Gypsies in the wood

Between songs at a concert last Friday, Old Calf frontman Ned Oldham said that he’s been working nursery rhymes into lyrics since the mid-’90s. It started when he was studying for an MFA in fiction at UVA in the 1990s, and the poet Charles Wright used Mother Goose to illustrate lessons in rhyme and meter.

As is the case with much of what we pass off to children as entertainment, taking art meant for kids and making it for adults exposes some bizarre nuts and bolts in the human psyche. On “Do Not Play With Gypsies,” a renovated British nursery rhyme, Oldham sang to a crowd crammed comfortably into a Gordonsville barn, “My mother said I never should play / with the gypsies in the wood / if I did / she would say / naughty girl to disobey.”

Old Calf and the evening’s other act, the fingerstyle guitarist and folk songwriter Doug Paisley, both have new albums out on the Brooklyn-based label No Quarter Records. On tour together for a brief stint, they passed through on a string of dates that would head to The Mockingbird in Staunton on the following evening.

If there was a lesson to be learned at the concert, it’s that context is everything. A wise man I know (O.K., it’s my dad) always complains that wine tastes good at the winery, but bring it home and it’s no good anymore. Writing this two days later from a balmy apartment, it’s tough to conjure the perfection of the series that the old-time fiddler Alex Caton hosts in the barn beside her house in Gordonsville: a big, fat dog roaming past Paisley as he played; a natural swimming pool fed by a lily pad-covered lake; a throaty chorus of frogs that would eventually came to overwhelm the music. Caton says she hosts it infrequently, just a handful of shows per year, to keep the series fresh for its regulars, and also so she doesn’t compete with real venues.

Old Calf’s regular members are a who’s who of local professionals, including the multi-instrumentalist Matty Metcalfe, drummer Brian Caputo and bassist Michael Clem. The rote showmanship of which these guys are surely capable would probably get boring fast, but Oldham leads the band with an looseness that gives the same feeling much great music does: a riveting sense that all the layers might tear apart at the seams. The group continues to surprise with each concert, first, because they’re careful not to outstrip local demand for Old Calf concerts, and second, because simple changes in the lineup make each show surprising in a new way. The night’s show welcomed Caton on fiddle, plus the supremely versatile electric guitarist Aram Stith, a member of Oldham’s former band The Anomoanon, who also appears on many recordings by Ned’s brother, Will Oldham.

The full band also returned (after a lengthy intermission between sets) to back Paisley on a couple of tunes. On his guitar Paisley is a soft and precise plucker—and a lefty to boot—rooted in a lineage of unassumingly dark songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark. He apologized for his appearance through an impressive mustache, by way of a good story: He had recently been invited to play on Canadian television, and had in mind to wear a particular pair of jeans with a small stain near the knee. Paisley said he sanded the stain and threw the jeans in the wash. When he took them out, the knee was worn through—about an inch away from the stain, still very much there.

The cover of his new album Constant Companion, released in January, is an eerie double exposure photograph of normal Doug Paisley sitting next to Doug Paisley in a mask, pointing to the two Doug Paisleys: the one you hear on first listen, timeless and well-worn but not without blemish. And then the one you hear when you take the record home, whose morbid words suggest that he’s more worn-through than you realized in concert.

But at the concert, Paisley was gazing over the crowd as if at some distant star. It wasn’t time to process his poetry. It was time to listen and enjoy.