A Match Made for a Folk Ballad

Here comes another singer-songwriter act trying to scrape its way out of the thick acoustic-music underbrush with a do-it-yourself album and . . . all right, we’ll give ‘em a spin since they’ve been booked to restart the Living Tradition monthly concert series in Anaheim.

The longest-running folk soiree in Orange County returns Saturday after more than a year’s hiatus.

Dave Carter with Tracy Grammer, “When I Go,” it says on the CD cover, big block type for his name, smaller italics for hers. A sticker on the case says “1998 Winner, Kerrville New Folk,” which could be a reason to bite, because Kerrville, an annual folkie get-together in Texas, is famed for high standards and an adventurous vibe. Acclaim there launched Michelle Shocked, among others.

First track: the title cut. Dark, mountain banjo from Carter, haunting, beautifully intoned violin from Grammer. Instant gravitas in the music, sparse but epic, a feel akin to Stephen Stills’ “Find the Cost of Freedom.” The narrative line: An American Indian warrior, facing the dawn of battle, prepares for death and commends his soul to the Infinite.

And Carter, who writes the songs and sings lead in a sturdy, earthy and melodious voice, presents himself as a major lyrical talent in the last, stunning verse:

And when the sun comes trumpets

From his red house in the east,

He will find the standing stone where I chanted my release.

He will send his morning messenger to strike the hammer blow,

And I will crumble down uncountable,

In showers of crimson rubies, when I go.

Nine more songs, strong to gem-like, make “When I Go” a candidate for discovery of the year.

Mystical, romantic ruminations set amid vivid, wild, Western landscapes; haunting, clear-eyed looks at the downside of love; a humorous talking-blues streak, especially on the hilarious and scintillating trucker’s tall tale, “Little Liza Jane”; an instant, exuberantly catchy folk-pop classic about a free-spirited girl in tie-dye (“The River, Where She Sleeps”); and an imaginative closing epic called “Elvis Presley” that enlists the King’s ghost for a Faulknerian rumination on the soul-squelching march of modernity as reflected in the downfall of the South--and that of a certain tragic Southern boy. If it sounds like a cornucopia, well, it is.

So who are these people? Two pursuers of a belated vocation (Grammer is 30; Carter, who has an angular, Lyle Lovett look without the hair, will only give his age as “young enough to do it, but it’s getting close”). Both were smitten with music as children, but only recently have they put aside their career fallbacks and risk penury to make it a full-time pursuit. The Living Tradition show is their Southern California debut.

Carter’s journey began in a Texas household headed by a mother who came from hardscrabble origins and pursued a calling as a charismatic fundamentalist preacher, complete with speaking in tongues, and a religiously devout but conservative mathematician father who came from old money.

By age 12, Carter had shown an independent bent toward spirituality with his own clandestine peeks into Buddhist texts, checked out surreptitiously from the Dallas public library because it would be “a heresy, an outrage in my family.”

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Carter plunged into music, studying piano, guitar and cello, writing songs from an early age. He earned a master’s degree in music from the University of Oklahoma, at which point he decided he’d be better suited to something else. So he got additional degrees in mathematics and psychology.

In the mid-1990s, he was working as a computer programmer, giving piano lessons and continuing his math studies when, he says, significant chunks of songs started playing in his dreams.

“I would be sitting around the stables in Grand Prairie, Texas, with my grandfather and his friends, listening to country music, and I would hear the hooks and main lines to songs, and wake up with the chorus in my head. I’d write it down and turn it into a song, and I realized, ‘These songs are really good, and I could reach so many people with them.’ ”

Carter was sitting in a numerical calculus class in 1994 when, he said, he “had a mystical experience” that told him to chuck everything and devote himself to music. So he headed to Nashville, played his stuff at clubs where the songwriting pros gather, and was confirmed in his new calling by an immediately enthusiastic response.

