SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Family heirlooms can take all shapes: a pocket watch, a painting. For Robin MacArthur and her husband, Tyler Gibbons, who form the indie-folk duo Red Heart the Ticker, the family inheritance consists of an old farmhouse in the woods - and lots and lots of songs. Angela Evancie has this story from Vermont.
ANGELA EVANCIE, BYLINE: If it weren't for Robin MacArthur's grandmother, Margaret, many of the songs on Red Heart the Ticker's new album would have been lost or forgotten.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOCKS AND BOLTS")
EVANCIE: This is a man named Lester Fairbanks, singing for Margaret MacArthur in 1961. She drove her old Jeep around the back roads of Vermont, collecting folk songs. She visited nursing homes and hospitals, and made her recordings on a Wollensak reel-to-reel. She was also a musician herself.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOCKS AND BOLTS")
EVANCIE: Margaret MacArthur released nine albums. Her first came out on Folkways in 1962, recorded at her kitchen table with that same Wollensak. Red Heart the Ticker recorded its new album just a few feet away, in her study.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOCKS AND BOLTS")
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
ROBIN MACARTHUR: So, my grandparents bought this house in the late '40s, and it was completely abandoned. The floors were all eaten by porcupines, and the doors and windows were all broken - and they moved in here anyway, with their four children.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
EVANCIE: How old is the house?
ROBIN MACARTHUR: Uh - 1803.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOOR OPENING)
EVANCIE: Robin MacArthur grew up just down the road. Today, her grandmother's house is more or less the way she left it: folk art on the walls; creaky, wooden chairs; and, of course, her instruments.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENT)
EVANCIE: Robin and her husband, Tyler Gibbons, use some of them on the new album.
TYLER GIBBONS: We ended up using - quite a lot - her old Martin guitar; also, a number of her dulcimers. This is one of Margaret's bass dulcimers.
(SOUNDBITE OF DULCIMER)
GIBBONS: It's a very cool sound. What else? There are a few - kind of harps and zithers that we experimented with - oh, of course, Margaret's fretless banjo.
(SOUNDBITE OF BANJO)
EVANCIE: This is also where Margaret died. At the end, she couldn't remember anything but her songs.
ROBIN MACARTHUR: I was in the room with her when she died, as were many of her family members. And we were all holding her hands or her arms or part of her, you know, her shoulders.
EVANCIE: After her grandmother's death, Robin MacArthur brought Margaret's recordings into this room and played them.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ROBIN MACARTHUR: And suddenly, here I was, sitting in this room, and her singing voice was loud and reverberant in the room around me. And it was this incredible, spiritual moment where, you know, I realized she wasn't really gone. Here voice was so present.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BRAES OF YARROW")
ANDY KLOVOS: This is really great because we love seeing our collections used.
EVANCIE: Andy Klovos is the archivist at the Vermont Folklife Center, which houses many of Margaret's recordings.
KLOVOS: And we love seeing them used in ways that inject life into them, as opposed to having them just sit on a shelf. Tyler and Robin take this traditional material and with a deep respect for it, infuse it with the atmosphere of the period in time they're living in.
EVANCIE: But Tyler Gibbons says it's delicate work making old songs new again.
GIBBONS: You know, the field recordings are largely just a cappella. And then Margaret's recordings are often just her voice and her dulcimer, or her guitar - so very sparse. And we tried to bring in textures and sounds that could open up the song emotionally, a little bit. And again, that's a tricky line to walk.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SINGLE AGAIN")
EVANCIE: Robin MacArthur says recording the album became a different kind of session than they were used to.
ROBIN MACARTHUR: Instead of finding dialogue with other contemporary artists, it's finding dialogue with the past, which is an incredible way of kind of erasing time, at least momentarily; to bring the ghosts into the room with us, and bring the dead into the room with us - both my grandmother, but the people who sang these songs before her and the people who lived in this old house before her, and the people who built the stone walls around us.
EVANCIE: Call it singing with ghosts, or bringing back the dead. However you think about it, it's a rare thing to find company with those who have gone before. For NPR News, I'm Angela Evancie in Marlboro, Vermont.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'VE COURTED THEE BEFORE")
SIMON: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon.