This year, Scott Alarik ushers in the spring for us with a couple of young performers who will share the stage with him in a song swap format. Alarik has been the principal folk music writer for The Boston Globe since 1986. He is also a frequent contributor to Sing Out! the Folk Music Magazine, and was folk critic for the public radio program “Here and Now” for seven years. Pete Seeger calls Alarik “one of the best writers in America.” Alarik’s latest CD, All That Is True, now connects his long careers as music journalist and folk singer. The album was produced by brilliant young fiddler-pianist Hanneke Cassel, and features Boston’s hottest neotraditional performers, including Crooked Still’s singer Aoife O’Donovan, cellist Rushad Eggleston, and banjo prodigy Greg Liszt, who Bruce Springsteen asked to play banjo on his world tour honoring legendary banjo-player and folk singer Pete Seeger. Also on the album are mandolinist-guitarist-songwriter Jake Armerding, and superb Celtic-American fiddler Eric Merrill. Alarik performs at major festivals throughout the northeast, including the Philadelphia, Boston, and Champlain Valley folk festivals, and New Bedford Summerfest as well as at some of the best coffeehouses and clubs in the area.

Scott Alarik photo by Ted Gartland

Sarah Lee Guthrie was two years old when she made her singing debut as part of a children’s chorus on father Arlo’s 1981 album, Power of Love, but she had little subsequent interest in making music herself, although she was surrounded by it. After graduating from high school in 1997, Sarah Lee agreed to tour-manage her father, who was emceeing the Further Festival, on which members of the Grateful Dead were joined by the Black Crowes. She got on so well with the Crowes and Chris Robinson that, when the tour ended, she made what proved to be a life-altering decision: “I knew all these cool rock & roll guys, so I decided to move to L.A.” Meanwhile, Johnny Irion had become friendly with Robinson while Dillon Fence (Johnny’s group) was on the road with the Crowes. Just after Sarah Lee arrived in L. A. Johnny arrived to join Freight Train, a band Robinson was producing. Soon Johnny and Sarah Lee met at an L.A. club and began dating a week later.

One night in Johnny’s Santa Monica apartment, he handed Sarah Lee an acoustic and taught her a couple of basic chords. As she strummed, he started playing licks over the top, “so that it sounded kinda good, for like a second,” Sarah Lee recalls. Noticing a growing smile on her face as she plucked the strings, Johnny turned to her and said, “It’s fun, huh?” Johnny’s words echoed in her head for days afterward. “I thought, ‘Gosh, it is fun,’” she remembers. “I’d never known that side of it; music was like a business to me.” It was then that Sarah Lee realized she’d discovered her true calling. Sarah Lee had just applied for college when word of her musical epiphany reached the family; she got a call from her mother urging her to forget higher education and join her father on tour. So she went out on the road with her dad — “I’m the comic relief in the show,” she says with a laugh — but she always came back to Johnny. A year and a half into their relationship, he proposed. “It totally sideswiped me,” says Sarah Lee, “but I’ve always been a one-person person. He solidified me and believed in me and my art.” They married in 1999 an are now living in western Massachusetts, close to the Guthrie family.

Since setting out on the road together in 2001, they’ve averaged 180 shows a year and have released a couple of solo CDs as well as a collaborative album called Exploration. Johnny wrote six of Exploration’s songs, three are co-writes by the duo and two are solely written by Sarah Lee — “Holdin’ Back” and “Mornin’s Over” — which testify to her rich bloodlines, evidencing a contemporary take on the profound simplicity that distinguished the work of her legendary grandfather.

 

 

  

[Scott Alarik is] the complete folk entertainer. . . a rich-voiced balladeer and songwriter. . . and a droll comic between songs. Daniel Gewertz, The Boston Herald

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The distinguishing feature throughout is the couple's caressing harmonies, which carry on the legacy of Johnny and June, Gram and Emmylou. Maverick

Welch and Rawlings apart — it’s hard to recall two modern country voices that dovetail as elegantly as this husband and wife team. . . A dream. Uncut