The South has the blues, Appalachia its bluegrass. For much of its history, though, the Chesapeake had no distinct music—aside from the hymns of crab pickers and chanteys of menhaden fishermen. That changed in the 1960s when folk singer Tom Wisner, the Bard of the Chesapeake, began writing songs about the Bay. Later, others carried the tradition forward: among them Janie Meneely, the Eastport Oyster Boys, and folklorist Tom McHugh, who collaborated with musician Bill Matthews and environmental educator Andrew McCown on Chesapeake Scenes (1996), an album of songs, stories, and poetry rooted in Bay life.
This year, McCown released Chesapeake Scenes II: The Bay in Words and Music, a deeply atmospheric collection blending music, curated poems, and stories. It’s available online now, and he’ll perform it next month. Resonant with imagery from the Bay’s wooden boat era, Chesapeake Scenes II pairs storytelling by Chesapeake writers like Gilbert Byron and Meredith Davies Hadaway with songs by Wisner, McHugh, and others. Though McHugh’s passing in 2021 is felt, the album gains richness from new Eastern Shore voices and musicians like Karen Somerville, Pam Ortiz, and Sue Matthews.
The sense of place conveyed by Chesapeake Scenes II is unmistakably authentic. Much of the album’s new material grew out of McCown’s evening performances of music and poetry for his students aboard Echo Hill Outdoor School’s 1901 skipjack Elsworth, set against a backdrop of Chester River pound nets and sunsets. The project arrives at a watershed moment for McCown. After 46 years as an influential environmental educator and skipjack captain, he is stepping back—offering this layered album as both a tribute to the Chesapeake and a reflection of his own lifetime of memories.
Echo Hill Outdoor School produced the album with help from sponsors the Hedgelawn Foundation, Andrew and Leslie Price, Ann Huessener, and Julia and Sally McHugh—all in support of sharing the Bay’s traditions with the wider world.
In anticipation of an upcoming performance of the album at the Annapolis Maritime Museum on October 9, and with the recent launch of the album on Spotify and Youtube, McCown sat down with CBM to talk about the stories, experiences and collaboration behind Chesapeake Scenes II.
How did the first Chesapeake Scenes album evolve?
Tom McHugh had just started to write some Chesapeake-oriented folk songs. And in conversation, I started to tell Tom about things I would read to children onboard the Echo Hill Outdoor School boats—Gilbert Byron’s stories, poetry. And I recited a few for him. A couple of weeks later he called me back and said, “I think we should get together and we could mix this up.” Then, as we got into it, I became more selective on the pieces I read between his songs and other songs from Bay musicians he picked out. We did that for 20 years before the first album.
You brought a lot of the stories and songs you developed for your environmental programs on the Chester River to Chesapeake Scenes II. What can listeners gain from hearing these pieces?
I started reading to students from Gilbert Byron’s The Lord’s Oysters, a book I grew up with, in the late ‘80s when the School committed to programs on authentic Chesapeake workboats. We wanted to create the feeling that we were on the river 80 or 100 years ago, the same time period that Byron was writing about. It allowed people to be enrapt in the river and the landscape—putting up the rain tarp when it rains, sailing when the wind blows, fishing when the tide is right. It’s a pace of life we don’t find very much today, and I wanted to bring it into our programs, and then later into Chesapeake Scenes.
How does Chesapeake Scenes II continue to tell the story of the Bay?
A lot of Tom McHugh’s original music was about the end of the wooden boat era, the hardships of the waterman’s way of life, and going forward. It’s the same with Wisner’s music, “Chesapeake Born” or “Dredgin’ is my Drudgery.” Those songs verify our feelings about the culture and lifestyle that has grown out of this great living resource that is the Chesapeake. With this new album, we built on that tradition with some national or international pieces that transcend beyond the Chesapeake, as well, to show that the connection to the sea is felt across the world. We’re unique, yet we’re the same—it’s deeply rooted.
There’s a unique rhythm to the album’s flow. How did you curate the selection of songs, stories and poems for Chesapeake Scenes II?
I selected familiar music that told stories and could be presented to a live audience. The words were a different story—whether short or long, they couldn’t be complicated, and the poetry had to paint a picture, without needing to be analyzed. Each poem is coupled with the song just before or after, and it bridges us to the next story.
I wanted the selections throughout to show the landscape or the traditions or the people from a different perspective. Each piece on this album tells us something about the past or preservation, and what has value. We can’t keep the wooden boat era going on forever, but it doesn’t mean we should forget about it.
To see Chesapeake Scenes II performed live on October 9, visit: amaritime.org/
To listen to Chesapeake Scenes II on Spotify: https://bit.ly/chesapeakescenes
