![]() ![]() The man had been suffering from terminal cancer and said her songs brought him to tears. Goodman recalled that when she was hosting a show from Kentucky in the early 80s, a listener from Australia wrote in to her requesting to hear more of the McCaslin music she had been playing. “She was incredibly generous with her time and her music,” said Rachel Goodman, a longtime Santa Cruz radio host and close friend of McCaslin’s. The event was of enormous significance to her, Arrufat said.īut through her achingly beautiful songs, McCaslin manifested a musical family that spanned the globe and left a legacy of empathy and service. After years of searching, she eventually managed to meet her birth mother, Oowanah Chasing Bear Mauser of the Kiowa-Apache tribe, in 2013. “Her album ‘Broken Promises’ is one of my favorites … the songs on that are quite descriptive in what was going on in our life.”Īrrufat noted that one song on the album, “Someone Who Looks Like Me,” explored McCaslin’s yearning to understand her heritage and biological family. “Shortly after we got together, she was very prolific in her writing,” Arrufat told the Sentinel. In 1998 she was named a Gail Rich Award winner for her contributions to the county’s abundant artistic environment. She even had a column in the Sentinel for a time, Arrufat said. She also kept busy in the community by teaching guitar and banjo, hosting a radio show on KZSC and working at Sylvan Music on Santa Cruz’s westside for many years. McCaslin performed in Santa Cruz with Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, David Crosby and Graham Nash during the “no nukes” rally that marked the 50th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It served as an early example of a lifelong commitment by McCaslin, who performed at fundraisers and community events throughout her career, especially during her time in Santa Cruz. “I remember going, ‘this is going to change my life,’ never knowing she was going to become a dear friend.” Hometown heroĪfter her relationship with Ringer ended, McCaslin moved to Santa Cruz in 1989, where she reconnected with an old friend, Greg Arrufat, whom she would later marry.Īrrufat said he first met McCaslin in the 1977 when she performed at a fundraising drive he had organized to help establish the Santa Cruz Mountains Community Theater. ![]() “It was just the whole package,” Mitchell said, remembering the first time she saw McCaslin and Ringer play live at a UC Santa Cruz concert in the 70s. ![]() She was also known for her pitch-perfect duets with Jim Ringer, who she was married to until the late 1980s. He said this opened up her songwriting to seemingly endless possibilities.Īltogether, McCaslin released 12 albums where she explored the deeply personal and abundantly universal in subjects such as family and adoption, western self-mythologizing and the ineffable beauty of the California landscape. Nielsen added that McCaslin was also uniquely talented at “open tuning,” a method of tuning the guitar such that strumming without finger fretting generates a major or minor chord. “She played it absolutely identically and I’ve never met anybody who could do that.” They push and pull at each other a little bit, because nobody does it perfectly,” Nielsen said. Nielsen said that it was common for McCaslin to record two separate guitar tracks in a given song that would ultimately be played alongside one another in the final version. “One of the things that amazed me the most was her guitar playing,” said Dave Nielsen, who owns a studio on the westside of Santa Cruz and helped McCaslin record her final album “Better Late Than Never.” The words now take on a heightened resonance for McCaslin’s devoted family, friends and fans who have reveled in her lyricism for more than 50 years.įriends and collaborators say McCaslin was the whole package – poetic lyrics, a gentle but piercingly beautiful voice and stunning musicianship. The song was written in 1977, when McCaslin was 31 years old and had just emerged as a bonafide country-western music talent. “But for the ones whose turn is ended / though they started so much the same / in the hearts of those befriended / burns a candle with a silver flame,” sang Mitchell, who broke into an impromptu cover of the tune called “Old Friends,” shortly after invoking its lyrics. Naturally, it was lyrics from one of McCaslin’s songs that surfaced for Ginny Mitchell, a dear friend and collaborator of more than 30 years, as she shared precious memories of McCaslin with Sentinel earlier this week. McCaslin battled Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, a rare neurological disease similar to Parkinson’s disease which she was diagnosed with in 2017. SANTA CRUZ – Folk music icon and longtime Santa Cruz County resident Mary McCaslin died Oct. ![]()
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