Guest post by Nathan Arizona
When folk singer and songwriter Mary McCaslin was 6 she and her family moved across the country from Indiana to California. She remembered being excited because she thought they were heading for the Old West. But the West turned out to be the suburbs of Los Angeles, the old pioneer trails were freeways and the music she heard came from boss jocks on the radio instead of cowboys around a campfire. She later called her new home “the great suburban stucco forest.”
But young Mary could still imagine the Old West. On the radio she could hear Marty Robbins sing about the desert around El Paso, not just the Supremes and Petula Clark, the British songbird who was also one of her favorites. She could see what it looked like by watching the many Western shows on TV at the time. And when she was ready to start a career singing folk songs, she found West Hollywood’s Troubadour club, a major gathering place for like-minded musicians. A music partner there recalled that “she always sounded like someone on an old country record.”
McCaslin went on to become a favorite at folk music clubs and at major folk festivals in the ‘70s. Her open guitar tunings were part of the appeal. She was also a recording artist who sold well in the folk world. She never reached the stature of, say, Joni Mitchell, but she drew favorable comparisons. She “explores Joni Mitchell’s territory with equal intelligence, more charm, and no drums,” said critic Robert Christgau.
The songs McCaslin wrote herself were usually about the West she had once imagined. The best known is probably “Young Westley,” from her best-known album, “Way Out West.” Here’s “Young Westley” and then a song about a guy who felt like an “outlaw on the run.”
McCaslin, who died four years ago, was also known for her covers of pop songs like the ones she heard on the radio back in Redondo Beach. One of them was the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” She “transforms the tune from an urban teen-age lament to a mountain-flavored folk song of quiet, adult desperation,” a New York Times critic wrote.
Here it is. We’re not in Motown anymore.
