Музыкант Коллин Кутлер выступит в исторической церкви Св. Давида, символизирующей связь между станциями Подземной железной дороги

In 1837, abolitionist Quakers founded Guilford College as a co-educational boarding school in Greensboro, North Carolina. The campus features a lone tulip poplar, a 300-plus-year-old historical symbol. Known as the “Witness Tree,” it stood silent watch over the Underground Railroad. The earliest documented use of this safe passageway dates back to 1819 in the Guilford Woods, when a free Black man named John Dimery escaped to Indiana. The Guilford Underground Railroad station is divinely linked to St. David African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Zion Church, 660 miles away in the Eastville neighborhood of Sag Harbor. Although there is no official written record, oral tradition has handed down stories of the church serving as a maritime Underground Railroad stop. Whaling ships and other seaworthy vessels smuggled formerly enslaved people up the coast, often en route to liberation in Canada. On Thursday, September 24, St. David’s will have a full-circle moment when Greensboro’s own Colin Cutler, 37, brings his classic assortment of Southern roots music to rattle the historic wooden bones of the 186-year-old structure. The kickoff event for the 16th annual Sag Harbor American Music Festival will also bless the church’s return to its foundation as an A.M.E. Zion house of worship, following years of housing a Baptist congregation. The celebration will include a ribbon-cutting and a public plea for folks to follow the calling Cutler bore witness to from birth. “We’re doing a big push at the festival to let everyone know we want to form a community choir,” says Dr. Georgette Grier-Key, executive director and curator of the Eastville Community Historical Society. “We want people of all ages, generations, and walks of life singing in our church.” Who better to start the party than a two-piece outfit featuring Cutler playing traditional instruments like guitar, banjo, and harmonica, accompanied by Evan Campfield on stand-up bass? From the Guilford Woods to Havens Beach, a rollicking mix of storytelling and folk-singing will call out to the past. “We highlight American music because we want our guests to get a sense of the special qualities of what’s been produced in our country and gone around the world,” says Kelly Connaughton Dodds, president and co-artistic director of the free — other than Friday night’s ticketed headliner — four-day jamboree. “Colin has such a soulful blend of jazz, folk, and blues — true Americana music. When he applied, we wanted him right away. Colin playing St. David’s is a perfect fit.” Funny thing is, Cutler was born in England. He was an Air Force brat who mostly grew up moving about the United States — Virginia, Nebraska, Louisiana, etc. — homeschooled, with an extremely conservative Pentecostal community at his back. Christian radio in the household, godly tunes in the church pews, and the first plucks of a guitar at 16 are the origins of Cutler’s unconventional career. It is also why he was thwarted in desiring an opposite musical direction at his small Virginia college with its professed “unwavering Biblical worldview.” “Nobody wanted to join my power metal band. But I did meet a guy in our student-led worship group who’d been in a Raleigh bluegrass group, so we started playing acoustic together,” says Cutler. “It led me to the local music scene where I saw a terrific clawhammer banjo player, a woman named Kelley Wills. I instantly gravitated to it, learning mainly by ear. The old-time country and folk styles give me space to tell the stories I want to tell, which prior, I’d written as poetry, never in song.” Cutler’s life as a troubadour, however, would have to wait. Duty called. He followed family suit with his own military career, serving as an officer in the Virginia Army National Guard for seven years. He spent time in Germany and Qatar, later joining a Romanian NATO mission as a public affairs officer — a gig he particularly enjoyed because it put him in touch with people outside the chain of command. In 2018, with an expanded worldview and a yearning to get back to roots music, Cutler left the military behind. “At 27, Uncle Sam and I decided we’d had enough of each other. In the military, people are ignored, or at least made to feel secondary, to the mission,” says Cutler. “I basically said to myself, ‘I like humans. I’m going to go hang out with some of them and write humanist songs.’” Starting in 2016 with “Nelson County Wayside,” released right before deployment — “perfect timing,” he chuckles — Cutler’s written a lot of 'em. He has four full-length albums featuring both his four-piece electric band, Hot Pepper Jam, and solo material, including “Now and In England” with “Barstool Confession,” a song penned in a Humvee in Germany. When the pandemic hit, Cutler returned to Greensboro, where he’d gone to graduate school before deploying overseas. Cutler — whose day job is teaching composition and developmental English classes at Guilford Technical Community College — also has Catholicism on his mother’s side of the family. Back home, he summoned the Catholic ghosts of his favorite Southern Gothic author. Cutler’s affinity for the sweaty in-the-pale-moonshine-light tales of Flannery O’Connor took on an outsized role in “Tarwater.” It’s a 2023 concept album featuring songs seen through the eyes of the sinner-and-saint characters in her works. “In our church, we weren’t handling snakes, but kids were ‘Slain in the Holy Spirit,’ speaking in tongues, all that good stuff,” says Cutler. “Being Catholic, O’Connor was a gateway, a safe halfway house to start getting out from under the religion I was raised in. One of the great things about music is it’s enabled me to become my own person, in a healthy way.” It’s fitting that cuts off “Tarwater” will be prominently featured at the Sag Harbor Music Festival gig. Take “Bad Man’s Easy,” inspired by O’Connor’s most famous short story: “Might be the Devil, might be God, might be both. Might be grace, might be the law, I don’t know. But a good man is hard to find…” Except come late September, two good men will be center stage, connecting endpoints of the Underground Railroad. All the long spiritual journey needed was for Cutler to lay down his rifle and pick up an acoustic Woody Guthrie fascist-killing machine. As St. David A.M.E. begins anew, Cutler will stand in for the Witness Tree — but not in silence. You gotta ring out these songs of freedom.