The sun was going down as Eric Gibson jumped into his truck.
Eric and his brother Leigh, collectively known in life and on stage as the Gibson Brothers, had been working on their 15th country/bluegrass album when the pandemic hit. The rest of their tour was cancelled. Suddenly, they had no income. After they played their last show in March 2020, they waited with uncertainty like the rest of the world for life to resume.
Eric and Leigh grew up on a 100-cow dairy farm in Ellenburg Depot in northern New York, 2 miles south of the Quebec border. The farm was originally from their great-great-grandfather, who farmed 80 acres after fighting in the Civil War. By the time their father put in a pipeline in the 1970s, the property had grown to 750 acres. Still, they called many of the fields by the names of the people who owned them in the past, the local history embedded into the farm itself.
When Eric and Leigh were young, they got off the school bus to find their father sitting at the kitchen table. In front of him was a flyer from Dick’s Country Store, which sold “gas, guns, groceries and guitars.” The flyer said that guitar lessons were being offered in the shop. Eric and Leigh’s father said that one of them was going to learn to play the guitar and the other the banjo. The dairy industry had already started getting tougher, and their father knew the farm couldn’t be viable for another generation. He didn’t want his sons to have to struggle like he did.
Even if they weren’t going to be farmers, the Gibson Brothers worked the same as any other farm kids, sent from one task to another whenever they weren’t in school. They brought that work ethic with them to the music industry, which they joked was much like farming with its uncertainties and stresses.
Admittedly, I was already won over by the music of the Gibson Brothers before I talked with them for this column. With 15 albums and 30 years of songwriting behind them, it’s hard to find a description that would fit everything they’ve produced. Their songs are steeped in a traditional bluegrass sound, but I would argue with enough flex to take elements from different decades of music, even if subtly, to make an original tune. “Cool Drink of Water” released seven years ago, has been stuck in my head for a few weeks now. I might let it stay there.
Like anyone who has pursued a dream for so long, Eric and Leigh have stories to tell. Early in their career, they played at the Ryman in Nashville, after which they were approached by bluegrass legend Ricky Skaggs. Skaggs said he loved their music. Two weeks later, they were changing a wagon tire with their dad when their mother shouted from the back door that Ricky Skagg’s office was on the phone. Even their father ran with them to the house. Skaggs signed them to a record deal, and the album was made. However, in a cruel twist, the label that was interested in distributing the album then folded due to a corporate merger, and the record was never released. Regardless, with a persistence that might have come from growing up on a farm, the Gibson Brothers still created music for the next three decades.
Eric and Leigh laughed about the highs and lows they experienced in making bluegrass. They came across grounded, in a way that showed they were very much still the farm kids they were in their teens. It was obvious that growing up on the farm meant a lot to them.
Eric admitted, “I still wake up in the middle of the night thinking I’m back on the farm. It won’t leave me alone.”
The Gibson Brothers have done something that few other major artists have: They wrote songs about farming. “Farm of Yesterday” looks back on a childhood on a family farm, what that meant to the singer and how that farm was different than what is found now. “In the Ground” also laments how small farms that sustained families are no longer viable and the consequence of that. Both are great tunes. However, it was another song about farming called “I Go Driving” that made me tear up.
Eric still lives near the farm in Ellenburg Depot where he and Leigh grew up. When he jumped into his truck during the pandemic without any particular place to go, he started listening to old country songs. It took his mind back, and in the growing shadows, he could start to see the old farms in the dusk that weren’t there anymore. When he got back home, he told his wife that he couldn’t talk because he had to go upstairs and write a song. What came out was “I Go Driving,” a track that might capture the current moment in agriculture, and that would be appreciated by every farmer who wished the industry was easier:
See, I'm travelin' back in time to a land of make believe
Where the farms are going strong and my father's still with me
Where the silos in the shadows and the barns are full of feed
Where there's hope in farmers' eyes and folks who know their needs
When I go driving
Click here for more music from the Gibson Brothers.
