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I’m With Her: Lyrical songwriting, sterling instrumental chops, and ethereal harmonies

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Watkins, Jarosz, and O'Donovan
I’m With Her – Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, and Aoife O’Donovan – at July 2015 Red Wing Roots Music Festival

“When you go to heaven and hear singing, it will sound like these three women.”

Those were the words of mandolinist Chris Thile at a Kennedy Center concert in 2016. He was describing I’m With Her, the Grammy-award winning roots music trio composed of Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan, and Sara Watkins. These three women bring together lyrical songwriting, sterling instrumental chops, and ethereal harmonies to make beautiful — some would say heavenly — music. We’ll take a look at their work in this Saturday Soundtrack.

The group of singer-songwriters came together in 2014 and have been steadily building a catalog of mesmerizing songs and a loyal following. Yes, that loyal fan base includes me, as they were also involved in my first and only case of celebrity stalking, but that’s another story. I first saw the group live in 2015. Having seen each of them with earlier bands and in solo appearances, I knew that they could forge a distinct and memorable musical partnership.

I was not disappointed.

There’s so much to highlight here. Nina Simone’s acapella Be My Husband was one of the first songs of the band that captured my attention, especially the weaving of sound between the unison and three-part harmony vocals. John Hiatt’s Crossing Muddy Waters is a 2015 recording that showcases the bluegrass and roots origins of their work, especially with Jarosz’s clawhammer banjo, played off against Watkins fiddle in support of O’Donovan’s beautiful lead vocal. On Thile’s Live From Here radio show, they go full-on bluegrass with a medley of Toy Heart / Marry Me / Jerusalem. Sarah Jarosz has a great time with Dolly Parton’s He’s Gonna Marry Me, and Watkins’s shivering vocal and the band’s round in Don’t You Hear Jerusalem Moan is, simply put, bone-chilling. The tune Little Lies comes from the band’s 2017 EP. It is a good display of the interplay of instruments and voices that makes the band so appealing.

This is a band that isn’t afraid to go out on a limb. Anyone playing Joni Mitchell is taking a chance of looking pale by comparison, but in their live version of Carey, they nail it and have fun in the process. (Check out the harmonies at the 2:25 mark, and then the great unison line at the end.

See You Around IWH

Call My Name was awarded the Grammy for 2020’s Best American Roots Song, and their performance on Thile’s Live from Here show is a great example of the beautiful harmonies that are integral to their work. Their website notes that the sonic textures and urgent beat result in “a song both stark and luminous, perfectly capturing the potent tension within even the most loving relationship.”

If you want to go all the way down the rabbit hole, look at the music videos on their web site, check out their full NPR Tiny Desk Concert, or their one hour and 20 minute set at Boston’s House of Blues. You won’t be disappointed.

Tour dates are all up in the air with the coronavirus outbreak, so I won’t even try and highlight where they will be appearing. For now, we’ll have to be content with the work that’s already posted online and in their CDs.

Over the next three weeks, I’ll look at each artist individually. But for now, enjoy I’m With Her.

More to come…

DJB

An ongoing conversation with the past

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At the very beginning of 2018’s American Dialogue: The Founders and Us, historian Joseph J. Ellis lays out his personal self-evident truth. This guide star that leads his work is simple yet important: “The study of history is an ongoing conversation between past and present from which we all have much to learn.”

I couldn’t agree more. Especially in times of crisis such as we face now.

Over the book’s 200+ pages, Ellis demonstrates how just such a dialogue takes place in the hands of a talented historian, biographer, writer, and thinker immersed in the study of our nation’s founding. Focusing on key issues of our day, he carries on a rich, thoughtful, and challenging conversation with four founders that helps us go back to the beginning and understand some of their controversial decisions, and how that differs from choices we are making today.

The questions are well chosen given our highly polarized times. Ellis notes that we are “currently incapable of sustained argument” as our creedal convictions — formed during the revolutionary era — bump up against “the emergence of a truly multiracial society; the inherent inequalities of a globalized economy; the sclerotic blockages of an aging political architecture; and the impossible obligations facing any world power once the moral certainties provided by the Cold War vanished.” This attempt to take these questions back to the founders to see what we can learn is smart in its conception and — while not without flaws — nonetheless illuminating in its execution.

As it should, the conversation begins with our original sin of slavery and race. Ellis chooses Thomas Jefferson as the founder who “lived a life thoroughly embedded in the twin American dilemmas of slavery and racism.” When Jefferson made a census of his “family” at Monticello in 1800, “he counted eleven ‘free whites’ and ninety-three slaves, two of whom were his own children.” Ellis, who is one of Jefferson’s most astute biographers, shows how this founder’s views on race changed significantly from 1776 to his death fifty years later in 1826. While assuming in the early days of the revolution that slavery would end like other barbaric practices, later he presented a multi-layered defense of his inaction on emancipation that cast him in the role of helpless victim.

Andrew Levy’s study of Robert Carter III, The First Emancipator, is just one of many works that shows Jefferson’s defense to be a lie. Carter’s actions to emancipate 450 enslaved individuals shortly after the country was formed — and similar emancipations by other well-known figures such as Edward Coles, and Richard Randolph (Jefferson’s cousin) as well as hundreds of property owners forgotten to history — shows that Jefferson was really not looking for an answer to the question of what happens once the slaves are freed.