Carter doesn’t rely strictly on dreams for his material: “When I Go” was sparked by the death of his mother in 1997; trying to connect with her as she suffered from Alzheimer’s disease gave rise to its haunting, dramatic contemplation of the twilight world between this life and what’s to come; imagination, and a long absorption of Native American culture, suggested focusing on the death-wait of an Indian warrior.

The album is immersed in pop and rock song-craft as well as folk and country traditions. Lyrical fragments from Bob Dylan and the Beatles fly fast in “The River, Where She Sleeps.” “Little Liza Jane” loosely adopts the structure and narrative flow of the Byrds’ nugget, “Chestnut Mare”--a runaway ride that heads off a cliff, then becomes suspended gracefully in floating space before a climactic splashdown.

“I’m interested in good songwriting across all genres,” Carter said. “There are certain people who are icons, they’re the masters and the rest of us proceed from them. All of us modern songwriters are the children of Lennon and McCartney, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.

“Every songwriter I know is building on the groundwork those people laid. And in my case I would also bring Buck Owens and Merle Haggard into that. I also have a lot of classical influence--Mozart’s melodic influence is big on me.”

It was Grammer’s ear for music with a country accent that drew her to Carter when she first heard him perform in 1996 at a Portland songwriters event.

“He took his place at the front of his room, and everybody got real quiet,” she recalled. “I was new in town, and it was obvious there was a certain level of respect for this guy. It was a relief to finally hear something with a little twang to it, because it’s the kind of music I grew up with.”

Grammer said some of the fondest memories of her Orange County upbringing revolve around singing country songs with her father. “My dad was a guitar player and used to get out guitar books [of] John Denver and Willie Nelson songs. I would sit on the bed, turn the pages and sing along, making up harmonies.”

Grammer sang in school choirs, performed in operettas, and learned the violin, guitar and mandolin. But after graduating from Laguna Hills High School in 1986, she went off to study English and anthropology at UC Berkeley and stopped playing. In 1994, during a year off from school, she lived in Modesto, where her father had moved, and he helped her hook up as a performing partner with a local singer, Curtis Coleman, who had been in the ‘60s folk group the New Christy Minstrels.

“I started singing with him at his shows,” Grammer said. “That’s when I picked up my violin and guitar. It felt like I had rediscovered an old friend. I wondered why I hadn’t touched these instruments in so long.”

Grammer and Carter “met cute,” as they say in Hollywood: They were literally in the doorway on the way out of the folk gathering where she first heard him sing when he noticed she was carrying a violin (having appeared on the bill with another singer). He invited her to come jam with his band.

The band dissolved, but Grammer and Carter formed a romantic and creative partnership that is in the first stages of branching out nationally.

“When I Go” is getting airplay on folk shows around the country. And Grammer, who handles the booking, is plotting a year of steady travel aimed at hitting all the pinpoints on her U.S. map marking pockets of airplay.

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After playing in Anaheim, the duo will head to Albuquerque for Folk Alliance, a convention for bookers, agents, record companies and others interested in finding and presenting emerging acoustic talent.

Carter said some small specialty labels already have made offers, but he and Grammer (who may soon get promoted from “with” to a more equal “and” in the duo’s billing) are keeping their options open.

“Our fan base contains people who are interested in Americana, and the cowboy [music] thing, and people who are more interested in New Age,” he said. “There’s the folk following, and a lot of ties to insurgent-country type people and college listeners.

“It’s a dilemma for us to pick a label, because a lot of those labels cater to just one of those groups. We’re big admirers of Ani DiFranco, and might follow her model and do it ourselves.”

The duo’s web site is https://www.listen.to/daveandtracy.

Amen.

* Dave Carter with Tracy Grammer and Tintangel perform Saturday in the Living Tradition series at the Downtown Community Center, 250 E. Center St., Anaheim. 7:30 p.m. $10. (949) 559-1419 (Living Tradition ticket and information line) or (714) 765-4500 (community center).