PORT TOWNSEND — John McCutcheon, performer, traveler, acoustic musicians’ union member, is about to stream himself to the whole country all at once.
In “Turn Your Radio On,” a 90-minute concert presented online at 5 p.m. Sunday, McCutcheon will step into the boots and instruments he’s lived in since he was a college student.
When asked what kind of music he plays — Americana, blues, bluegrass? — he immediately, emphatically answers.
“I’m a folksinger,” he said, in the style of his mentor, Roscoe Holcomb, and of Woody Guthrie.
McCutcheon’s 42 albums have titles such as “Barefoot Boy with Boots On” (1980), “Fine Time at Our House” (1982), “Stand Up! Broadsides for Our Times” (2010) and “Trolling for Dreams” (2017).
And from 2020? “Cabin Fever,” created in McCutcheon’s Georgia mountain hideaway.
McCutcheon will play Sunday’s live concert to benefit four community radio stations around the United States. They include KPTZ-FM 91.9, licensed to Port Townsend and heard in Jefferson and Clallam counties.
This will be a live stream via the Mandolin video platform, which the artist finds far superior to other ones out there. Mandolin doesn’t compress its content, McCutcheon said, so watching a streamed performance is like seeing high-definition television for the first time.
Ticket prices vary: students $10, unemployed/laid off $5, general admission $20, family/household $30, music supporter $50. These can be purchased on KPTZ.org and include on-demand viewing for 48 hours after Sunday’s 5 p.m. live stream.
For information, email contactus@kptz.org or phone 360-379-6886.
“It’ll be from John’s home studio. He’s got it all tricked out … it’s like having a front-row seat,” said Chris Bricker, a KPTZ DJ and producer who’s known McCutcheon for about a dozen years.
They met through Acoustic Traveling Musicians Local 1000, part of the American Federation of Musicians labor union.
Some 50 years ago, McCutcheon was steeped in academia, “in little rooms,” he recalled, where the professor lectured on a subject “to the exclusion of everything else.”
He persuaded his advisors to let him go out on a three-month independent study of folk music — starting with Holcomb, a retired coal miner and farm hand who, as a musician, had drawn the attention of cultural historians.
“I took a hard left turn,” McCutcheon said, “and here I am in Roscoe’s living room in Kentucky.”
He learned not only how to sing and play a song, but also how music feeds community life.
McCutcheon went down to Holcomb’s place to learn the banjo, and then dove into the world of dancing, storytelling and moonshine.
That three-month independent study, like the music, has lasted a lot longer thanks to traveling artists and community radio stations, said McCutcheon, now 68.
“‘Young’ gets older all the time,” he quipped.
Stations such as KPTZ, McCutcheon added, have the power to knit people together in times of trouble: a storm, a fire, a pandemic. The non-commercial outlet “reminds us that where we live is a community, and not merely a marketplace,” he said.
At the onset of the pandemic last year, musicians such as McCutcheon lost their incomes entirely. They also discovered how important the act of communion is between musicians and audiences, he said.
At home in Smoke Rise, Ga., he started doing a couple of online concerts per month, and he connected with the Mandolin streaming platform.
The artist also is working on two more albums: “Bucket List,” to be released in September, and “Leap,” to come out next spring.
They’re follow-ups to “Cabin Fever,” which he put up on the internet last year as a pay-what-you-can download.
“Everybody needed music,” McCutcheon said.
As for Sunday’s concert, it’s going to be about love songs, activism and the medium of radio. It’s a place to find inspiration and a sense of connection, he said, and, “I just thought somebody ought to make a big deal out of that.”
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Jefferson County senior reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3509 or durbanidelapaz@peninsuladailynews.com.