In bringing the conversation to today’s troubled times, Ellis takes the reader through the failings of the First Reconstruction (1865-1877) and into the promises and shortcomings of the civil rights movement and what has been called the Second Reconstruction. Even with the acquisition of basic rights such as voting, Ellis notes that we too often equate ending segregation with ending racism. That false equivalence should be clear to all by now. He also notes the lack of a real economic component to either era of reconstruction and the overlap between issues of race and class. In predicting another major backlash near the middle of this century as America moves to a minority-majority country, Ellis quotes James Baldwin who wrote,

“In the context of the Negro problem, neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further that the past will remain horrible for exactly so long as we refuse to assess it honestly….Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in American bears some responsibility for it.”

The second dialogue focuses on questions of equality, and engages with the work of John Adams. Ellis shows in multiple ways how the pragmatism of Adams contrasted with the idealism of Jefferson. Adams felt that humans are not controlled by reason, but instead are driven by their emotions. Leadership, in Adams’ view, “entailed not listening to the voice of ‘the people’ when it ran counter to the abiding interest of ‘the public.'” Out of this world view, Adams thought it was inevitable that oligarchs would arise in America, just as they had throughout history. According to Ellis, Adams had “two rock-ribbed convictions: the new financial aristocracy, like all aristocracies throughout history, could not be killed but must be controlled; and the invisible hand of the marketplace required the visible hand of government to regulate its inevitable excesses.”  In other words, America was not exceptional, except for the fact that it would attempt to look out for the greater public good against the over-reach of the financial oligarchy.

Ellis’s rather short dialogue on our second Gilded Age shows how the federal government during the presidency of Ronald Reagan worked to repudiate the underlying assumptions of the New Deal. This was the result of a well-funded and explicit campaign to undermine the regulations and protections put in place under FDR and supported by both parties through the next 50 years. We are at a point now where the top ten hedge fund managers make more than all the kindergarten teachers in the United States precisely because “one side enjoys the advantages of a very large and expensive megaphone that amplifies its message.”

The final two sections of Ellis’s book look at the law and foreign policy. James Madison is the founder chosen for his work to shape our Constitution and how we interpret that work today. Madison’s greatest achievement was recognizing that the Constitution presented a “framework for debate” and that “argument itself became the abiding solution.” The Constitution is an inherently “‘living document’ that successive generations interpret in light of changing historical circumstances.” That understanding — supported strongly by Thomas Jefferson —provides the springboard for Ellis’s strong and sustained attack against the misconception of “originalism” as most proudly practiced by Antonin Scalia. In a scathing critique, Ellis takes apart Scalia’s one-sided opinions, and those of his conservative colleagues on the Supreme Court, as essentially a weapon to overturn liberal precedents. Ellis quotes Justice William Brennan’s description of originalism as “arrogance cloaked as humility.” Noting that at one point in time it is useful for new nations to have mythical heroes, “…over the past half century the scholarship on the founders and the blatantly political character of the Supreme Court” makes such illusions untenable.

“To repeat, the American founding, most especially the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, was always a messy moment populated by mere mortals, whose chief task was to fashion a series of artful political compromises. And the Supreme Court has never floated above the American political landscape like a disembodied cloud of heavenly wisdom. It always was a political institution comprised of human beings with no special connection to the devine. Both illusions were now exposed as childish fables.”

George Washington is the natural founder for a discussion on foreign policy, but Ellis doesn’t focus as much on the obvious warnings in his Farewell Address as he does on the first president’s work to reconcile the “Indian” question and western expansion and then on the Jay Treaty to avoid war with Great Britain. On both issues, Washington took stances that were wildly unpopular. He did not succeed in providing safe nations for Native Americans, but he was able to ensure that the Jay Treaty became law, buying the new nation time to develop before it would be forced to fight against a foreign government again. Underlying this work by Ellis is Washington’s very pragmatic (and very un-Jeffersonian) belief that America would not succeed in bringing democratic principles to faraway places. Ellis’s response to the current state of affairs is that our country has come to be “at peace” with the idea of continual war. He focuses on the fact that despite our overwhelming military superiority, the United States has not produced successful outcomes in our battles after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. There are many reasons that Ellis draws upon to reach his conclusions, but they often boil down to financial and accounting chicanery. Keeping the costs off the “books” reinforced the larger pattern of deception in the post-Cold War era, “making war almost painless: it is not declared, few have to fight, and no one has to pay.”

Ellis ends his work with an epilogue on leadership, and points to how extraordinary it was to have the collection of founders working in one place at one time as our nation was formed. And his focus on a virtually unknown founder, among the general public, speaks to his expertise on this era in our history.

The editorial task of writing the Constitution was undertaken by one man, Pennsylvania delegate Gouverneur Morris, who made the revisions to the draft of the Constitutional Convention in one four-day period. Madison said that “a better choice could not have been made, as the performance of the task proved.” Morris was the individual who changed, “We the people of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut” then state-by-state down the seaboard as written in the original draft, to the simple and magisterial “We the people.”

