Category Archives: Music

alice’s restaurant

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They play it on NPR stations around the country, at noon, though sometimes WNCW waits until 12:07 because of announcements and such. I wrote them a strongly worded letter about this last year, on the subjects of sacrilege and responsibility to the public.

It was August of 1996. Stuffed into the back of my old dark blue Pontiac T1000 hatchback were my possessions in life. A laundry basket full of my clothes, a suitcase containing my cassette tapes and toiletries and a lot of socks. A Caboodle organizer, pillows, a blanket, a radio, books, things I can’t recall, but it all had to be stuffed in to the gills. Everything I owned, the shirt on my back, a cassette player and some batteries, and twelve hours of driving ahead.

I left home for real. I had dropped out of college at Carolina because I ran out of scholarship money and didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, if I ever grew up. It made sense. A friend had offered me a place to stay in a town just north of Tampa, until I could get on my feet.

I set sail. I had glanced at a map before I left. I found my way around the Atlanta beltway and stopped in Valdosta to eat at a Shoney’s, marveling because I had only heard of Valdosta as a far-away place. I continued, noting the changing vegetation, Spanish moss, palm trees, hot wind when the window was rolled down. I was nineteen years old, so I drove five miles per hour over the speed limit, terrified of being pulled over. Cars whizzed past me on the left. My journey took a long time.

I stayed with Bill and Dawn for six months before finding my own apartment. It was in their home that I was exposed to folk music beyond Nanci Griffith. Dar Williams became a taproot for me. Later, Kate Campbell’s music changed me forever. But there is an afternoon I recall, when Bill took out a vinyl album of Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant and said, “You need to listen to this. It’s long. Pay attention,” and set the needle to the very outside, to the first track.

I did listen. I thought it was odd, but I laughed. I laughed a lot. Then I told him I didn’t like it, but within a year, I had gone out and bought a cassette of it.

And when the Pontiac became a Nissan Sentra, and another newer Sentra, when Florida returned to North Carolina, when NPR boosted its signal and I could tune in on the car radio, when I had a cassette player in my car, I learned every word of “Alice’s Restaurant” until I could sing it with perfect timing.

Every year at Thanksgiving, NPR still plays it at noon, and I rush over and turn up the volume on the sound system. “They’re playing it!” I yell toward the kitchen. Then I return to stirring the cranberries as they simmer, and I sing every word.

But I think it sounded better on vinyl.

snow music

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For all the talk about fertile gardens and verdent views, my heart belongs in winter.

Since moving to Vermont two years ago, I have been through winter twice. True winter. Not the winter of the South, when snow would flirt with a few passing days and coats were always too warm; nor of the winters of my childhood, when there was enough snow to play and taste and to say, “It snowed.”

Winter in Vermont is a handfastness with folds of whites and grays, a gasp of blue-pink piercing cold that welcomes and bites, blinds with torrents of falling flakes and chills the air so clear that distant white mountains seem close enough to reach out a mittened hand and touch.

In the first winter here, my wide-eyed joy at the first snows was replaced by a deep love for the deeper grip of January, temperatures so cold they made the air smell like rainfall, the way living required a simple deliberateness, the early falling of darkness, dark coming, dark going, driving in falling flakes under tree branches heavy with the snow.

And while driving, I came to love two very different pieces of music that I heard while sheltered inside on nights so wintry that trees cracked open. Each made me jump up and run over to the radio to find out more.

Natalie Merchant’s cover of “Poor Wayfaring Stranger” has open chords that mimic the joining of barrenness and beauty of the snowy field I see on the way home from work, spread out before me and dotted with a single red barn.

Ola Gjeilo’s “Dark Night” plays on my morning drives in the heart of winter. It seems to light up the snow in swirls of cobalt and turquoise and glints of red, more luminiscent than my car’s headlights. It renders the icy inclemency thrilling.

I played the Gjeilo on the way home from work today, to remember, as summer has begun to relent. I yearn for iron-cold dark night again, and for snow.

how gifts are given

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“May I sit here? I’ve been out. I’ve had a cold, but I think I’m well enough now to sing.”

“Of course,” I say, and scoot my chair to the left a few inches to let her into the aisle. I move my glass of water and my coat.

