Alice Gerrard, Reclusive Folk Hero, Emerges to Sing for Trans Rights and Gun Reform
A little more than a decade ago, Alice Gerrard received an invitation to perform at a fiddle camp in Washington state.
“Should I bring an older musician with me?” Gerrard, 76 at the time, asked her friend Suzy Thompson, who was organizing the event.
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Thompson laughed.
“Alice,” she told her. “You’re the older person now.”
Alice Gerrard just celebrated her 89th birthday this summer, but the singer, songwriter, fiddler-guitarist-autoharpist, and folklorist still refuses to see herself as any kind of older legend. As someone who spent the last 70 years learning from past generations of old-time, bluegrass, and folk musicians who played a vanishing type of American roots music (some of them born in the 19th century), Gerrard views herself as the mentee, rather than the mentor. Listen to her talk about music, and you’ll hear a musician who proudly still has much to learn from those who came before.
“People will occasionally ask me to play somewhere, and they bring me out on stage and people are like, ‘Yeah!’” says Gerrard. “And I’m still kind of like, ‘What the hell is going on here?’”
Sure, Gerrard acknowledges it’s nice to be recognized, but for the most part she couldn’t care less about the accolades and legacy-cementing bona fides: That her records as one-half of Hazel & Alice in the Sixties and Seventies provided a lodestar for several generations of future stars — from Emmylou Harris to Alison Krauss to Naomi Judd to Kathy Mattea to Molly Tuttle — who saw in Hazel & Alice an all-too rare prominent example of women making harmony-rich bluegrass records on a national stage.
“I first heard Hazel & Alice when I was 12 years old,” Tuttle recently said, “and their music changed my life.”
In her seventies and eighties, Gerrard has served as a source of local inspiration and tutelage for an entire new generation of North Carolina-associated musicians, including Rhiannon Giddens, Hiss Golden Messenger, Phil Cook, and the fiddle virtuoso and scholar Tatiana Hargreaves. Even though Gerrard once moved to rural Galax, Virginia, to learn from the old-time fiddlers who lived in the area, she was surprised, and a little bit confused, when some years ago Hargreaves told her she was considering moving to North Carolina’s research triangle to study with Gerrard.
“I was like, ‘Really?’” Gerrard remembers thinking. “That’s why you’d move here?”
Gerrard prefers to keep working and moving forward, and these days she’s about as busy as she’s ever been. Later this month, she’s releasing Sun to Sun, her first album in nearly a decade. She’s also putting the finishing touches on a yet-untitled book — part memoir, part photo collection, part musical history — that has occupied much of her time. Though she’s grown to despise touring (don’t get her started on checked-bag fees) and rarely performs outside of North Carolina, Gerrard is playing a handful of dates this fall to promote Sun to Sun, including a rare appearance up north at the Brooklyn Folk Festival.
Sun to Sun (due on Sleepy Cat Records) is a fiery, vital collection of roots music that centers Gerrard as a songwriter. There are songs decrying American gun violence (the title track), North Carolina’s shameful 2016 anti-trans bathroom bill (“Keep It Off the Seat”), and the stain of American racism (“Old Jim Crow”), alongside sweet love songs, Michael Hurley-reminiscent ditties about fishing and cows, and mournful reflections on grief and aging, all of them written by Gerrard.
The songs came about during the lockdown, when, after getting vaccinated, Gerrard was able to reunite with local musicians and collaborate. She describes the process of writing the record in the self-effacing way she talks about her life’s work. She wanted new songs to sing at various livestream and local shows, and once she realized she had written a dozen, she figured she might as well document the fantastic band she’d put together.
Eventually, Gerrard says, she decided to record the songs: “Why not? That’s how it came about.”
But even if she’s prone to downplaying, Sun to Sun is a profound inter-generational statement for an artist who’s lived through nearly a century of political tumult and progress.
“To see Alice, who has seen many things in her lifetime, speaking about things that are going to be impacting my generation and generations to come is so inspiring,” says Hargreaves. “Also, as a queer person, to have an elder in the bluegrass and old-time community speaking up about trans rights is so powerful and meaningful.”