“Morris’s words ‘We the people’ provide an answering echo on the other side of the American Dialogue, sounding the parallel truth that our rights and responsibilities coexist in a collective whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Although Jefferson’s words are forever, Morris’s words enjoy a special relevance in our own troubled time, since they remind us that we rise or fall together, as a single people.”

Highly recommended.

More to come…
DJB

Competency. Credibility. Empathy.

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A crisis can be illuminating. It can strip away the façade of what we say we believe and expose our true natures. We can use a crisis to step into being our best selves. Or we can take a different route, such as acting out of cold-hearted self-interest to stockpile more than 17,000 bottles of hand sanitizer and attempt to profit from a pandemic.

Along with illumination, a crisis can bring a moment of reckoning. In 2020, America is coming face-to-face with the dire consequences of a well-funded campaign that began in the 1950s to denigrate, hollow-out, and ultimately destroy good and competent government along with the maintenance of a strong and empathetic social contract. Our current crisis has brought those decisions front and center. That reckoning is at the heart of Anne Applebaum‘s recent article in The Atlantic magazine: The Coronavirus Called America’s Bluff. 

Moments of stark illumination and national reckoning also tell us a great deal about our leaders. When it comes to leadership in a crisis, it turns out — surprise, surprise — that competency, credibility and empathy matter. Proven incompetence, unprecedented lying, and a total lack of empathy are recipes for disaster. While he stands as the most inexperienced, uninformed, and divisive president in history — who is using this crisis to show the world that he is uniquely unqualified for this position and this moment — Donald Trump is, however, not an anomaly. He is, rather, the culmination of a massive campaign to put a prominent role for government on the defensive in deference to the worship of money, the market, entertainment, and unfettered capitalism. When corporations become equal to, or more important than, people, we no longer have a true, functioning democracy. Instead, we have a serious problem.

Historian Joseph J. Ellis has been clear in describing this challenge. “Without a role for government,” he writes, “the American Dream becomes a realistic prospect only for the favored few.” Our founding fathers have also pointed to what happens when the few amass power at the expense of the public. In a dialogue about our second Gilded Age, Ellis writes,

“John Adams tried to tell us that outcome [of favoring the few] was virtually inevitable over two centuries ago. The two Republican presidents enshrined on Mount Rushmore, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, both insisted that the federal government was the ultimate arbiter of our common fate. Franklin Roosevelt, the greatest Democratic president, declared that the federal government was responsible for enforcing a social contract in which the right to pursue happiness included the right to a job. Something is not only missing but terribly wrong when these voices are absent from our national conversation.”

But it isn’t only historians and policy experts who recognize the dangers of poor, self-centered leadership. Marketing executive and author Robert Glazer has written about the need for steady hands in a crisis. Looking at the responses to the coronavirus in the business and political worlds, Glazer notes that the job of leaders requires a balancing act. “During a crisis,” he writes, “leaders have the difficult and opposing responsibilities of keeping their constituents and teams informed, while also compelling them to remain calm and focused on solutions.” In examining the leadership of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo* in recent weeks, Glazer was especially taken with Cuomo’s characterization of the three main causes of fear:

“Not receiving information: When people don’t have the information they want or need in an evolving crisis, they worry about what they don’t know and what is being kept from them….When leaders don’t communicate early, people will inevitably fill in the blanks themselves with rumors and fear.

People don’t trust the information they are receiving: Once a leader or organization loses credibility, almost anything they say will be questioned. It’s critical during a crisis to speak truthfully and carefully, and it’s potentially harmful to say something in the spirit of providing comfort that may be disproven later as the situation changes….

The information received is frightening: Sometimes leaders must give people information that will scare or upset them. In these cases, leaders must be factual and empathetic, and explain the why behind the information.”

In dealing with this moment in time, I believe we have two huge tasks ahead of us as a country.

The first task, of course, is to address the current coronavirus crisis in a way that doesn’t overwhelm our flawed and fractured health care system. That would be difficult even with competent hands at the wheel. Thankfully, the general public has responded to the pandemic with a sense of sacrifice and relative calm. As for leadership, we now have to count on elected officials and health experts at the state and local level to tie us over until the administration gets its act together. History can again be a guide. As was seen with the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, quick action by local authorities in St. Louis to close down public gatherings helped avert a spike in cases, where Philadelphia’s decision to hold a parade to honor returning war veterans exacerbated the rising case load and overwhelmed the local health care system. We need to address the current coronavirus crisis with competency, credibility, and empathy.

The second task, to return to Applebaum’s thesis, is to have a serious reckoning with the havoc the well-funded and long-standing attacks on competent government and support for unfettered capitalism have wrought. That reckoning will not be easy, and the parties, people, and businesses with power and money will fight any change to their privilege. In a country where our creedal convictions revolve around “we the people” and “all men are created equal,” it will be the people who have to show leadership. We will have to face the fear that, as Franklin Roosevelt so eloquently said, can be our greatest obstacle.

We have to vote as if our lives depend on it.

Because they do.

More to come…

DJB

*UPDATE: The section on Andrew Cuomo clearly did not age terribly well…which is one of the problems with blogs written in the moment using flawed individuals as exemplars of virtue. Many, in fact, knew of Cuomo’s flaws. As is often the case, those raising concerns were pushed aside in the rush to find examples of true leaders.