Her diminutive eighty-year-old frame doesn’t take up the full width of the chair. She sets her bag on the floor and opens her music folder. “What did he go over last night? What did I miss?” she leans over and whispers, so as to keep from disturbing Jamie, who is teaching the basses how to sustain a modified vowel on a note too high for their range.

“Let’s see … ‘Lift Up Your Heads’, ‘And With His Stripes’, and yeah, we went back to the Christmas stuff and did ‘And He Shall Purify’ and ‘For Unto Us’. He tortured us on the melismas.” She scribbles furiously with her pencil on a single sheet of notebook paper in the back of a folder that is shabby from many years of use.

She leans over once more. “I’m Nancy,” she says.

I smile. “Amy. Thank you for sitting with me, Nancy, but you’re going to be sorry because I sound like a frog tonight!” She keeps a straight face. “Well, then, we’ll just be a couple of frogs. This thing still has my throat.”

Why does this remind of me so much of my Grandma? She would have said something like that. She was always a little odd. I think about the name Nancy and decide that she reminds me more of a Ruby.

During our first break, we talk in the fervent, rambling way that people do when they’ve just met but feel like fast friends. We talk about raising kids and fact-checking the media and her thirty-minute drive down for these practices, which she makes without complaint every week because she feels safe in her Buick. She won’t let her husband drive her.

We talk about church choirs and music and why I sing Messiah every year when I’m not a believer. “You are … unusual!” she says after a thoughtful pause. We talk about the piano I’m planning to sell. She says it’s a shame to sell a piano, unless it’s going to someone who’s going to use it. “I played when I was young and I thought I could get it back,” I explain. “I play every Sunday for our little church up there, but if I sit at the piano in my living room, I can just play for hours. Such a joy, and you never lose it,” she says, and she gives me a keen, piercing look, convicting me for giving up, then lets her eyes fall because something has occurred to her.

“I used to play the violin, too. I played for years, honey, and sometimes I even did a solo in church on it. And you won’t believe it, but ten years ago, we had a windy day, as windy as I’ve ever seen it be, and don’t you know, I was carrying the violin back into the house — “

I know what is coming. The violin neck is about to get crunched or the whole case is going to be blown out of her hand and the instrument smashed to pieces.

” — and the wind caught and the door slammed right on my hand and broke my finger!” She holds out her right hand, so frail with its paper skin and liver spots, and shows me the ring finger, knuckle swollen with arthritis, bent and misaligned. “My husband took me to the emergency room, but you know, they let me sit out there for so long that it didn’t get set right, and now look at it.” She looks at the finger and rubs it. “I haven’t played the violin since. It hurts too much to hold the bow. I have to have that finger to hold it, you see. Ten years,” she muses.

The break is over. We sing through ‘Glory to God’ and ‘His Yoke Is Easy’. Jamie makes jokes and Nancy glances over each time with a smirk. “He is just something else, isn’t he? So funny,” she whispers. Something in that half-smile is my Grandma. Nancy stands at four-eleven, the same height, the same tiny form. Her wit is sharp.

I am suddenly overcome with love for this woman, a gem like Grandma was, and I know what to do, because they make damned near everything these days. Things an eighty-year- old woman would not necessarily know about, I realize.

At the next break, I sneak off to an empty room in the church fellowship hall, take out my phone and bring up Amazon. I search for “violin bow arthritis”. There it is, a grip mod piece for the bow frog that is made for players with arthritis, complete with five stars and multiple, grateful testimonials about finally getting to play the violin again after years of prohibitive pain.

I order it. It won’t be here in time for me to give it to her in person, even with Prime, but I have her name and her town and addresses are easy to find in online voter records. I see she is registered as a Democrat in a sea of Republicans. I think about how she just told me she loves NPR.

It’s terribly difficult to keep from grinning for the rest of the rehearsal. I manage to solemnly charge her with being careful on the way home and resting up and taking care of that cold. In this moment, I know that my heart has adopted a grandmother.

I’ll stand beside her during the performance, transported back to twelve years old, standing beside Grandma in the church choir.

