By WILBUR WOOD

For The Outpost

 Montana concerns are more than a passing fancy for Martha Scanlan.

Martha Scanlan plays the guitar, writes songs and sings them, and people are praising the “haunting” quality of her voice, her poetic imagery and unique perspective.

Scanlan will appear this Saturday evening, Aug. 1, at the 18th annual Birney Barbecue in the Tongue River country of southeastern Montana.

She’s toured a lot, and recently has been featured on National Public Radio’s “Mountain Stage” and at the Winnipeg Folk Festival.

“Expect a nice balance of mellow and lively folk, honky-tonk, bluegrass and nitty-gritty country music,” wrote the Winnipeg Festival organizers.

But Scanlan’s not just parachuting into Montana, lending her voice to the cause of keeping the Tongue River Railroad from slicing through irrigated cropland and working ranches to get to state-owned coal tracts at Otter Creek, then flying off to her next gig. She actually lives here, on Hanging Woman Creek, at the Bones Brothers Ranch, which is owned and operated by the family of her friend Jean Alderson.

She’ll be joined by a neighbor from Rosebud Creek, the rancher and poet Wallace McRae, who frequently donates his talents to Northern Plains Resource Council fund-raisers like this one.

Scanlan says she’s happy “chasing cows and fixing fence” - along with preparing for a late August tour in the British Isles. This will be the third Birney Barbecue to which she has donated her musical talents.

“I want to do anything I can,” she says, “to save this place.”

Solo Performing

“Last time, I played here with a band,” Scanlan said in a telephone interview on July 26. “This year it’s solo.”

Scanlan’s only been writing music for eight or nine years, but she earned a name for herself with her lyrics and singing with the Reeltime Travelers, a string band that plays “old time music” with verve and innovation. (The band, including Scanlan, was featured on the soundtrack of the movie “Cold Mountain.”) But she’s transformed herself into a solo artist with her 2008 Sugar Hill release, “The West Was Burning.”

The title song begins, “Was the year the West was burning, I/  was on a mountain sleeping, I / woke up a-dreaming / about you.”

It continues: “I was walking down a road of dust and bones and ash and following a burning set of tracks that led to you. / I still feel the fire in your stare / I still think I coulda burned up there.”

That’s an example of how Scanlan mingles personal images with images from the larger world. “Up on the Divide” - another song from that album - provides another a good example.

An old cowboy, a widower, is cinching up the saddle on his horse so he can “drive the cattle where the snow used to be.” He is remembering his wife –  “her grave on the hillside is long overgrown” - and an old friend who “sold out and lost everything” and thinking of his grandfather who “gave up this gun that my daddy gave me.” All of them gone, and the man hopes “there’s somewhere we can all rope and ride.”

Then the last stanza makes the jump to what is passing in the world beyond friends and family:

The coal company man wants to eat up your coal

He’ll swallow your cattle, then he’ll swallow your soul

He’ll dig you a grave about 10 acres wide

And the springtime’s a -coming up on the divide

Springtime’s a -coming up on the divide

Montana roots

Scanlan was born and grew up in Minnesota, and recently spent 10 years in eastern Tennessee immersing herself in traditional Appalachian folk and country music, but she has deep roots in Montana as well. Her great-grandfather worked on railroads in this state, and her childhood summers were spent in a family cabin in the Bitterroot Valley.

In the late 1980s to the mid-1990s she lived in Missoula, took classes at the University of Montana in art, anthropology and environmental studies, and also worked in outdoor educational programs in Idaho.

She likes Missoula and the country west of the Rockies, but did not appreciate the polarization she felt at the time. It was “damn hippies” on one side, she says, versus “welfare ranchers” (a reference to leasing public lands to graze livestock) on the other side.

“I’m not prone to jumping into causes,” she says, but while in Tennessee there were environmental battles, mainly around coal mining, that she could not ignore. The people fighting them were not primarily environmentalists but farmers and other people on the land. In that way, she said, it’s like Eastern Montana.

This is a battleground, she says. The Tongue River Railroad just won’t go away, and coal bed methane (which drains water from coal seams to release gas) is a huge threat. Coal is the aquifer in most of this county, and water pumped out of the aquifer means that springs and wells, and eventually the land itself, dry up.

Fighting Fairly    

“But I love being around the old cowboys,” she said. “I love their sense of honor, their courtesy. They fight fairly. The other side does not, yet the ranchers still do not change the way they operate.”

She mentions Tongue River rancher and irrigator Mark Fix – a former chairman of Northern Plains and active in the group’s coal bed methane task force - as an example. “He’s feeding his cows at 3 a.m. so he can get to Helena later that day for a hearing.”

She appreciates the fact the Northern Plains collapses the polarity she observed in Missoula. Many agriculture groups call Northern Plains an environmental organization, she has noticed, while many environmentalists often see Northern Plains as an ag group. But this is the group’s strength; this is the kind of coalition that could save this country.

What does she see in the future?

Anyone in the music business spends a lot of time not playing music, she lamented, instead dealing with agents or wrangling jobs for the future. So, for her personal future: “Keep ranching and playing music.”

On a larger scale, she said, “I’d love to see people support local agriculture, and for the country to be more self-sustaining.”

And she quotes her friend Jean’s father, Irv Alderson, who said one day, “The land will forgive us, but the water will not. When it’s gone, it’s gone.”

For more information on Martha Scanlan, go to her website at www.marthascanlan.com. The 18th annual Birney Barbecue is Saturday, Aug. 1, at the R Bar Ranch, almost 2 1/2 miles south of Birney on the Hanging Woman Creek Road. (Signs will be posted.) The silent auction begins at 5 p.m. At 5:30 p.m. the meal begins, all you can eat, with beer or soft drinks. At 6:30 p.m. is a presentation by the Northern Plains Resource Council, featuring Wally McRae. At 7:30 p.m. the silent auction ends, followed by entertainment featuring Martha Scanlan. Tickets are $10 per person, $15 per couple, $20 per family. Buying a $35 membership in Northern Plains at the gate gets you in free. Bring lawn chairs. Dogs need to be leashed. Camping is available. Contact Clementine at 248-1154, or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for information.