John Prine

The timeliness and timelessness of John Prine

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(UPDATE:  John Prine passed away from COVID-19 on April 7, 2020, just three-and-a-half weeks after I wrote this post suggesting how much we needed his music and his outlook on life. My appreciation can be found here.)

This seems like a good weekend to recall the work of the man who wrote the classic line, “To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.”

John Prine has been in my life, and in my head, forever.

When the singing mailman was discovered in 1970 at The Fifth Peg in Chicago by a young journalist named Roger Ebert, he was already writing and playing such incredible songs as Sam Stone, Hello in There, and Paradise. In fact, those were the first three songs Prine ever played on stage. To hear a 1970-era country singer and songwriter tackling subjects such as the Vietnam War and drug use, old age and loneliness, and environmental degradation and rural depopulation in such a sensitive and thoughtful way was unheard of from the country music industry in nearby Nashville — or at least it was in my experience as a teenager in Tennessee. While John was writing Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore, Merle Haggard was winning praise from the right wing for “love it or leave it” songs like The Fightin’ Side of Me. It was a strange time.

So, who thought we’d be back there again so quickly?

Which is why we need this American treasure as much as ever. As one reviewer wrote,

“Nobody ever bought a John Prine album for the beauty of his voice. The Illinois native has the vocal range of a bass drum and the subtlety of Kentucky moonshine. Prine’s genius — displayed erratically over almost 30 years and nearly 20 albums’ worth of wholly novel songwriting — has always been his ability to blend the sublime and the goofy to illuminating effect.”

He can write laugh-out-loud songs like Jesus, The Missing Years, Dear Abby, and In Spite of Ourselves (sung as a duet with the incomparable Iris DeMent). He writes great kiss-off songs like All the Best with the wonderful line, “Your heart gets bored with your mind and it changes you.”

But he also  continues to write and sing about people and situations out of the mainstream, yet authentic to the core (see Caravan of Fools*), while featuring up-and-coming musicians as his companions in rhyme.

Prine was recognized with one of the Grammys’ Lifetime Achievement awards earlier this year. At the awards show, the great Bonnie Raitt performed an acoustic version of Prine’s classic Angel From Montgomery in homage.**

I am an old woman named after my mother
My old man is another child that’s grown old
If dreams were lightning and thunder was desire
This old house would have burnt down a long time ago

Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing that I can hold on to
To believe in this living is just a hard way to go

One of my favorite John Prine songs is Long Monday. In his typically off-beat way, he’s written an affectionate love song about a wonderful weekend and the aftermath of Monday morning.

You and me
Sittin’ in the back of my memory
Like a honey bee
Buzzin’ ’round a glass of sweet Chablis
Radio’s on
Windows rolled up
And my mind’s rolled down
Headlights shining
Like silver moons
Rollin’ on the ground

We made love
In everyway love can be made
And we made time
Look like time
Could never fade
Friday Night
We both made the guitar hum
Saturday made Sunday feel
Like it would never come

Gonna be a long Monday
Sittin’ all alone on a mountain
By a river that has no end
Gonna be a long Monday
Stuck like the tick of a clock
That’s come unwound – again…”

John has been touring overseas this winter, before returning to the mainland in time for Jazz Fest on May 3rd, New York City’s Apollo Theatre on June 20th, and Wolf Trap, in a show with Emmylou Harris, on June 26th. A cancer survivor, for which we are all fortunate, John is someone you should enjoy while you can.

More to come…
DJB

Image: Cover of Prine’s 1971 self-titled debut album

*In his live versions of Caravan of Fools Prine adds a disclaimer to the song saying, “any likeness to the current administration is purely accidental.”

**The version I’ve linked to is actually from the Bonnie Raitt + Ruthie Foster performance from the film Road to Austin. It is just sublime. Plus, Raitt begins by saying, “I’d like to sing this song for Molly Ivins, for Ann Richards!” Enough said.

Babe Ruth and the creation of the modern celebrity

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In the coming weeks, if we are able as individuals to stay healthy, we may all be looking at books in our “to be read” pile to fill up this time of coronavirus. For very good reasons sports leagues and tournaments are shutting down. Opera houses and theatres are going dark. Schools are closing. Restaurants may be next on the list. Watching cable news is just too damn depressing (and not always very informative). As I was writing this, Major League Baseball cancelled the rest of spring training and has pushed back opening day at least two weeks.

If you are looking for a good sports book to fill up your hours, I wish I could send you to Jane Leavy’s 2018 The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created with more enthusiasm. Those who know my reading habits are aware that I always read a baseball book as part of my personal spring training. (The other part of the regimen is watching Bull Durham, the best baseball movie ever.) In 2020, The Big Fella was the book of choice.

While there are stories and sections to like in this hefty new biography, there is — as is often the case — too much of a good thing.

Leavy has gone all Ruthian on us with prodigious amounts of material. But, just like the Babe, she plows through almost 500 pages without a sense of discipline in deciding what’s worth keeping and what is best left untouched.

