Alice Gerrard’s ‘Sun To Sun‘ may be a sprightly tune, with equal light placed on Tatiana Hargreaves’ fiddle, Reed Stutz’s banjo and DaShawn Hickman’s pedal steel but it has a serious message about gun control. Gerrard’s ire is also equally shared – of course the blame for the school shooting is directly on the shooter, but there are other links in the chain. Unregistered guns, legal carrying, untraceable resales and an unwillingness to ask just why a semi-automatic rifle is needed to go after Bambi’s mother – these are the sort of things that Gerrard notes require some political will to resolve, but she isn’t optimistic: “Walkin’ around in a world gone crazy/ Big shot politicians in their black Mercedes/ Won’t do nothin’, not one thing from sun to sun/ And while they’re doin’ nothin’ ‘nother fool goes and buys a gun.”
Singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Alice Gerrard has spent nearly sixty years in the world of traditional music – her recordings with Hazel Dickens during the 1960s and ’70s influenced a generation of women musicians from Laurie Lewis to the Judds. Her songs have been recorded by Kathy Mattea, Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer, Tatiana Hargreaves and Allison deGroot, Cahalen Morrison and Eli West, and Rhiannon Giddens among others. ‘Sun to Sun’ is the title track of her latest album which will be released on October 20th on Sleepy Cat Records.
