And he said, “Vera has heard that song and she’s going to be doing a show in Holland and she’d love to sing it, but she feels it’s a little too short, would you mind writing another verse for it?” Are you kidding?! So I wrote what I call Vera’s verse and that’s the last one about whose forest was this. That was not in my original recording. Dame Vera, she was a great, great old gal, man.

Jason: She lived to a ripe old age.

Tom: Oh, yes, she sure did.

Jason: The forces sweetheart.

Tom: There she was in the jungle out there in Burma, singing, standing on a jeep, singing for the troops. What a trooper. I respect that.

Jason: John, to reflect on the album that you’ve done with Tom and listening to the material. I assume you’ve built up a wealth of amazing songs. Is the plan to continue the partnership?

John: Oh yeah, as I said earlier, we were just writing today before and came up with something that we both thought, hey, that’s a keeper.

Tom: That’s a keeper. Yep, we’ll do that one.

John: We’ve got a big, big backlog of songs, which is a great problem to have. Yeah, we plan on doing another album, probably recording it this summer. I’ve got another one of my own that I’m doing in the spring. We’re both writing with a lot of people right now. Once we kind of road tested this technology, with the two of us, we’ve each been writing with lots of different people. This may be the most satisfying, because I’m not as old a friend with a lot of younger people. And it’s great, but you don’t make old friends.

Tom: We’re going to do another, definitely. We could do it now. I think we have enough material to do it now. But I like the idea of piling on, I want a heap of songs to go through. Let’s do this one and this one and this one and this one. And I’ve got an album that’s being put together. I’m not doing anything. Kathy Fink is co-producing an album called Bluegrass Does Paxton. All bluegrass singers doing my songs in bluegrass style. I’ve heard some of the tracks and it just knocks me out. I’m thrilled. That’ll be coming out next spring. Somewhere in there, I’m going to do another solo album. I’m thinking of getting John to produce it.

John: I might do that! It’s a funny time now because CD sales have fallen off a cliff and the ascendant distribution system of music is streaming, which, you heard it here first, is just larceny as far as musicians go. So, we spend all this time and a surprising amount of money doing these. Luckily we’re at a stage when we can just say, well, this is what we do. We want when people look back on this stuff to say, wow, they really took a great deal of care in every single piece of this thing with the writing, with the performance, with the production, with the artwork, everything. We just got used to doing it this way and love it. I love writing with Tom, recording, and hearing what we have together. It’s just been a joy.

Tom: Yep. We’ve done what, four or five concerts, the two of us, and we both do a different style for these concerts. We both sit down at an angle to one another, so we’re also to the audience, and we talk and perform, it’s really an evening’s conversation with songs. That’s great.

John: People love it. It’s great fun for us to go out there without a net and say, okay, what are we going to talk about tonight? And we’re both old dogs enough to know, okay, well, I can see where this conversation is going and now is the time to sing a song. So it’s really fun.

Tom: It is.

Jason: It’s been amazing to talk to you both, the songs on the album are really special as are the songs that you’ve both recorded across your songwriting journeys. I wish you continued success with your partnership and other endeavours. Thank you so much.

Tom: Thanks Jason.

John: It’s been a pleasure to talk to you as well.

Further information

The Strange Brew Podcast of this interview is coming soon.

Tom Paxton & John McCutcheon: Together – on Tom Paxton’s website

folkmusic.com – John McCutcheon