Cross Country!  Not a day goes by that I don’t think of the musical group Cross Country as I drive along Cross Country, the bucolic boulevard in Baltimore with the green and white street sign after which a folk trio was named in 1986.  The group disbanded seven years later, yet not a  month goes by that I don’t also listen to the 1990 Cross Country tape (in our old red Honda) or their 1992 CD (in our newer silver car).  Once a fan, forever a fan:  over and over I play their music, the rub of memory making songs shine like polished stones in a copper bowl.  As I drive under a canopy of green leaves, beside the road tumbles Western Run, cutting its way east to the Jones Falls Valley and south to the Chesapeake Bay . Geology is geology, I think, and when an era comes to an end, we draw a line in the sand (or rock) and chart extinction—and still there are those glorious moments when the earth rumbles or a forest flutters or a swamp spills and up crops a lost frog, fringed gentian, a vein of gold, a woodpecker with an ivory bill.  We thrill at the thought of a sighting!  This summer, from cross the country for a Cross Country reunion will surface, live, a trio of voices I thought had vanished forever.

In the late eighties, Carol Thomas, Ned Quist and John Yankee all lived in Mount Washington and worked at the Peabody Institute where Carol and John taught musicianship. Ned Quist worked in the Peabody music library.  Each July, they joined a young summer faculty that migrated to New Hampshire, south of Mount Washington at the foot of Mt. Monadnock, where in the tiny town of Dublin they taught at The Walden School, a camp for composers between the ages of eight and eighteen who came from all corners of the country and from abroad too.  At Walden, Carol (soprano, guitar, fiddle) and Ned (tenor, guitar, tin whistle) began singing in concert together; soon after, they added John who brought a bass voice, a piano keyboard, a harmonica, a trumpet and his own sweet whistle. 

Their reach spread.  They sang in Baltimore , New England , and towns and cities in between.  Their audiences grew rapidly, and fans became rabid fans a.k.a. groupies, who traveled any distance just to hear music that grew more and more glorious as the three voices settled smoothly into the terrain of music-making that harked far back in time.

To follow Cross Country was akin to more than road trip or tour.  In concert, they sang a range of songs from across the vast American landscape with an eye to educating audiences as naturalists or rangers would—with reverence for sheer beauty and an eye to story and history and setting. Their two albums are a veritable field guide to American music for audiences eager to follow a trail through times and places dear to our nation, some endangered, all worth preserving. The songs selected mine our cultural history —Stephen Foster’s Hard Times, Amazing Grace and Jacob’s Ladder,  Fiddler’s Hymn, the funny Why Do You Bob Your Hair, Girl? and Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me.  They sang regional music that could capture our land from sea to shining sea (from the west  The Goodnight Loving Trail and The Song of the Sage; from New England, Marblehead Neck; from the Midwest, Michigan Kin; from the south Garden Holler.) Well before diversity became public mandate, they introduced Bulgarian and British and Caribbean and African music with conga drums, maracas, claves, and chicken shakes.

Always, the arrangements were inventive and often the songs were original —Ned Quist’s tribute to big ships, Hail and Farewell,  Carol’s ballad Quite Some Time and her setting of a poem by David Beaudouin, Sonnet (Imitate the Wind), John’s fiddle tune, Yankee Reverse.  The concerts were as glorious as sunrise on a summer morn.  A faithful following of fans attended every appearance Cross Country made—concerts in cities, fund-raisers for Walden, summer appearances at Walden, a regular July gig at the Old Otterbein church.  And then geography did the group in.  Ned Quist had settled in Baltimore , but Carol Thomas became Carol Thomas Downing and moved with her husband to Norfolk , Virginia .  John Yankee left Garrison Forest where he directed music to go west to Telluride, Colorado .  The three did regroup for one last concert in the summer of 1996 when Flight 800 crashed into the Long Island Sound carrying with it one of the founders of the Walden School, the composer David Hogan, who was living in France.  Friends of David and of Cross Country crowded into a small stone church in Pikesville , Maryland .  A week later the Walden family said farewell to David in New Hampshire .  And then Cross Country was gone too.

Until this summer!  Nine years later there will be a reunion!  As I follow the course of Western Run through Mount Washington on my way home, I think of an essay E. B. White wrote in a Maine summertime, Once More to the Lake, when he took his son back to the camp he had known as a small boy.  “On the journey over to the lake,” he wrote, “I began to wonder what it would be like.  I wondered how time would have marred this unique, this holy spot—the coves and streams, the hills that the sun set behind, the camps and the paths behind the camps.”  Songs, too, are landmarks for moments that will never come again as they were (we are different, they are different)—yet if we close our eyes and listen, we stand on land that may be changed by the march of time, yet, if we are lucky, seems unaltered.

Last year, my husband I went to see Peter, Paul and Mary in concert in Baltimore in celebration of a new album, In These Times.  After a forty-year gap, it was clear the old times were no more.  Their voices, though magnificent, were weathered; our eyes brimmed with nostalgia more than they burned with political fire.  Of course, we clapped and clapped.  Music-making by folks we have loved just never grows old.  Still, with only a nine-year gap, I am hoping this time for the timeless—for the clear echoes of all the songs we knew  (Bob Dylan’s Tomorrow is a Long Time, for Now is the Cool of the Day, for the every-sweet Bramble and the Rose.). 

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