Thomm Jutz At Home in Appalachia

Thomm Jutz grew up in Germany’s Black Forest, but he’s very much at home with the music of Appalachia. That’s one reason this successful composer, performer, and session musician became an American citizen and relocated to the United States in his thirties.

Jutz’s fascination with the region and one of its native sons—guitarist and songwriter Norman Blake—has led him to pursue a graduate degree in Appalachian studies and write “An Acute Sense of Place: The Songs of Norman Blake” for his thesis.

“I was not born into a place that spoke to me,” Jutz explains in the paper. “The place where I was born, Germany, had lost its lore and song through the perversions of the Third Reich. Country and bluegrass music have provided me with such a place since I first heard it as an eleven-year-old boy. Later, in my early thirties, Nashville gave me a place to play, write, learn, and grow.”

Jutz studied classical guitar in Germany and had a busy career as a musician there before he and his wife relocated to the U.S.

“When I moved to Nashville, I thought I was going to be a guitar player on lower Broadway for 10 years,” he says. “I've never played a gig on lower Broadway in the 20 years I’ve been here, but a lot of other things happened that I couldn't have planned.”

Jutz has dozens of songs recorded by John Prine, The Steeldrivers, Balsam Range, and many others. He’s toured with notable musicians, including Nanci Griffith and Mary Gauthier. He’s collaborated on albums exploring The Civil War and Mac Wiseman’s amazing life in bluegrass, and he teaches songwriting at Belmont University in Nashville. He’s had hundreds of his songs placed in TV shows and motion pictures.

Jutz says he’s first and foremost a songwriter. And while he’s fascinated with history, he’s not much interested in nostalgia, one of bluegrass’s preoccupations.

“I don't really think that we need more songs and bluegrass music about grandfather's hands or grandma's soup recipes or something,” says Jutz. “I think we've heard those, and there was a time when people could sing these songs with conviction. We can still sing those songs, but I'm not sure that we still need to write them.

“I don't consider myself a bluegrass songwriter. I got a lot of cuts in bluegrass music, but to me, there's no difference between writing Americana music or country music. At the end of the day, you have to write about what you care about. To some degree, you can also write about things you don't care about, which is fine and part of the craft, but it might not be as rewarding.”

The subjects of the songs on Wall Dogs, a 2024 album recorded with frequent collaborator Tim Stafford, include Depression-era muralists; the women who made Gibson guitars during WWII labor shortages; a trans-Canadian railway; and notorious sundown towns in the South. Song ideas frequently come from his avid reading of history.

Jutz had long wanted to study his adopted region. When the pandemic took away his road work, he saw it as a chance to begin a graduate degree in Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University. For his thesis, Jutz wrote about the legendary guitarist and singer/songwriter Norman Blake, who set many of his songs around Rising Fawn, Ga., the Appalachian community where he’s spent most of his life. Jutz explores three such songs in the paper, including “Green Light on the Southern,” in which Blake shares many details of the steam locomotives that fascinated him growing up.

“Somebody says if one wanted to understand the basic mechanics of a steam locomotive, that song wouldn't be a bad place to start,” Jutz notes. “Why do we care? A great songwriter like Blake can make us care about it. You see the magic of these elements working together and this huge massive thing in motion, and you know it's just gorgeous, and there's such poetry to the language. And then it's also an incredible melody, and to me, the version with Tony Rice and Norman is one of the greatest recordings ever made.”

In the coming months, Jutz plans to tour Ireland with musical collaborator Eric Brace, play shows with Stafford to promote Wall Dogs, have many co-writing appointments, and work on a solo recording project. He also wants to turn his thesis about Blake into a book on the artist who has so affected him.

“When I discovered Norman Blake’s music, something shifted in me as a songwriter,” writes Jutz in the paper. “Notions to please the mainstream fell by the wayside. Along with that, I discovered a purity in the music that was and is reflected in the Appalachian landscape. Today I spend a considerable amount of time in Johnson City, Tenn. I have found a place to write about, and I have Blake to thank for leading me there through his songs.”