Mac Wiseman To Record New Album With Producer Peter Cooper

Mac Wiseman is a legend of American roots music who will later this year, at age 89, be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

“Mac is one of the heroes,” says Kris Kristofferson. Merle Haggard says, “Mac’s is a great, great voice.”

That voice was first raised in the 1930s, around a little wooden table near Crimora, Virginia, singing songs like “Little Rosewood Casket,” “Put My Little Shoes Away” and “East Bound Train.” He sang those songs because his mother, Neva Ruth Wiseman, wrote them down, in longhand, in a composition book into which she’d write the lyrics to songs she heard playing on the radio. The composition book served as a family songbook, and Mac delighted in learning and singing the songs from his mother’s hand.

Mac Wiseman still has the composition book with lyrics his mother wrote down. At 89, he still holds it and sings from it, though others would keep it under glass. In June, he took it into a Nashville studio to guide him through the most personal album of his long journey, “Songs From My Mother’s Hand.”

“Her notebook was the beginning of my life,” Wiseman says. “I’d sit at the old kitchen table with a kerosene light and read, go from one page to the next.”

This year, Wiseman revisited the songs from his mother’s hand. He read them again, and then sang them again, with accompaniment from Grand Ole Opry guitarist Jimmy Capps, world-class instrumentalist Thomm Jutz (Nanci Griffith, Bobby Bare, Marty Stuart), multiple Grammy-award-winning bass player Mark Fain, and 22-year-old bluegrass thrush Sierra Hull. He sang not as a young boy, but as an old man. He sang in a new century, of days long gone and emotions present and impacting.

Mac Wiseman has played Carnegie Hall with Johnny Cash, and Madison Square Garden with Charley Pride. He has taken country music around the world. He was there at the beginning of bluegrass music, recording with Flatt & Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Boys in 1948 and with Bill Monroe in 1949. He was a founding member of the Country Music Association, and he directed Dot Records’ country division beginning in 1957.

He has made more than 60 albums in his career. But he has never opened his heart as he does on “Songs From My Mother’s Hand.”  These are the songs that made him a singer. This is the world that made him a delight. As it was in the beginning, it is now and ever shall be.