Leavy has structured her story around a three-week barnstorming tour that the Babe and fellow Yankee Lou Gehrig took following the 1927 season. It was during that historic year in baseball when Ruth broke the seasonal home run record with 60 blasts. “Let’s see some son of a bitch try to top that one,” he reportedly said at the time. Gehrig, who batted behind Ruth in the Yankees order, was the winner of the league’s Most Valuable Player award. After the season ended with a Yankee sweep in the World Series, the two players headed out across America, playing in games featuring local talent renamed the Bustin’ Babes and the Larrupin’ Lous for the day.

Their agent Christy Walsh is at the heart of this story, and much of what works well throughout the book involves the descriptions of how Babe and Walsh quickly understand and take advantage of the possibilities of synergy in building fame. Leavy is working to show how Ruth became our first modern celebrity, and she pulls together a number of disparate threads to make that argument.

I couldn’t help but think of the current occupant of the White House when reading Leavy’s description that “Ruth’s relationship with New York’s sporting press was cozy, complex, and complicit.” One sportswriter of the era said Ruth had more talent for staying on the front page than your average earthquake. Sound like anyone we know? But Ruth produced in his chosen field: on the baseball diamond. As he said in a different context, when asked about making a higher salary than the president, “I know, but I had a better year than Hoover.”

The structure of the book doesn’t always work, and I would get lost in the back and forth between the tour and the biographical information. Leavy can write a terrific sentence. But as they pile up one upon another, the reader often loses sight of those disparate threads. She can go on and on about the legal issues surrounding the naming of the Baby Ruth Candy Bar and lose our interest in the process. (Short story: Babe didn’t get a penny, although it was clearly named for him.)  And she often writes about specific and sometimes iconic pictures (the best example being Nat Fein’s Pulitzer Prize winning photo of the Babe’s final appearance at Yankee Stadium) without including them in the book’s collection of photos. It is frustrating to read her wonderful description of how Fein came to capture that moment, and then look for the well-known picture of Babe standing at the top of the dugout steps, leaning on a bat, taking in the adulation of a full house just months before he died, and finding it absent.

In Leavy’s portrait, Babe Ruth comes across as the man who helped shape many facets of modern America that we know today. His love for baseball, food, beer, women, and attention are at the forefront of this work. Unfortunately, the excesses of modern life in the new age of celebrity also come across in ways intended and unintended in The Big Fella. The end result — perhaps like an episode of The Apprentice* — is something less than fully satisfying.

More to come…

DJB

*Full disclosure: I never watched a single episode of The Apprentice. Even then I couldn’t see why anyone would waste any time on Donald Trump.

Servant leadership

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“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.”

Max DePree, the long-time CEO of the furniture and design pacesetter Herman Miller, wrote those words in his small but influential book Leadership is an Art, and they’ve stuck with me through the years.

In the early 1980s, as I was preparing to take my first leadership post as the executive director of a nonprofit organization, I read Robert K. Greenleaf’s 1977 book Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. A humanities major without any background in management or business, I was looking for guidance on how to lead, motivate, and manage people.

Greenleaf’s words resonated with me, even if I didn’t come close to fully understanding their implications. “The servant-leader is servant first,” he wrote. “It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first.”

I went on to study other management and leadership theories, attended a Harvard Business School executive leadership institute, and adapted what seemed to work best from each one for my particular situation. But it wasn’t until I joined the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1996 and saw true servant leadership in action that I understood the philosophy and set of practices behind the concept “that enriches the lives of individuals, builds better organizations and ultimately creates a more just and caring world.”

This week, the National Trust is celebrating the career of John Hildreth, a true servant leader.

Nats Game John Hildreth
John Hildreth

John began his career as the Director of the Preservation Resource Center at the Preservation Society of Charleston in 1981. In his 34 years at the National Trust he rose through the ranks from Field Representative to serve as the Director of the Southern Regional Office, Vice President for Eastern Regional Field Services, and Vice President for Preservation Partnerships. Yet it is not in the titles, but through the scope and depth of his work, where the true nature of his servant leadership comes through.

When the Trust began talks a few years ago with the Lilly Endowment about what would become the $20 million National Fund for Sacred Places, I told our CEO that John was the right person to help conceptualize and lead this work. John is a man of faith who believes deeply in the importance of places of worship as community landmarks in all the meanings of that word. I knew well his empathy and concern for others, having watched it first hand through his work on providing housing and restoring communities in New Orleans following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. I saw it first hand in Charleston with his work to help the parishioners of Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church retain and preserve the physical manifestations of the outpouring of love and support received from around the world following the horrific shooting there in 2015. As the VP who built the National Fund, John has worked in a servant leadership arrangement alongside Partners for Sacred Places, congregations around the country, and his National Trust colleagues, helping preserve historic houses of worship and keeping them in active use.

John also exhibits the characteristics of servant leadership through his eagerness to hold up and celebrate forgotten stories of sometimes marginalized communities. It was with John’s support that one of his staff members brought the Pauli Murray House project to our attention a few years ago. This National Treasure, which now houses the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, is very relevant; not just as a historic site where a major figure of the civil rights struggles spent her formative years, but because of the work that is accomplished there today. John led the Trust efforts in the work to identify, save, restore, and reuse segregation-era Rosenwald Schools throughout the South. His desire to serve brought him in touch with thousands of alumni, the descendants of Julius Rosenwald, and local groups throughout the country. He will retire knowing that the creation of an endowment at the National Trust will support the preservation of these simple, yet iconic treasures.

