Mary McCaslin -- Folk Icon or Also Ran

I was sad to learn in today’s print edition of the NY Times, of the passing of “Mary McCaslin, 75, Folk Singer Who Longed for Old West.” I learned that she passed away at her home on October 2, a few weeks ago. I knew she had been sick, suffering from a rare neurological disease. I had hoped for a recovery for her, and for science to catch up to what it had not been able to solve yet, but the time was not quite right or ripe for that, and the gentle Times obituary closed that hope for now.

Mary was called by some as “iconic,” but I know that not too many know or knew of her talents, including her often close to pitch perfect arrangements of her own songs, and her arrangements of the classics from the Beatles to Motown to the great American songbook, spiked with her often exquisite voice. I was introduced to her close to 50 years ago with her pleasantly lilting “San Bernadino Waltz.” I often loved hearing her singing and playing guitar, but her music felt like a very sweet treat, one I wanted to savor and maybe not experience too often (for it might take away from the experience).
The obituary described Mary as “a pure-voiced folk singer who sang plaintive laments for the fading Old West, reimagined pop and rock classics as mountain ballads and was an innovator of open tunings on the guitar…,” The obituary compared her to Joni Mitchell, whose open-tuning adventures took her into inflections of jazz, while Mary went the opposite way into more Celtic oriented and Old West directed sounds. One reviewer of her music pushed into using language such as describing her “clear, delicately affecting vocals” and the way her “unorthodox guitar tunings create unusual, ethereal melodies of striking beauty.” While another reviewer used language such as ““[h]er point of view suggests a woman who grew up riding horses under the open sky of the high plains. Even Miss McCaslin’s experiments with Motown songs conjure a plaintive rusticity.” Her version of the Supremes’ hit “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” inspired the reviewer to say that she “transforms the tune from an urban teen-oriented lament into a mountain-flavored folk song of quiet, adult desperation.”

It is no accident that her music drove reviewers into pushing on the outer limits of language. I am hopeful that her passing inspires more people to learn of her music and to listen in to the sounds that conjure up a simpler world of purer values.

Folk icon. Mary McCaslin was truly wonderful. RIP

Christgau was overall pretty fair to her (think there were some later albums. or maybe just one, that he didn't review):
https://www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist2.php?id=898
Not seeing the original full-length Rolling Stone review of Way Out West, which was what first got me interested, but Rolling Stone Australia quotes it here (rest of that list might be handy too):
https://au.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/10-folk-albums-rolling-stone-loved-in-the-1970s-you-never-heard-11878/mary-mccaslin-way-out-west-11887/

Not seeing a byline for this, but not bad---from 1998, around the time of reissue, I think:
https://www.nodepression.com/album-reviews/mary-mccaslin-way-out-west/

I covered the reissue of The Bramble and The Rose, her ace duet set with husband Jim Ringer, in a Voice round-up of way-out-West-mynded female artists:

In 1972, a singer named Mary McCaslin flushed Hollywood and headed into a
West she'd seen only from airplanes. An open-eared folkie in the Age of Dick (Nixon) and
Quaaludes, she carried a notebook, a guitar, hard-won studio expertise, and a
hard-fed appetite for something more. McCaslin soon scored a (reformed)
outlaw hubby, Jim Ringer. Together they assembled The Bramble and the Rose,
recently reissued on Rounder/Philo.
This album contains: death and dreaming, "Geronimo's Cadillac," "Hit The Road, Jack,"and Christmas---well, as seasonal suggestions via the jingle-jangle twilight of fresh air "Strawberry Roan", anyway, which generously scatters phosphorescent, undersea-like associations over the dry Rockies, for de facto lagniappe
---not too far from the high lonesome call to the Reaper, to "spare me over for another year"---
just call it all seeds 'n' needs. Traditional and Contemporary Songs of the American People, simple and subtle as you please. Something in the songs and/or the singers tries to keep
its distance. But like death and dreaming, like life, the music they make
passes through everything; one damn thing leads to another. And of course, it all
started with a woman, pulling her hat down over one eye.