Six Miles South of Mandan

By Randy Christianson

Chuck Suchy takes a break from his farming, awaiting two arrivals: his daughter Andra into Bismarck Airport and the predicted arrival of the winter’s first blizzard onto his farm. He has heavily mined both family and weather for material in the past, and it seems safe to say he will continue to do so in the future.
 
Kind of like the “millionaire next door” popularized by a recent book, Suchy is the internationally respected singer/songwriter who farms just up the road; in this case six miles south of Mandan, near Fort Lincoln.

Farming and music-making are two professions which are both outside the 9 to 5 rat race, so they’re not always easy to multi-task. But Suchy and his wife Linda have settled into a routine of juggling them, dodging the occasional falling ball, and even having fun in the process. For instance they routinely bring in the breeding bull for their cows a month later than their neighbors, to give them some extra road time in the spring before calving ties them to the farm, and this year they will widen that gap still further.

In concert Suchy jokes his life is “make the CD and do the concerts to get the money to buy the gas to make the hay to feed the cow to get the calf to sell to get the money to make the CD and do the concerts…..”

In many ways Suchy is like those cult musicians who are unknown to most of us, but are huge faves of the cognoscenti. In his wake is a trail of critical appreciation. Perhaps his biggest champion nationally, Rich Warren, host of folk showcase “Midnight Special” on WMFT in Chicago, calls Suchy “one of the great undiscovered treasures of contemporary folk music” and “a refreshing divergence from the trend.” A reviewer for The Boston Globe highlights the divergence between his urban ear and Suchy’s rural sound by labeling him “a man with a rich, wide-open-spaces voice.”  Chicago folksinger Bonnie Koloc, in introducing Suchy as her warm-up act, said “he’s what those boys in Nashville would really like to be. He’s the real McCoy.”

And across the pond England’s Folk Roots magazine reinforces the view by labeling his ouvre “an acoustic opportunity to slip away to a simpler lifestyle.”

Wrong. Chuck Suchy doesn’t do lifestyle. Just life. Exhibit One is his wordplay in “Simply Fly,” inspired by watching, while working, a red-tailed hawk swoop his land:
    Simplify, Simplify,
    You know no more nor less than I.
    Simplify, simplify
    Spread your wings and simply fly.
Suchy’s 40-some recorded songs are packed with Nodak moments, evoking the sights, sounds, winds, smells, pains and pleasures of farming and those wide-open spaces. He is a link for thousands of Americans, and others, who have to drive a score or more miles from their homes just to see fireflies at night.

“I don’t know of anyone who brings so much of life in North Dakota to people who don’t live there” says renowned Twin Cities bluegrass and folk musician Peter Oustroshko, a favorite stage musician on “Prairie Home Companion” who performed the same role in the Robert Altman movie.

“If there were ever any music that I wanted to be played at my own funeral,” he claims, “it would be Bach’s ‘Largo’ from the “Double Violin Concerto in D Minor” and Chuck’s ‘Simply Fly’.”

While it may communicate ND life to the Outer 49, Oustroushko says, “Chuck’s music is pretty universal in its appeal. It puts me where I want to be.”

That first album, “Much to Share,” bearing the legend ‘Songs of a Farmer’ on the cover, was on the revered, in folk circles, label Flying Fish. Chicago folk/bluegrass impresario Bruce Kaplan signed Suchy because they shared a concern in the mid-80s for the fate of family farms facing foreclosure, as part of the Reagan-era policy of upsizing farms by downsizing their owners. The single live cut, “Three In the Afternoon” from the 1986 Chicago Folk Festival, is an elegiac recounting of the sweet moment of pause in the farmwork, but with the bitter sting in its tail of being recalled in the memory of a displaced farmer; Suchy is proud that another Midwestern folk luminary, Iowa’s Greg Brown, has covered it in his own concerts.

It was Kaplan who paired Suchy with Oustroushko in the studio, and the latter says “ever since I first met Chuck at that first recording session we just really hit it off.” Despite the 450-odd miles separating the twin cities of Bismarck-Mandan from Minneapolis-St. Paul, the two performers cross-pollinate by visiting each other, and Oustroushko says “I consider it one of those real treats for me to go to his farm and sit up on his hill.”

Oustroushko thinks it may have been his patient lobbying—for almost 20 years—plus the opportune hiring of his fellow musician and friend Sam Hudson as music wrangler for Prairie Home Companion, that got Suchy his first gig on the gold standard of National Public Radio, when PHC broadcast from Minnesota State College, Moorhead in 2004. Garrison Keillor called him back in 2005 when the show actually forded the Red to broadcast from Chester Fritz auditorium in Grand Forks. Keillor called Suchy “one of my favorite singer/songwriters. I’m reminded of that every time I listen to him.”

Suchy manages to make life on the farm sound downright exotic, even to many of his fellow NoDaks. While he devotes his entire operation to raising 80 head of black Angus, he also harvests songs, which seem to organically sprout from his soil year after year. He has to put lots of hours into his cattle operation, but much of it is repetitious and routine. And for a composer, he says, that’s a definite plus. “It’s work that affords you some free brain time. And it arouses questions that make you think.”

    Butterfly, flutter by
    Wings upon our heels.
    Running ‘round where God is found,
    Down on Molly’s field.
Molly, by the way, was one of the line of Suchy’s farm dogs, thus that much closer to the earth than her master and who, he laughs, would steadfastly guard his land by barking fiercely at any jets flying overhead.

Since farming is not a job you come home from, Suchy writes plenty about the frequent pleasures of making your own fun in the boondocks, as in his ode to domestic romance “Dancin’ in the Kitchen”:
    I got the chores done
    It’s still winter
    There aint much movin’ round the farm.
    Just two dancers in the kitchen
    Heart-to-heart and arm-in-arm.
 
“Molly’s Field” and “Dancin’ in the Kitchen” were definitely audience favorites in his two appearances on Prairie Home Companion, and PHC keeps them available for replay.

“Unraveling Heart” is his latest CD; on the back is a pile of Suchy’s old guitar strings he can’t bring himself to throw away. Inside are many more images of thin flexible metal, in keeping with the “unraveling” theme. Suchy says it’s a handy visual metaphor: “you get tangled up in barbed wire, you get tangled up in life.”

As he enters his seventh decade (that means he’s 60, folks), “this time of life I’m trying to untangle the tangledness that life accrues.” Despite his earlier lyrics, he says he has not actually achieved the simple life he poetically champions. “That’s the quest.”

Suchy learned to play and sing as a child on the farm he now farms. “I just assumed that was my destiny” he says. He did coffeehouses and open mics while attending BSC and NDSU, and later performed a mix of originals and covers around Mandan-Bismarck.

Hearing Stan Rogers, the late Canadian folksinger, sing “The Hand Behind the Plow” told him that farming could be fertile ground for his music, which he saw as his destiny from youth. “I never really made that decision, it just came to me…that was just a matter of the music not being denied.”

And he realizes that the family farms he celebrates in song may be bucking a trend. “I don’t know how close I feel to modern farming anymore. I’m saddened by the lack of community.”

“But we still need to stay in touch with the land, so I’ll just plug on,” he chuckles. And keep unraveling that tangle.

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