You never lose it. I want to give Nancy back this music, because I think she’s really a Ruby. I can close my eyes and envision a violin and bow in her hands again. It gives me the much-touted Christmas warmth I seldom experience. This is how gifts are given.

kate

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On my lunch break walk, I wrote this in my head. I was musing over the parting words after the concert Saturday night, when Kate looked me in the eye and said, “Seriously, for all the years, thanks. Thanks for being there.”

“Fame … you wake up one day and suddenly, everybody in the world wants to meet you. But you soon find out they don’t want to meet you; they want you to meet them.”
– Fannie Flagg, Welcome to the World, Baby Girl

1999
“Hey Amy … drive carefully. Be careful.”

I heard Kate Campbell perform the songs from Rosaryville before I had my hands on the album. She sang on a stage in the corner of the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, while handmade tamales were being served at the bar in the back. I ignored the tamales because I was a fan. I was a fan in a room full of fans, all of us sitting uncomfortably in our gray-green folding chairs, transfixed by the superhuman woman wielding a Gibson guitar. She was singing “In My Mother’s House”, a song that felt to us like a glimpse into her life. We got to imagine her going to homecoming in high school. We got to see her parents’ dining room, a turkey on the table.

Being a fan sure did feel an awful lot like love.

Then the third verse … “Everyone sees what they want to see / But I’m just a girl who used to sing in my mother’s house.”

In that moment, I was certain those words had been written just for me. They punched me under the ribs and took my breath. She was telling me to back off. She was resigning from office, climbing down from the pedestal, pushing me away with two strong arms. Not letting me see what I wanted to see.

I wanted to see someone who loved me back.

What was it like to be the sort of fan who appreciates an artist’s work and comes to hear it time and time again because she knows she will be enriched and uplifted? The one who could think about borborygmi and the tamales while Kate was in the room? I envied that fan. I was too intense, ascribing significance to every word and glance and nuance.

Later, I would play the CD in the car and sing along perfectly with the lush harmony of the bridge, then fast-forward through the third verse, let go of the button, and resume singing, hearing what I wanted to hear.

A fan is a stalker who builds a good, sturdy fence and keeps the gate locked from the outside. I have attended thirty-two performances to hear Kate sing. By now, this amounts to publicly permissible stalking.

But no, that’s not quite it.

A fan is a hungry heart holding out her hands for alms. I used to sit and wait for Kate to look my way, and when she did, the house lights were turned down low and she couldn’t see my pleading eyes, willing her to somehow know me, lift me from her pedestal on high and make me important and valuable. I wasn’t the only one. I could spot them around me in a room. We fans were the radiant ones with our hearts in our eyes. We watched Kate but did not see her. We saw what we wanted to see.

But no, that’s not quite it, either.

Acts of kindness. Acts of understanding, even unwitting mercy. Going out of the way to come have breakfast, and her husband Ira paying for it. A private cassette tape I have protected for two decades. A funeral plant and hand-written letters. Driving me to my car in a dark parking lot, for safety. A smile and the peace sign. A quiet conversation with friends after my divorce, asking if we were all right. Infinite patience in the numerous times when I could not make my feet walk away from her presence and carry me home. Because no fan is composed entirely of need.

Acts of kindness. Acts of caring. A basket of Oreos nestled in a bandana. The last Biscuitville t-shirt left at the corporate office that was too small and had to serve as wall-hung memorabilia. Miles driven around town to put up posters advertising a concert. Wide-armed hugs given. They were not a sacrifice to a goddess. They were hand-picked clover flowers clutched into a bunch by a child’s hand and held out proudly, purely. Because no artist is devoid of need.

Creation needs a beholder and the creator needs the care of hearts and hands along the way. The luck in the finding is mutual.

I cannot know what I have given her back beyond cookies and a t-shirt, but I know that Kate’s influence has shaped me, to an extent that only a pleading-eyed fan could be shaped. Her stories are likely responsible for the day last year when I rebuked and reported a white co-worker for using the worst of racial slurs and a black co-worker, wounded by the incident, grasped my hands in hers and thanked me for standing up. But for Kate, I would not have visited the Civil Rights Museum and stood, weeping and overwhelmed, on that balcony at the Lorraine Motel. But for Kate’s art, I might choose to sit inert and useless against this dark time. I would not be a fan who opened her heart wide for all the years and let in the riches she poured out for alms, words and ideas that leave no room for hate.

