Sally Anne Morgan
on embracing technology, experimentation, and layers
When I connect with musician Sally Anne Morgan via phone earlier this spring, the sounds from her homestead punctuate our conversation: roosters crowing, sheep rustling in the background. Sally makes music, works as a printmaker, and lives a rural life outside Asheville. At first glance, it’s an idyllic life. Sally herself acknowledges her musical and life trajectory – playing oldtime music and learning letterpress with dreams of a computer-free life – were once based on a romantic ideal.
“I think back on that time, when I was really into oldtime music and old-fashioned things, which at the time felt like an authentic rebellion to consumerism and technology, but in retrospect was constructed and a bit costume-y. Also, just reckoning with race and the Movement for Black Lives in the past several years has made me less comfortable romanticizing the past.”
Sally Anne Morgan’s debut solo album Thread (2020) is rooted in traditional music, including ballads and fiddle tunes, but with a healthy dose of drones, percussion, and improvised sounds, it’s clear this is music from a personal, experimental space. When talking about her take on Clyde Davenport’s “Sugar in the Gourd”, Sally acknowledges her less than dogmatic approach to fiddle tunes. “That’s just where I’m at with fiddle tunes right now. I don’t really want to play them unless I can totally fuck them up.”
Musical Beginnings
Sally grew up playing violin in orchestra, and when she was in the ninth grade, her oldest brother got into bluegrass music. She says she piggy-backed on his interests and acquired The Fiddlers’ Fakebook. At the same time, she discovered her dad's record collection, which was filled with folk revival records –Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, the Newport Folk Festival.“I was exposing myself to all this music from the past, but also no one in my high school was into bluegrass. I thought I was totally a weirdo. When I went to college at Virginia Tech, I brought my violin with me thinking I might find a bluegrass jam.”
What she ended up finding was an oldtime jam. Eventually someone burned her a CD of Tommy Jarrell and common tunes from the Blacksburg Oldtime Jam. “I don’t know exactly what happened, but at some point I just got really hooked. As I started to get better, it became way more fun and rewarding. All of a sudden,I wasn't just the fiddler quietly eeking it out in the back, but I could actually lead a tune. “
Eventually she became friends with the members of the Black Twig Pickers and started playing with them. “I was drawn to their approach and sound, which was definitely very rhythmic, not very refined, and not very notey. It was just powerful in a scruffy kind of way.” A couple of the bandmates were also in the experimental band, Pelt. Being exposed to this improvised, acoustic music continued to widen Sally’s perspective.
“We'd be driving to a gig and they’d be playing and talking about Don Cherry and Terry Riley and Indian ragas and just this whole wide range of what at first seemed like random or disparate musical influences. But at some point, it started to make sense to me. I give those guys – Mike, Isak and Nathan – a whole lot of credit in exposing me to the world of music that I’m most into now.”
House and Land
While touring with the Black Twig Pickers on the East Coast and the UK, Sally began to see a common trend. “I was noticing this weird explosion of fingerstyle guitar players. It seemed like every time we played a show, the opening act was a white male solo guitar player, and I was really curious as to why and how this was such a thing.”
Sally often noticed she was often the only woman on the bill. Meeting experimental musician and guitarist Sarah Louise was a breath of fresh air. “When I first heard Sarah Louise, I was really interested because there were so few women doing fingerstyle guitar. At some point, I asked if she could be the opening act at a show, and we struck up a friendship.”
“I had just learned Jean Ritchie’s ‘Unquiet Grave’ and I asked if she wanted to sing that, and she was like, ‘Oh I already have a harmony I've made up for it because I’ve listened to the record so much.’ So that started our collaboration. It came together really naturally, and it was really fun to be in a group with another woman and to be so inspired and playing these traditional songs, but also placing our own twist on things. It was pretty magical.”
Tinkering with tunes and ballads as House and Land was not a thing that Sally had typically done in the past.