The best test of servant leadership is this: do those served grow as persons? The Greenleaf Center notes that, “A servant-leader focuses primarily on the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong.” There is, simply, not a better description of John’s career. “While traditional leadership generally involves the accumulation and exercise of power…the servant-leader shares power, puts the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible.”

John is closing out a consequential professional career that has made a difference in communities and in the lives of people living in those cities and towns. I’ve been honored to serve with him for parts of that journey. While he often reported to me, in truth, I was the one who was learning from him about true leadership and what really matters. It has been a privilege to count him as a colleague and a friend.

So in the best tradition of Max DePree, I want to say thank you, John Hildreth, for the example of servant leadership you’ve given to so many of us during the past four decades.

With best wishes for what comes next to you and Barb.

Have a great week.

More to come…

DJB

Installment #24 of The Gap Year Chronicles

Image: John Hildreth speaking at the Cincinnati Icons National Treasures event

The lonesome sound of Tyler Childers

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I’ve always loved the old Utah Phillips tune Rock, Salt, and Nails. It has such a lonesome sound that connects on so many levels. And surprisingly, for a song that sounds so ancient, no one sings it with greater feeling than the young country singer Tyler Childers, who is featured this week on Saturday Soundtrack.

“By the banks of the river, where the willows hang down,
Where the wild birds they warble with a low moaning sound,
Way down in the hollow where the water runs cold,
It was there I first listened to the lies that you told.

Now I lie on my back and I see your sweet face.
The past I remember, time can’t erase.
The letters you wrote me, they were written in shame,
And I know that your conscience still echoes my name.”

Childers is from Kentucky, having grown up in Lawrence County where his father worked in the coal industry and his mother worked as a nurse. Like many a country musician, he began singing in church—in his case the local Free Will Baptist congregation. His grandfather gave him a guitar, he absorbed the music of the 1980s, and began writing songs. At 15, when his grandfather died, Childers turned to bluegrass as a way to remember him.

“Now the nights are so long, my sorrow runs deep.
Nothing is worse than a night without sleep.
I walk out alone, I look at the sky,
Too empty to sing, too lonesome to cry.

Now if the ladies were blackbirds if the ladies were thrushes,
I’d lie there for hours in the chilly cold marshes.
And if the women were squirrels with them high bushy tails,
I’d fill up my shotgun with rock, salt and nails.”

Childers first major studio album was 2017’s Purgatory, produced by Sturgill Simpson and David Ferguson, and it earned him a 2018 Emerging Artist of the Year award from the Americana Music Association. He released a live album, Tyler Childers: Live on Red Barn Radio I & II, in 2018, and last year saw the release of Country Squire, which has solidified his reputation as a major new player in the country music mix of artists like Simpson and Chris Stapleton.

All Your’n from Country Squire received a Grammy nomination as Best Country Solo Performance.

To my taste, Childer’s best work to date is the solo acoustic work you find on the Red Barn Radio sessions and on YouTube videos. Nose on the Grindstone, which hasn’t been included on one of his studio albums, is about a coal miner and addiction, and a poignant reminder of the pain of eastern Kentucky. That’s a recurring theme in his music. Childers is all about hard lives and hard loves, and his simple guitar playing and aching voice are a perfect match for these stories of pain and love. White House Road may be one of the best of these songs, as the singer from Paintsville, Kentucky—famous for its lawlessness, religion, and booze—puts his own spin on life in rural Appalachia.

When they lay me in the cold hard clay
Singing them hymns while the banjo plays
Tell those ladies that they ought not frown
Cause there ain’t been nothing ever held me down
Well the lawman, women or a shallow grave
Same old blues just a different day

On a brighter note, 22nd Winter is about the first time Childers was snowed in at his in-laws. As he explains in one performance, it isn’t a blues, but a love song. Childers has clearly made his mark, and with that voice and songwriting ability he has a great future ahead.

Tyler Childers opens for Sturgill Simpson at the Anthem in the Wharf in D.C. on March 15th (sold out) and the 16th.

Enjoy.
More to come…
DJB

UPDATE: Due to closings amid rational, well-intended and well-studied efforts to slow the spread of infection, the Sturgill Simpson + Tyler Childers shows at the Anthem have been rescheduled for May 17-18, 2020.*

*Emily Winthrop had this right when she tweeted, “Hey media friends. Can we please stop saying things are closing “amid fears of coronavirus” when it’s actually “amid rational, well-intended and well-studied efforts to slow the spread of infection?” The frame of fear is helping no one.

A stunning portrait

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Early in the beautiful Céline Sciamma film Portrait of a Lady on Fire you notice the silences. They are as much a part of this wondrous work of art as the rough terrain, crashing waves, and gorgeous landscape. Set on a remote island off the coast of Brittany in 1760, the film begins as Marianne, a painter, arrives via a small ship tender after jumping into the sea to save the box holding the canvas for her work.

