The Sally Anne Morgan Interview
Are you originally from Asheville, NC? What was your childhood like growing up? When did you first begin to fall in love with music, more specifically the guitar fiddle, shruti box and banjo? Was this something that was relevant growing up in your household?
I grew up in Northern Virginia, in the Washington DC suburbs. I always loved listening to the radio when I was a young child, Oldies 100 was my jam. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love to listen to music. My parents insisted on my siblings and I all learning an instrument, and I chose the violin, though I was always lukewarm about it, I think the kind of classical music that children are taught just wasn’t for me. I quit as soon as I was allowed to, which was in Middle School. In High School I discovered my dad’s old record collection, which was a lot of folk revival stuff: Ian and Sylvia, the Newport Folk Convention, Leadbelly. I started to get really into it, and was checking out books in the library about “Roots Music”, Woody Guthry. I started listening to “Bluegrass Country” on the radio, shows like Dick Spottswood, and got my parents to take me to bluegrass jams. I already had a violin and knew how to make sounds out of it, but it took a while to transition into playing it more like a fiddle, learning from ear, learning to cross tune. Basically over the course of the next decade of my life I slowly became enamored with old time fiddle music. When I went to school at Virginia Tech there was an old time music jam that I started going to. Things really opened up for me when I was gifted a guitar. I had never thought about music in terms of chords or keys before, but it started to all make sense when I played a bit of guitar. I bought a cheap banjo as well, and that felt like something that fit inbtween the fiddle melody and the guitar rhythm.
What would you and your friends do for fun growing up? Who were some of your earliest influences in your more formative years? When and where did you see your very first concert? When did you realize you wanted to spend your time pursuing music?
I was an outdoorsy kid who played barefoot in creeks in the suburbs. I feel like growing up in the late 90s, early 00s, popular music was at a low point. There was nothing empowering or cool that I encountered that wasn’t old. I think my first couple of concerts included Incubus and Hoobastank along with the likes of Mike Seeger, Old and in the Grey, the Seldom Scene. My older brother burned me CDs of the Grateful Dead, but otherwise I feel like I was totally forging my own path, with few guides until I got into college. As I got better at old time music and could lead a jam on the fiddle, it just got more and more fun and it snowballed. It became my social scene, each new tune I learned unlocked another one. I started playing with the Black Twig PIckers and made a little money here and there. There was one year in my life where I made my living entirely from music, playing with another oldtime band the Freighthoppers, we were the oldtime band at smaller bluegrass festivals all around the country. But it didn’t feel fun or sustainable for me. Touring is much more fun when you do it occasionally, like a kind of vacation. The problem is most jobs don’t appreciate you taking several weeks off, multiple times a year to play shows. So I had to find a way to build my life around music without it being my main career. I ended up getting into letterpress printing and art, and somehow have mostly made my living being my own boss and doing that.
Prior to becoming a solo musician you also participated in the wonderful duo House and Land with Sarah Louise Henson. How did you guys initially meet each other? What exactly inspired you guys to first start the group? The band released two LP’s from 2017-2019 on Thrill Jockey. Tell me about writing and recording those albums and what the overall vision and approach was for those bodies of work.
Sarah and I met when I asked her to open for the Black Twig Pickers in Asheville. I’d seen her play and thought it’d be a cool fit. My first impression was that we were kindred spirits like needles in the haystack. It’s rare to find someone who is as deeply into traditional music as experimental and sees the psychedelic side of it all. We nerded out hard on ballads and it clicked. Melding fiddle and guitar is so easy because sonically they’re doing very different things, we could each jam out and not get in each other’s way. I think our first show was opening for Jake Xerxes Fussell and Danny Kroha. The material is all traditional so we didn’t write the songs so much as arrange them. We wanted to use unusual treatments, sing harmonies, get a little weird without being too self conscious about it. Even though these were very old ballads, we treated them as alive, as they are, part of a living tradition, feeling free to adjust some words to suit us, mess with the melodies a bit. Some songs we tinkered with a lot, some were much more free flowing.
