Some of the most arresting music I've heard this year has come courtesy of Mountain Man, an all-female trio from Vermont, who sing of herons and honeybees, lost dogs and bathtubs. Particularly I love a track named Mouthwings: "The way one feels could be likened to an opening/ Or a slamming/ Or a breathing hard," it goes. "All of them/ All of them/ Have seen inside my mouth/ Have grown and flown south."
There is something choral in the way they sing, but also plaintive, a little lost: they've described their music as "like three voices searching for something and coming together while they're searching". The searching is the important part: they seem to call out in the darkness when they sing – their words meet, half take shape, then disappear once more.
There's something about these voices, their strangeness, their seriousness and searchingness, that reminds me of Sarah Ogan Gunning, a miner's daughter then a miner's wife and widow from Kentucky, who inherited traditional ballads from her stepmother and composed her own songs – commentaries on troubles, poverty, sickness and strife, and the struggles of the unions and the hardship in the coal-mining camps. They mark her out as one of the most important chroniclers of America's labour movement during the Depression, but it is her voice that will cling to you.
Woody Guthrie, a friend of Gunning, said: "Her voice, dry as my own, thin, high, and in her nose, with the old outdoors and down the mountain sound to it … Sarah Ogan got the house of people to keep so still that the cat licking his hair sounded like a broomstick rubbed against a washtub."
Her voice is certainly less pretty than those of Mountain Man: listen to her mewl through Dreadful Memories, Oh Death, or I Am a Girl of Constant Sorrow, and you'll hear a thorny, well-chewed voice, half-curdled in the throat, half-bleated through the nose. But they share something in their timbre and their depth, in the way they seem to call out from somewhere dark and lonely.
Gunning's singing style was forged in the Appalachian tradition, built upon the love songs, ballads and dance tunes brought over by the Scots, English and Irish. Their subjects shifted to reflect the new American experience – songs about logging, mining, ranching, and murders and disasters. Other changes came with new instrumentation, such as the banjo and the guitar, and by mingling with other styles, such as music-hall and parlour songs, and, most crucially, African-American music, which affected not only the songs' subjects and rhythms but also reinforced the idea of group singing.
Group singing was already rooted deep in Appalachian music, community and religion: the European settlers had brought with them the tradition of Protestant psalm singing, with its a cappella style of "lining out", in which a leader sings or chants a hymn's line, which is then repeated by the congregation. Like many African musical traditions, it hinges upon call and response, and the effect is part choral, part spiritual, always moving.
Mountain Man share these traditions, though their voices are softer, their subjects sweeter. You can hear in their music the same ornamented inflection, the same plaintive rhythms and spiritual yearning as in old Appalachian music, and most importantly, this same lining out, this call and response, voices searching, then coming together.
Gunning sang alone, which perhaps swells the sense of loneliness in her songs – she calls, but hears no response. She sang of hard times, of a life stripped back to the wick, of homes left and husbands and children lost. "Dreadful memories/ How they linger," she once sang. "How they ever flood my soul/ How the workers and their children/ Died from hunger and from cold." And it seems her voice is left behind, forever searching for something, for other voices to come to it.
