Biography

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Alex Martin - Appalachian Fall: The Song-Poems of Michael Martin

Michael Martin (1936–2023), called “the foremost meditative poet of Appalachia” by former North Carolina Poet Laureate Shelby Stephenson, lived and wrote for 30 years in southwest Virginia, in a mountaintop cabin he built himself, a mile from the nearest road or utility line. There he forged deep friendships with the members of his rural community. Much of his writing chronicles their tragedies and triumphs, as well as those of their ancestors who lived in the hollers beneath his mountain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and links these lives to the continual striving of human history. His deep exploration of a small place thus achieves a resonant universality.

Before recording Appalachian Fall: The Song-Poems of Michael Martin, his son, Washington, DC, composer and guitarist Alex Martin, had worked primarily as a jazz musician, as reflected on his previous three albums: Nostalgia for Terra Incognita (2007), Second Life (2011), and Folk Songs, Jazz Journeys (2021). But as his father’s health declined in recent years and much of Alex’s life became devoted to caring for him, he brought his music back to his father’s Appalachia. This album is the fruit of a final collaboration. They were joined in creating it by some of the DC area’s finest folk, Americana, and jazz musicians, including former Bumper Jacksons vocalist Jess Eliot Myhre.

“Before returning to my first love, music, I thought I wanted to be a writer like my father,” writes Alex Martin. “I worked for a while as a newspaper and wire service reporter in North Carolina, and even got a master’s degree from the Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas in Austin. I wrote poems, short stories, and a couple of novels I never published, before coming home to my guitar as my vehicle of storytelling. But in the course of my writing career I also learned a lot about editing, and it remains my other line of work. These skills proved invaluable in creating these songs from my father’s poems, most of which are quite long and navigate the borderlands between verse, prose, and transcription of oral history. Unsurprisingly, I first chose the shortest ones I could find, including the little gems that are “Second Letter to Marlea” and “Twang.” Although I created a reprise for the latter, for the most part these first poems required almost no edits to become songs. The music wrote itself.

“After that, things got a lot more difficult. I wanted to represent what perhaps appeals to me most in Dad’s work: his portraits of his closest friends in the community, two mountain elders whom he calls Philo and Beulah. They transmitted to him a treasure trove of Appalachian culture, stories of the community’s inhabitants going back more than a century, as well as spiritual and cosmological worldviews of extraordinary depth. My father’s writing about them records with great empathy and detail a way of life that has largely vanished but that left a profound mark on America. I knew I had to make Philo and Beulah central characters on this album, but it required a lot of hard choices, as anyone who has read his work will realize immediately. My father’s greatest gift to me in his final two years was his most precious possession: his writing, which he allowed me to work with to the ends of music. In one of his final poems, dictated to my sister in the hospital, he called this his son’s ‘rigor of revision.’”