“When I was first getting into fiddling, I thought you had to replicate the version you chose to learn from as much as possible, and stay ‘true’ to the source. But after a few years, that approach started to feel really limiting. No two players play a tune exactly alike, and also, what is the point of doing that? It began to feel more like a game than a form of expression.”
Sally adds that the more she learned about the folk revival and history of traditional music, the more she began to accept the living nature of the art.
“It isn’t an embalmed thing to be preserved, it is a living tradition that changes over time. For example, Jean Ritchie was rewriting ballads, altering melodies and putting her own spin on songs all the time. This is my art, my music and not anyone else’s. I should just be able to do whatever I feel like. I started to feel a lot more freedom once I came to this realization.”
Going Solo
After a few years of playing with Sarah Louise under House and Land, Sally was ready for a new project.
“As House and Land progressed and we got further away from the traditional material, I was like, ‘Why not try writing my own songs or tunes?’ I had always been a collaborator or in bands, so It seemed like a step forward to some new direction. I wanted to see what my solo voice would be. At the time, it felt very vulnerable. Being on a stage alone was terrifying, but I wanted to push myself to get comfortable doing that.”
Sally began to piece together original and traditional songs and tunes she had written and arranged over the years and her solo album Thread started to come together. She also earned a residency at the Hambidge Center, which gave her time away from chores on the farm to focus on writing and recording pieces for the record. “It was really inspiring to have time in a cabin in the woods alone, my one job being music. With my regular day job being printmaking, I find it hard sometimes to switch to music. There always seems to be something more pressing.”
Embracing some of the recording process herself while working on Thread gave Sally a new vantage point on an already changing perspective on making music and art.
“My attitude towards technology has changed a lot. I started letterpress printing eight years ago when I was also deep into oldtime music. I think I had this fantasy of not being on computers. But the way it’s turned out is I’m actually doing a lot of work on the computer, which I’ve come to embrace. I really like using Photoshop for example, and creating artwork using a system of layers, that I wasn’t able to do by hand before.
There’s some overlap with that layered approach with my music now too. I was surprised that I actually enjoyed learning how to use some basic recording equipment for Thread. And it definitely changed my approach to creating music - being able to create one layer at a time and keep adding, or subtracting them. There is freedom in being able to control and improvise that part of the process.”
On September 11, 2020, Thread was released into the wild. Sally says releasing the record in the middle of the pandemic was challenging, to say the least.
“There was so much going on in the world and it really didn’t feel great to promote myself and the record in this time of mass death and political upheaval. But I also, maybe it helped some people during that time? That would be my hope. It’s also been disappointing not being able to tour on this record, which has always been fun and a fulfilling part of the record release cycle for me. Hopefully I’ll be able to make up for it one day.”
Looking Ahead
Sally is in the middle of recording a second solo album. Last year, she received a grant from the North Carolina Arts Council, as well as spent time at another residency at the Hambidge Center. She says the second album will include a couple of traditional songs, but will be based mainly on original songwriting.
“Generally my songwriting, at least for the second record, has come from this place of wanting to explore some different guitar chord expressions or fingerpicking styles. I’m also typically not trying to go for a traditional one, four, five chord structure. Lyrics-wise, I journal a lot, and I make a note if something pops into my head, like some words or phrases. Sometimes, if they’re good enough, that can be enough to build a song upon. In some cases, it comes together really quickly and fluidly. Other times, it’s taken a little more like intention and work.”
Sally adds that she didn’t deliberately set out to make another record at first. “I just had songs I was writing, and then I got this grant and it was like, ‘Okay, there’s definitely enough songs and ideas here to make a record.’ Post-recording, I have noticed a lot of themes that have popped up in the songs I wasn’t even aware of at first.”
Those themes feel particularly appropriate for this moment in time.
“Circles, circular things, cycles, patterns.
Also, this idea of mornings. During the pandemic, I began to really embrace my circadian rhythms. There’s a few different songs where I sing about how nice it is in the morning.”
Visit Sally’s website to learn about her work. Her debut solo album Thread can be purchased on her Bandcamp.
