Mary-ing Time and Place

 I was sad to learn in today’s print edition of the NY Times, of the passing of “Mary McCaslin, 75, Folk Singer Who Longed for Old West.” I learned that she passed away at her home on October 2, a few weeks ago. I was somehow glad that it took a couple of weeks to disseminate the news, because Mary seemed to come from another time and place when communications were not so instant and rapid, when word travelled more organically, and you had time to savor one communication and memory without being bombarded with many. I knew she had been sick, suffering from a rare neurological disease. I had hoped for a recovery for her, and for science to catch up to what it had not been able to solve yet, but the time was not quite right or ripe for that, and the gentle Times obituary closed that hope for now.  

Mary was called by some as “iconic,” but I know that not too many know or knew of her talents, including her often close to pitch perfect arrangements of her own songs, and her arrangements of the classics from the Beatles to Motown to the great American songbook, spiked with her often exquisite voice. I was introduced to her close to 50 years ago with her pleasantly lilting “San Bernadino Waltz.” I often loved hearing her singing and playing guitar, but her music felt like a very sweet treat, like the wonderful cheese pastry I tried this morning from a local yet national organically-styled market. It was a truly wonderful taste experience, but one I wanted to savor and maybe not experience too often (for it might take away from the experience, and with regard to the pastry, for the good of my health, if nothing else).

The obituary described Mary as “a pure-voiced folk singer who sang plaintive laments for the fading Old West, reimagined pop and rock classics as mountain ballads and was an innovator of open tunings on the guitar…,” The obituary compared her to Joni Mitchell, whose open-tuning adventures took her into inflections of jazz, while Mary went the opposite way into more Celtic oriented and Old West directed sounds. One reviewer of her music pushed into using language such as describing her “clear, delicately affecting vocals” and the way her “unorthodox guitar tunings create unusual, ethereal melodies of striking beauty.” While another reviewer used language such as ““[h]er point of view suggests a woman who grew up riding horses under the open sky of the high plains. Even Miss McCaslin’s experiments with Motown songs conjure a plaintive rusticity.” Her version of the Supremes’ hit “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” inspired the reviewer to say that she “transforms the tune from an urban teen-oriented lament into a mountain-flavored folk song of quiet, adult desperation.”

It is no accident that her music drives writers into pushing on the outer limits of language. I am hopeful that her passing inspires more people to learn of her music and to listen in to the sounds that conjure up a simpler world of purer values and better use of time, giving science the time to catch up with the continuing challenges of the day.