Funny the way the mind works. When Kelsey Waldon and band performed a wondrous rendition of “Hello Stranger” at the Cat’s Cradle Back Room last fall, memories of a long-ago concert came flooding back. I can’t say for sure, of course, but the odds are good that the first I heard that A.P. Carter-credited tune occurred on March 29, 1985, when I saw Emmylou Harris from the seventh row at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia.
Over the previous months, fueled in part by the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, I’d begun making forays into country music. Sweetheart introduced me to Gram Parsons, whose G.P. and Grievous Angel led me to Emmylou, and soon enough I owned her then-new LP, The Ballad of Sally Rose, plus a cassette that had Pieces of the Sky on one side and Elite Hotel on the other. Luxury Liner, the 1976 album-home to her rendition of the song, would take a few years to sail into my life. It would take even longer for her Profile collection, which also included it, to dock. In any event, “Hello Stranger”—which she and the Hot Band launched into near show’s end—brought forth a raucous round of applause.
I start there because we all start somewhere.
I was 19. Johnny Cash was known to me, Merle Haggard and Johnny Horton too. But I was no honky-tonk man (though I was soon a Bocephus fan) and even less of a music historian. It would take about two decades from that March evening before I fully explored the recordings of the Carter Family via two five-disc CD sets and learned about their trials and tribulations via Mark Zwonitzer’s excellent biography, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? The Carter Family & Their Legacy in American Music. Their songs are, in many ways, audio time capsules that show how certain aspects of life, once one strips away the ephemera, have remained constant through the decades. It’s why their songs still speak to the soul.
Such is the case with “Hello Stranger,” which was first sung by cousins Sara and Maybelle Carter at a June 1937 recording session and eventually released as the b-side of the Carter Family’s January 1938 (78 rpm) single of “Never Let the Devil Get the Upper Hand of You.” The song shares the story of a man heading to prison for a crime he never explains: “She bowed her head, she waved both hands at me/I’m prison bound, I’m longing to be free.” Instead, he’s more focused on the woman he’s leaving behind: “Weeping like a willow, mourning like a dove/There’s a girl up the country that I really love.”
Emmylou’s rendition, a longtime favorite of mine, features Nicolette Larson on co-lead vocals. It tweaks the original lyrics, turning it into a song about a woman watching her man leave for prison. (“He’s prison bound and longing to be free.”)
About a year or so later, thanks to spinning folk records on my college radio station from the fall of ’85 to the spring of ’87, I discovered another version. Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard were both bluegrass legends, though I wasn’t aware of either—music discovery in the pre-Internet age was cumbersome, to say the least. One weekend morning, however, I heard another Folk Show deejay play their 1973 cover and liked it enough to, from that point on, play it from time to time on the air. Like Emmylou would in a few years, they also swap the gender pronouns, but do so while adhering closer to the original’s intent—it’s sung from the perspective of a woman heading to prison.
Other versions of the song abound, of course, as there are for many Carter Family tunes, including a fun rendition by Natalie Merchant, Jenny Holmer and Michael Stipe found on the TMOQ bootleg, but the one that has caught my fancy this week hails from Kelsey Waldon’s forthcoming collection of covers, There’s Always a Song. (It features similar time-capsule tracks from the likes of Roy Acuff, Jean Ritchie, Ralph Stanley, Doc Watson…and Hazel Dickens!)
Kelsey and Co. up the tempo a tad while adhering to the Dickens-Gerrard lyric tweaks, with S.G. Goodman filling the slot once afforded Maybelle, Nicolette and Alice. There’s not much more to say than it’s a humdinger of a performance. Listening, the mind spirals to the long ago only to spring back to the present. Libby Weitnauer’s emotive fiddle playing is a delight, too. Give it a listen. Hell, give it two, three, four and more.
(Here’s hoping Goodman hits the road with Waldon & Co. on their next tour.)
The Old Grey Cat 
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