I’d like to jump ahead a bit to your solo career with the release of your debut LP “Thread”. Can you tell me about writing and recording this album and how you approached this material that differs from how you approached say the music with House and Land? Your very anticipated 2023 album “Carrying” will be released in late September. With a heavy three, or so years behind us, what did you ultimately want to express and explore with this album? What was most important to you while creating this material? I’d love to know about some of the tracks on the album such as “The Center”, “Awake”, “Song For Arthur”“Beekeeper” and “Summerwater”.
For Thread I was playing more and more guitar and wanted to explore a solo voice that wasn’t strictly traditional. I’d always written songs, casually, usually secretly, and thought it was time to show some of them to the world. It felt like a natural outpouring of my soul, my expression. There still are a couple traditionals in there. And some instrumentals. It was really a mixture. “Ellemwood Meditation” was entirely improvised and led to my next release, Cups, too. I am a person led heavily by intuition and feeling so I didn’t put a lot of thought into choices, just what I felt like doing at the time. I started recording this in winter 2021 right after I found out I was pregnant. Many of the songs mention a mother figure, which is interesting because I don’t know if I was really thinking of having a child when I was writing them. Or I suppose some part of me was. I really love this about writing songs, how what comes out is often something I don’t even know is going on in my mind. So the album is largely about having a child. I called it Carrying - both meaning to carry heavy loads physical and metaphorical - so much of what we accumulate and carry around with us burdens us, but we also can’t, or don’t know how to let go. But also carrying as in carrying a child. Carrying to term, nurturing and nourishing, keeping safe. Something that is both a burden and a treasure. The profoundness of that experience, coupled with the mundaneness - something billions and billions of women have experienced before.
The theme of circularity, rebirth, becoming a mother, compost and reincarnation, all seem to be connected as well and all are driving forces of the songs on this album. The Center is sort of the spiritual center of the album and tries to articulate some beliefs about reincarnation - we’re all sacred compost, after all, and I think the underground is the deepest magical place on earth. So there is some cave imagery, worms and salamanders. I was also thinking of the Tombs of Atuan, one of the Earthsea books by Ursula LeGuin, where there is this very old, isolated religion where they worship these labyrinthian dark caves by keeping them dark, and the darkness is the worship, no light has been shined on them in eons, and just the feeling that comes over me thinking about that is so profound and moving. Summerwater is about connecting with one’s deep unconscious, and also about literally swimming in the water. The subconscious as a deep pool inside yourself, where ultimately we’re all connected, nothing has any edges, any artifice washes away. I have a life goal to never pass up a good swimming opportunity, and in summers especially I end up judging the quality of my summer based on how many swimming holes I went to. In Awake, I am riffing on an old North Carolina ballad, Awake Awake, but I ended up changing the melody and then changing all the words, and it became a totally new song. This is as close as a song of mine can get to a call to action - we’re all living in a time of ecological collapse, a mass extinction event, climate catastrophe, and we’re sleepwalking through it. Let’s collectively wake up. Beekeeper and Song for Arthur bookend the album and are the most acoustic and stripped down. Beekeeper is just this haunting, cool melody that came to me very naturally and I liked the tone it set for the record. Song for Arthur is the one song I recorded after giving birth and is just a love song and lullaby for my child.
I understand you also do Letterpressing in your home. Can you tell me about this? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
Somehow I have made letterpress printing my own art and cards my main career. It is connected to my music in many ways, but also articulates a different side of it. The nice thing about visual art and music is that I don’t have to use words to explain it! Which is good because I can’t really. The other main thing to share is that I started a brewery with my husband, Leveller Brewing Co. in Weaverville, NC. He is an artist of the palette and makes the best beer you’ve ever had. It’s mostly his project, but I support him as well. He is also an amazing musician who plays on Carrying and Thread. If you’re ever in the area come have a beer!