Marianne has been commissioned to do the wedding portrait of Héloïse, a young lady who has just left the convent and is to be married to a nobleman in Milan. Deposited on the rocky shore by the last man we see for a couple of hours, she finds her way to the mansion where Héloïse, a reluctant bride to be, lives with her mother and a young maid, Sophie. Marianne is told that she must paint Héloïse without her knowing, so they spend their days on long walks, with Marianne stealing glances at face and hands whenever possible. The silences have been there all along, but it is on those walks that the quiet between the conversation, the focus on gaze and view, along with the lack of a traditional musical soundtrack, becomes a key to the beauty of this film.

Told as a flashback, Portrait is a remarkable achievement on multiple levels. Hands shown in the cycle of paint applied and removed bring the viewer into Marianne’s worldview. The arresting cinematography captures the candlelit darkness of the mansion, where faces often are the only feature in the light, as well as the stark sun and rugged beauty of the coastline. We watch the love that grows between Marianne and Héloïse develop at a deliberate pace that somehow manages to convey both the urgency of the precious few days available to them when the mother goes to Italy and a romance outside time and space. The attraction of the lovers is sensual and real. There is a bond built between the two women of privilege and Sophie that is genuine and affecting. The movie is a triumph of love told from the woman’s viewpoint, yet the specter of the unwanted marriage to a man she’s never met is just one of several references to the stilting nature of patriarchy that is critical to understanding the exceptional storytelling that undergirds the film.

One of the most incredible musical moments I can recall seeing in any movie in recent history takes place just a little past the halfway point. Writing in IndieWire, Chris O’Falt describes the scene: “Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) have yet to acknowledge their growing desire when they are brought to an evening gathering of the women who live on the isolated island in Brittany. As the two soon-to-be-lovers exchange glances across the bonfire, a low, slow chant starts to rise as the rest of the women gather to sing.”

Here the song grows as does the obvious feeling between Marianne and Héloïse, the women of the island begin clapping in groups of twos, and they begin to repeat a lyric. O’Falt continues.

In an effort to get a song that had the beats per minute, polyphonic, and polyrhythmic qualities she needed, Sciamma decided to write the lyrics herself.

“I wrote the lyrics in Latin. They’re saying, ‘fugere non possum,’ which means ‘they come fly,’” said Sciamma. “It’s an adaptation of a sentence by [Friedrich] Nietzsche, who says basically, ‘The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.’”

You can hear the song halfway through the official trailer, beginning around the 1:00 mark.

The musical feast is central to a larger group of scenes after Héloïse’s mother has left the island. The remaining three women — in very utilitarian fashion — eat, drink wine, and debate Ovid’s version of the “Orpheus and Eurydice” myth. Orpheus, in looking backward on his way out of Hades, dooms Eurydice, his lover, to remain in the underworld. Héloïse suggests that Eurydice told Orpheus to turn back to look at her. Marianne has a different interpretation, suggesting that, “He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s. He chooses the memory of her.” Soon thereafter the bonfire lights not only Héloïse’s dress, but also the love between Marianne and Héloïse, and the passion soon follows. The “turning back” at the end of the myth, returns to full force late in the film.

This is a wonderful story of love and remembrance. The powerful ending features the movie’s only other musical connection, with an orchestral performance of Vivaldi that is another memory for Marianne and Héloïse.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a stunning movie, created by artists who bring craft and vision to their work. It is well worth your time and emotional investment. In French with subtitles.

Highly recommended.

More to come…

DJB

Image from film credit: NEON

Remembrance, not regret

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Birthdays that end in 0 are much easier for me to handle than the ones that end in 5.

I came to that rather trivial realization sometime over the past year. Approaching 30, 40, 50, or 60? No big deal. In fact, for that last one I used the occasion to gather 60 lessons I’ve learned over six decades. It was great fun.

The ones that end in 5, however? Umm…they seem to be more problematic. Perhaps it is because I’m suddenly closer to the next 0 and the next decade than to the one in my rear view mirror. At 35 most of us finally realize, if we haven’t already, that we are no longer a kid. At 45 you can claim with some degree of persuasiveness to fall in the middle age bracket, but that has its own set of challenges. (Mortgages, anyone?) By the time you hit 55 you are conscious of the fact that few people live to be 110, and you are face-to-face with all that implies. And at 65? Well, no one makes it to 130 so you have no claim to that middle age moniker. Of course, as if to drive that point home, at age 65 all the senior discounts, Medicare, and Social Security benefits kick in across the board. Not to mention aches in places you didn’t know existed.

Thankfully, I now have a very different outlook than when I reached 35, or 45, or 55. I am approaching my 65th birthday this week with a great deal more excitement for whatever lies ahead and what I’ve yet to learn, in whatever time is left. My gap year exploration of what’s next has certainly helped. Watching my father successfully navigate the final third of his life changed my perspective on the possibilities. But the primary reason that I’m optimistic is my recent work to look at personal experiences through a lens of remembrance without regret.

It hasn’t always been this way.

Regrets tend to lock us in a past where we constantly relitigate our actions. Truth be told, I’ve not always handled the “no regret” part of remembrance very well. From an early age I was a first-class worrier, and I still hold on to a part of that history. They may not matter to anyone else, but regrets matter to those who hold on to them. Regrets stop us from moving beyond past experiences in order to revel in fresh challenges. Yet we don’t realize that those past experiences, when ultimately faced, can turn out to be much less of an issue than they appear in our clouded memories.