Gerrard’s two latest projects — her outward-looking album, which tells the tales of the marginalized and pays tribute to fallen heroes; and her book, which focuses more on preserving lost histories than on her own story — both speak to the singer’s unending selflessness and generosity of spirit. Throughout her career, Gerrard has offered her knowledge of roots traditions to anyone willing to listen — always eager to shine the spotlight elsewhere.
It’s a sensibility that becomes clear after the briefest of interactions with the singer. When I had a factual question about pioneering folk guitarist Elizabeth Cotten for a story I was writing last year, I could think of no one to ask but Gerrard, who immediately emailed her answer. When, a year before that, I asked Gerrard to speak with me for a story about a Rhiannon Giddens album titled after the 2002 Gerrard song “Calling Me Home,” she had just one request: Was there any way I could print the name of Virginia fiddle player Luther Davis, whose death had inspired Gerrard’s song? “I would just love to think of his name getting into Rolling Stone,” she said with glee. “That would be so cool.”
“Calling Me Home” is one example of the type of song that Gerrard has been singing and writing her whole life to memorialize elders and channel grief. There are several tracks that do just that on Sun to Sun, and Gerrard says she has no plans to stop interrogating the emotional terrain of grief in her own writing. “It’s such a massive subject,” she says.
Gerrard’s interest in exploring grief song started a long, long time ago; 82 years, to be exact, in the early 1940s, when her father died when she was just seven years old.
“It leaves you with this well of sadness somewhere inside of you,” says Gerrard, “and it’s always with you in some way or another.”
Throughout her career, she’s been drawn to dark and morose storytelling, which made the worlds of bluegrass and old-time music, two genres with no shortage of songs about premature deaths and horrific tragedy, a natural fit for a young Gerrard. As a high schooler in California, she had grown up listening to Rosemary Clooney and Frankie Laine, the same pop crooners as everyone else her age. But as the late Forties turned into the Fifties, Gerrard became exposed to a music that sounded much more urgent: rhythm and blues, and, eventually, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, which she describes as a “mind bender.”
On Who’s That Knocking, her first album with Hazel Dickens in 1965 (advertised as “Bluegrass Country Music”), the two roughly 30-year-old singers tackled the loss and isolation of songs like the Carter Family’s “Darling Nellie Across the Sea” with the high, lonesome maturity and desolate wisdom of two sages who’ve already lived several lifetimes.
“It was the day of pretty voices and the Kingston Trio,” says Gerrard of her body of work with Hazel & Alice, much of which has been recently reissued by Smithsonian Folkways. “We just weren’t doing that.”
“There have always been women in bluegrass and old-time music,” Hargreaves says, “but Hazel and Alice had this tight sister duet sound, even though they weren’t sisters, and back then there weren’t very many examples of women singing together like that: super intense, hard, clear vocals, with women fronting their own band.”
In the late Sixties, Hazel & Alice had a number of life-changing experiences, among them the racially-integrated tours organized by civil rights activists Bernice Johnson Reagon and Anne Romaine, who co-founded the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project. Some of the experiences from those tours, where Hazel & Alice would attend workshops in rural Kentucky and learn about strip-mining from local activists, found their way into “In My Younger Days,” one of the standout tracks on Sun to Sun.
On other songs, like the a cappella “Remember Us,” Gerrard draws less on specific memories than her lifetime of soaking up the various American folk traditions.
“I can just sit here and I’ll sing something,” she says. “It won’t even necessarily come to me as a complete line, but I’ll start with a note, and then I go to another note, but there’s this deep well of music in my head that’s traditional in nature.”
Gerrard hasn’t written a single song since recording Sun to Sun. There are too many other tasks that take up her time: working on the book, promoting the record, wrangling her band together to plays shows. Sometimes, she feels like sitting on the couch with her dog Polly and watching TV, instead of tackling all the tasks that lie ahead.
But the work is too important to stop now. It gives her too much energy. “She just loves collaborating and making music and being in community with people,” as Hargreaves puts it. There are too many songs yet to sing, and too many stories from her legendary life in song (she’d hate hearing it described that way) that still need to be told.
“I imagine I’ll get back to [writing songs] one of these days. I’ll pull out my folder,” says Gerrard, “and see what sounds good.”
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