Mac was back to finding his varied solo niche in a variety setting (he even played Las Vegas with the Stoneman Family), and that more than kept him going while so many country acts, and bluegrass acts in particular, were having a very rough go. Among those he now toured with as a solo was Johnny Cash, on Cash’s first tour. They remained friends for life, even when Dot didn’t follow Mac’s advice come up with the bucks to sign Cash away from Sun and he went to Columbia. Three duets with Mac are among the last things Cash would record; those may yet surface among latter-day American Recordings to come.
Cash, Mac, and their buddy Merle Travis were soon to have a role in the commercial folk boom looming on the horizon. There was a place in the late ’50s where that side of their work could get a workout; it was a melting-pot of a variety show that would put hard country, pop, folk balladeering and rockabilly on the same stage, a long-running Compton, California, television extravaganza called “Town Hall Party”.
Regular viewers Clarence and Roland White, young bluegrassers by then, took a practical lesson in flexibility. As Roland puts it, “It was unusual that Mac could just get out there with his guitar and anybody could back him up. Mac and his guitar was the show, anyway. That was an eye-opener; he was smart!”
(Mac not only appeared on “Town Hall Party” live, and on its more polished “Ranch Party” syndicated offshoot, but along with Merle Travis and Johnny Bond, he regularly played side sets during breaks in the four-hour telecast in which they’d run a stump-the-band contest.)
Wiseman produced Dot records by Leroy Van Dyke, Jimmy C. Newman, Leon McAuliffe, and Reno & Smiley, but the late ’50s was not a ripe period in which to break new country acts. The number of country music stations in the U.S. dwindled down to 150 — a fact that would later make Mac one of the founders of the Country Music Association in 1963.
There were more unique Dot singles to come, including Mac’s 1961 version of “Lucky Old Sun”, which must’ve been the world’s first record with a Dixieland Jazz Band and a five-string banjo lead. And there was an unreleased charmer called “I Like This Kind Of Music”, which brings in as many strains of American pop as manageable in under three minutes — and never gives “this kind of music” a name.
The California A&R experiment ended when Wood sold Dot, and Mac returned to Nashville. Wiseman and Wood continued working at the label, though, and together, they turned their attention to another new realm: LPs. Characteristically against the conventional grain, yet prescient, Wiseman would insist that his Beside Still Waters gospel album be spare and bare (“the Living Room Sound,” he calls it) when so many were coming out with lavish choruses and strings.
He also released a folk song LP that, since he realized the new college “folk” audience didn’t want music that was all that folk, added harpsichords, backup vocals by the Jordanaires, and layered sounds, in advance of that practice in the commercial Folk Scare of the early ’60s. Mac would find a ready-made college circuit for his one-man folk act, and like buddy Johnny Cash, he played Newport and traded songs backstage with Bob Dylan, Ian & Sylvia and the like.
Wiseman moved up to Capitol, then RCA Victor, in ’60s and ’70s. As coffeehouses gave way to college rock, he made his way firmly into the rising bluegrass circuit, which has been a happy and “heaven sent” home to him ever since. There would be more classic bluegrass from him, such as his collaboration with the Osborne Brothers on CMH Records, and some charming and surprising albums with Lester Flatt. He’d have a label of his own to put out old ballads anew.
But, as you might figure, he’s never stayed entirely on the reservation. He had a novelty hit in the ’70s produced, inevitably it might seem, by his equally variety-oriented and unpredictable friend Cowboy Jack Clement, “If I Had Johnny’s Cash And Charley’s Pride”, and a number of surprising projects that seemed to crop up in a row, late in the ’70s. “I was getting itchy,” Mac concedes.
One of these was 1977’s Mac Wiseman Sings Gordon Lightfoot, an album-length salute to a writer well outside of bluegrass that Mac found much to his liking and suitable to his style. It moves easily from spare production on one track to ripe fullness on another; Eddie Adcock supplies the banjo as Mac tears into “For Lovin’ Me”, “Did She Mention My Name?” and “Sundown”.
A singular 1979 Churchill Records single came about when fiddler Ingrid Fowler, one of the co-founders of Nashville’s Station Inn and a part of the all-woman bluegrass band the Bushwackers, backed Mac at a show in Kentucky and introduced his music to her dad, who was looking to try making a record in Nashville.
Her dad was, it turned out, big-band progressive jazz bandleader Woody Herman, a born experimenter who’d come to respect, and was able to identify, the best musicians around his daughter’s very different world. As Ingrid’s onetime bandmate Bruce Nemerov put it, “Mac was the most urbane singer in the field, the one to do it.” Mac and Woody traded comic “This is how we do it in Music City”/”This is how we do it in the Big Apple” lines and sang verses of what Herman calls on the record the “one country song I know” — the southern pop classic “My Blue Heaven”. Churchill president Tommy Martin reports that the single reached the mid-60s on the major country charts. Another Mac chartmaker on Churchill was a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again” — a generation before the Dixie Chicks saw country fodder in that music.
When bluegrass experimenter Scott Rouse was looking for the right singers to be part of his GrooveGrass Boys bluegrass-funk experiments of the ’90s, with Bootsy Collins as a key player, he brought Mac in to sing.
“With that kind of music,” says Rouse, “where you’re sticking all of those styles together to make a new one, I had to have somebody who had done everything, and could sing everything very well. And that was Mac.”
Mac Wiseman has made the musical and career choices he’s made, and has sung what he’s sung, on purpose. Much of his best music is in nobody’s category, but rather in track-by-track sound zones of his own devising. Given where he came from, and what he found he could do, he might well have been another household name, a Burl Ives, working the broad pop and pop folk markets, scoring hits with Christmas novelties, occasionally making his way to Nashville; but he didn’t want to be in those pop venues all the time, always to be starting over. As adventurous as he’s been, there was also something in that country boy side of his that pulled him back toward home — and to those old songs, done his way.
“I live those songs; I really do,” he responds, asked how it happens that a pretty hip kid of the jitterbug era had such a feel for those Kincaid-style tomes from well before his time. “I just don’t like to sit down and record something that I don’t feel. But, the thing is — I have different moods. I might have me a little toddy or two and feel melancholy as hell, you know. And then I’ll lay some bad skin on you. You see?”
ND senior editor Barry Mazor would like to salute historians Charles K. Wolfe and Eddie Stubbs, without whose groundbreaking biographical work on Mac Wiseman this bio-critical musical re-examination would have been very much slower and more difficult.
