HAVERHILL—In 2020, Mallory Graham bought a gift – a commissioned “map of home” – for her partner in music and life, Scott Tyler. But the map didn’t depict a single place. It included Nashville; parts of Michigan, Maine, and South Dakota; and Bradford. For the duo behind the folk-Americana band The Rough & Tumble, each of those locations had special meaning while they toured the country performing.
“All of those places, in different ways, are home to us,” Graham said.
Now, the musicians have selected a specific spot to call home. After spending about eight years on the road, they bought and moved into a cozy cabin in the woods of Haverhill. It’s a permanent landing place – at least for now.
The decision to plant roots didn’t come easy, admitted Graham, 36, who provides the sweet, smooth, soulful vocals and plays accordion for The Rough & Tumble.
“The idea of stopping somewhere needed to be something definite; it couldn’t be transient,” she said, adding that the constant touring since 2015 had its highs and lows. “We loved being transient, and we hated it.”
Last month, Graham and Tyler sealed the deal in Haverhill by filming a music video at the historic local venue Court Street Arts at Alumni Hall. They invited local residents to participate.
“We had a whole bunch of people get together and play a rock-paper-scissors tournament,” said Tyler, 37
To their surprise, 80 people showed up.
“It was overwhelming,” Tyler said. The turnout confirmed their connection to their new home, he added. “I don’t know any of these people and they’re all my family.”
Graham is from Ellwood, a rural town in western Pennsylvania, and said she often felt like an outsider.
“We were very isolated," she said. "Family was not something that I considered home.” She learned from an early age to find a sense of home in outdoor spaces.
“We had this property in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains,” she said. “When I would go out into the woods, I knew the names of the trees, what berries I could eat, what kind of animals I would be able to see out there.”
Since then, Graham said, she has learned that familiarity can breed a sense of safety. And that familiarity comes not just from trees and animals.
“My solace now is knowing that people are a part of that ecosystem,” Graham said. She cites an idea from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which explores people’s relationships with plants: “Humans are so quick to make themselves separate from nature, when in fact we need to put ourselves rightfully within it.”
Graham and Tyler, who is from the city of Dinuba in southern California, met in a songwriting program during their senior year at two different colleges — she in Ohio, he in California — and became great friends. Tyler was the best man at Graham’s wedding in 2010. The two musicians formed The Rough & Tumble in Nashville in 2011.
Two years later, Graham got divorced. She and Tyler grew closer to becoming a couple. They were living in Nashville in 2015 when an ice storm left them without heat and their landlord refused to fix it. So they hit the road, embarking on their first tour and settling into a 16-foot camper. They gave themselves 10 years of rootlessness before they would make one location stick.
They loved dipping their toes in and out of communities across the country. The couple would consider the possibility of settling down in each new town where they played.
“Then we’d go to that town a second time, and we’d cross it off the list, every single time.” Graham said.
Haverhill was different.
“This place never got crossed off. It was actually one of the only areas that we drove away from where we felt like we could have spent more time.”
In late October 2021, after a tumultuous year of touring in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Rough & Tumble played a buoyant show in Haverhill. Some friends came up afterward and invited them on an unusual tour of their other friends’ historic house in town. The back of the house, Graham and Tyler soon learned, is the site of an old Grafton County jail where the last public hanging in that state took place.
As they wrapped up their jail visit, the owners of the house, Laurel and Byron Berwick, told Graham and Tyler that they had a cabin down the street for sale. The duo quickly agreed to buy it. It simply felt like the right fit, they said.
They settled in with their two large dogs, Magpie Mae and Mud Puddle. But Graham and Tyler are still getting comfortable with the concept of their confines, which include an eclectic array of artwork and antique furniture.
“When we look around at all this stuff, I guess it’s like any home,” Tyler said. “It feels like home because you’ve decided that it’s going to be.”
The community has embraced them – and not just to appear in a music video. Byron Berwick plows his neighbors’ driveways and, since Graham and Tyler arrived, he takes no payment but makes one request of the recipients: “Be really nice to Scott and Mallory.”
On May 12, The Rough & Tumble plan to release their ninth album, “Only This Far.” It reflects their journey both physically and musically.
“It’s a record that, I think, sounds like a lot of different places,” Tyler said. “We’ve got a song that feels very zydeco, one with accordion, some straight-out rockers, and some somber acoustic songs. Then we have one that just feels distinctly like the Rocky Mountains, you know, mentioning rattlesnakes and hailstorms and stuff.”
He added, “It’s a culmination of everything we’ve done so far.”
Their songwriting process has changed since they’ve settled down, the duo said. They created one song on commission, and Graham has written while she’s traveling. “I had to go to New Jersey and I wrote a song there, and I had to go to Ohio for a week and I started writing a song there,” she said, “but I was already noticing I was feeling homesick.”
The yearning to return to where she lives is a brand-new experience, she acknowledged. “Now I have the distinction of being homesick for a place, as opposed to an idea.”
Read the original story on the Journal Opinion
