Biography

Crimora, Virginia in the 1930s.

Shenandoah Valley. Christmas was a chopped-down little cedar tree, with candleholders affixed and bent to shape the bows of the tree. The Wisemans lit the candles and stood there to be sure the tree didn’t catch on fire. Stockings held a handful of hard candy, maybe an orange or a pair of socks.

There was life to the old home place, though, and it centered around a Victrola radio. Mac’s mother, Ruth, listened intently to that radio, thrilling in far-off sounds that somehow entered that little kitchen.

As she listened, Ruth sat at the family table and wrote the words to the radio songs in composition books. Then she’d clip a number out of the Ramon’s Calendar and paste that number to the book cover.

“You’re a flower that is blooming in the wildwood,” she wrote. “A flower that is blooming there for me.”

“I heard my mother call my name in prayer/ She was pouring out her heart to Jesus there.”

Playful ones, too. The one about the blind dog, Rattler, who seemed to get his sight back at suppertime: “Here, Rattler, here/ Call ‘ol Rattler from the barn/ Here, Rattler, here.”

Mac sang these songs with his mother, around a pump organ. He often pored through her books, sang to himself and taught himself guitar chords. He would become one of a handful of musicians who helped create bluegrass music, but this was more than a decade prior to bluegrass’ genesis in 1945.

The notebook songs, written in Ruth’s hand, are folk songs, with roots in the British Isles. They are foundational to what has come to be known as country music, and they imparted in Mac Wiseman a love of song that would spur the longest recording career of any American singing star alive in 2014.

Mac Wiseman has made more than 60 albums filled with folk, country, bluegrass, pop (he recorded Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again,” and Gene Austin’s “My Blue Heaven” with big band legend Woody Herman) and rock ‘n’ roll music. He began recording in 1946, on a Chicago session with Molly O’Day. He was a founding member of Flatt & Scruggs’ band and a lead vocalist for Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. He helped found the Country Music Association. He sang at Carnegie Hall, and made fans of legends Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and Merle Haggard. He entered the Bluegrass Hall of Fame and in October 2014, he’ll be formally inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Wiseman became known as “the Voice with a Heart,” and that heart for music began beating back in Crimora, as he lifted his mother’s hand-written words in melody.

In June of 2014, Mac gathered friends including Musicians Hall of Famer Jimmy Capps, Grammy-winning bass player Mark Fain, heralded multi-instrumentalist Justin Moses, acclaimed harmonica player Jelly Roll Johnson, dulcimer master Alisa Jones-Wall, guitar great Thomm Jutz and 23-year-old, rising acoustic music star Sierra Hull for what Mac counts among the most special recording sessions of his 68-year career. He brought that 89-year-old voice with a heart, and an old, yellowed composition book.

“Above all, this project is an effort to preserve American music history, pre-bluegrass,” says Jutz, who co-produced Songs From My Mother’s Hand with Grammy-nominated producer Peter Cooper.

The words from his mother’s pages, which Mac calls Songs From My Mother’s Hand, are more than cherished postcards from another age. They are vibrant, present (and present-day) musical wonders. They were gifts, from a mother to her son. Now, they belong to all of us.