John McCutcheon

John McCutcheon, the talented multi-instrumentalist folk singer from Wausau, Wisconsin, is considered as much a storyteller as a musician. McCutcheon learned about American folk music during a trip to the Appalachians when he was a young man and met from some of the country's greatest exponents of American traditional music such as the banjo playing coal miner Roscoe Holcomb and the North Carolina fiddle player Tommy Hunter. This early immersion into traditional US folk music helped develop McCutcheon's distinctive style where each song carries a message or tells a story. In the 1980s McCutcheon became a father and, unhappy with the standard of children's music on offer, decided to create some of his own and record it. The result was the 1983 album 'Howjadoo'; it was originally intended as a one-off but its popularity led to demand for more and the artist was persuaded to write some follow up albums which became equally successful. As well as playing guitar, banjo, zither and the Appalachian dulcimer, McCutcheon is also considered to be a master of the hammered dulcimer, an instrument not commonly associated with American music. Since the 1990s McCutcheon's music has developed a more rock oriented style in the genre known as heartland rock as practised by artists such as Steve Earle, Tom Petty and John Mellencamp. With more than 30 albums to his credit McCutcheon is a firmly established artist within the field of traditional American music.

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