For all the years.

Being a fan sure does feel an awful lot like love.

2019
“Hey, Kate … drive carefully. Be careful.”

snow globe

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Redemption is not the copyrighted, trademarked property of Christians. It belongs to us all.

Much was as I expected. The bones and sinews of the church were intact. Scant remodeling has been done. The mid-century water fountain in the hallway has been removed. A projector screen has been added in the sanctuary. The rest of it, the door knobs and hymnals and cinder block walls and brochures in the vestibule, are encased in a snow globe. Time has barely brushed against this place.

The book of my grandmother’s poetry is of the unwieldy large, square scrapbook variety, which made it nearly impossible to deal with on the seasoned copier. Half of my time was spent trying to figure out a way to capture the pages. A second book held one-page memorials to many I knew in childhood who have since “gone to be with the Lord.” She wrote poems for most of them. I snapped photos of these with my phone. I gathered her in, as much of her as I could.

The pew is still wobbly.

But the good stuff, ah. Four people who also seem untouched by time, save for some graying hair, like mine. The hugs were not dignified; they were long, tight hugs that spanned twenty-five years, the kind of hugs where you sway back and forth just a little, hugs that embraced my grandmother’s memory. Mary Jane. Martha. Vickie. Jim. I jumped up with joy each time I saw one of them. They did the same.

They did the same.

I could venture that an exception was made for me because of Grandma. I could say that Southern hospitality was substituted for love. I could even go so far as believing that they didn’t know, that the protective barrier created by my cowardice in not coming out as an atheist, never mind gay, turned it all into just a kid raised in the church coming back as an adult and triggering trips down Memory Lane. But I know better. I wrote an open letter to the church many years ago, about my orientation and scripture that challenged the church’s rigid stance, and entrusted it to Mary Jane by mail, asking her to share it with key people.

They knew. They knew, and they did the same.

How old is your son now? You are kidding me! You remember babysitting for us? Well,
he’s an attorney now, and she’s got two young children, they still go here. He’s not doing well. We had to move into a one-level house so he could get around. I’m retired and loving every minute of it. It was a year ago that your grandmother passed, right? Oh, we miss her so much. She was a dear woman, and hit every alto note. I always listened for her voice in the choir. You tell your daddy I hope they’re doing all right.

My daddy surprised me when I came out to him, around the same time I wrote that letter. I expected it to terminate our relationship, but instead, he said, “Well, when can we meet her?” Later, thinking out loud, he told me, “You know … I think I believed what I believed because somebody told me I should, but when I got to thinking about it, I realized I don’t.” Coming from a man who used to tell me that a report card with straight A’s was “fair,” that was absolute acceptance.

There is much lip service paid to love in those fundamentalist churches. The love of God within us, shown to us, shining through us so that others might see it and know it. Evangelism. Conformity. Believing what they believe because somebody told them they should. But some sneak out human, leave the safety of the windbreakers of their faith. They love. Not with their faith, but with their hearts. Not the love of God. Their own love. One of these is real.

(I wasn’t wrong to be wary. There is real hate, too. The love, then, is all the more precious. Love because of. Love in spite of. Love that isn’t cake frosting. Love that taps roots.)

I stayed for choir practice and part of Sunday evening service. We sang “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee.” We sang “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us.” I sang out loud and clear. Vickie sat beside me and said I sounded just like Grandma. I sang out to the vaulted ceiling, to the stained glass windows, to the loose hinges and bolts and the scent of the worn hymnal and my old seat in the choir loft. I sang out to my child’s simple awe and to all of my memories in that place, sang out to shake the little globe and watch the snow swirl in chaos and then fall around us, landing on the branches of the olive tree.

When the piano playing stopped, I retrieved my jacket and purse, hugged Martha and Mary Jane goodbye, and put the snow globe carefully back on its shelf. It would have felt selfish, having taken so much away, but I left behind extra paper in the copier, and an epilogue, and a graft of a small part of my deviant branch back onto the tree.

I drove home, returned to the present time, the love of four people within me, shown to me, shining through me so that others might see it and know it. P.J. was relieved that it went well, and saw that I was glowing because that evening, I felt like the most loved banana in the world.