I doubt there’s a person alive who remembers that at age 9, as I was playing in a piano competition in front of a room full of people, my memory suddenly went blank.

But I remember.

I stopped playing piano that day and suddenly found it took a great deal of effort to play any music in public, no matter how much I might love it. The regret of failure was too present. Knowing I wanted to move past this, I challenged myself at age 40, took a year of piano lessons, and then sat down in front of my teacher — and her group of elementary school students with all their parents — to play in a recital. And I aced it!

It was a step past regret to build new memories, new remembrances, of joy.

It is so tempting to sleepwalk through many phases of life, avoiding the places, literal and figurative, where we might have to face our regrets in order to learn anew. While these places appear countless times throughout our lives, major milestones often amplify their significance. The culmination of a career or the ending of a job, voluntary or otherwise, can be an occasion when regrets arise for work undone. The end of a relationship can push us to forget the wonder of a love once held outside time and space. Instead we focus on regrets and recriminations. When family and dear friends get ill and die, we struggle with regret instead of remembrance and, where possible, celebration. We forget the notes, and in the process overlook what brought us to love music in the first place.

The challenge to cut through the knot in the stomach is one I still face on occasion, more than fifty years after sitting all alone on that piano stool. But traveling through that challenge is necessary to reach these places where affirming memories are formed, connecting over time, to create our true identities. And the travel may very well be symbolic. “The real voyage of discovery,” as Marcel Proust once said, “consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Thankfully, I realize there is so much yet to do. Musicians and actors I’ve admired have been incredibly productive later in life. Many of my favorite writers are still turning out meaningful work well into their seventh and eighth decades. I’ve always been fond of Madeleine L’Engle’s observation that “I am still every age that I have been.” It reminds me that simply because I am now well into the sixth decade, I don’t have to forget the astonishment that came so easily during the first ten years. We’ve all seen examples of people who, as they move through life, fear what’s next and want to hang on to what they have and what they wish to be true. As the writer Ursula K. Le Guin notes in No Time to Spare, these are the ones who have “given up on the long-range view.” I keep reminding myself: don’t be that person!

Fortunately, there are also those who, in her words, realize the incredible amount we learn “between our birthday and our last day.” If we are flexible enough in mind and spirit to recognize “how rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn,” we can maintain the seeking, trusting capacity for learning and life that we had as a two-year-old. We can build hope for the future grounded in memory.

Observing and listening to make sense of life leads to interior places not normally visited in our daily routines. But looking at this voyage of almost 65 years through new eyes helps me remember the basic things that make us human. It helps me find ways to get to the heartbeat.

I want to say thank you to the many family, friends, colleagues, and even strangers who have been there for me over 65 years. Your support has led me to a place where I now move quickly past feelings of regret to memories that provide a solid foundation for whatever is next.

You may, or may not, remember what you did to lift me up. But I remember.

Have a great week.

More to come…

DJB

Installment #23 of The Gap Year Chronicles

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay.

Leyla McCalla’s music from the melting pot

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New York-born Haitian-American multi-instrumentalist Leyla McCalla is the fifth and final featured artist in our Black History Month tribute to musicians at the forefront of the work to reclaim the African American contributions to folk, old-time, country and roots music. I kicked off the Saturday Soundtrack series with my January tribute to Amythyst Kiah and then celebrated throughout February the music of Rhiannon Giddens, followed by Dom Flemons, Otis Taylor, and last week’s artist, Keb’ Mo’.

McCalla grew up in the cultural mix of New York City but relocated to Accra, Ghana for two years while a teenager. She returned to the States to study cello performance and chamber music at NYU. Taking that knowledge—and “armed with Bach’s Cello Suites”—she left to play cello on the streets of the French Quarter in New Orleans. There she sang in French, Haitian Creole, and English, and played cello, tenor banjo and guitar. McCalla spent two years and gained greater fame as cellist of the Grammy award-winning African-American string band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, alongside bandmates Giddens and Flemons. She left the group in 2013 to pursue her solo career.

I’ll begin this look at a small sample of McCalla’s music with the Haitian love song Rose-Marie, which she sings in this video from Delfest with the Chocolate Drops. Little Sparrow is a beautiful and sorrowful tune from the 2016 solo album A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey. “Through deeply felt originals and interpretations of traditional songs,” her website notes, “the album depicts a diverse American experience and Leyla’s struggles with and acceptance of her own cultural identity.”

The witty official video of the tune Money Is King is from her 2018 album Capitalist Blues. The song highlights McCalla’s incorporation of traditional Creole, Cajun and Haitian music into her contemporary work. With this record, it has been suggested that McCalla is processing the current political environment in her own way. NPR noted that the album

“…imaginatively maps her vision of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora while gently taking Anglocentricism (and capitalism) down a notch. She’s partly in the moment and partly looking beyond it, and seeing truths that we’ve missed.”

Singing with Our Native Daughters, McCalla’s tune I Knew I Could Fly is based on an Etta Baker-style Piedmont Blues. I love this video because it has short explanations from McCalla on her the creative process interspersed with the music.

To close out this Black History Month special series, I’ll quote NPR again, to remind us of the importance of this work.

“The roots-music scene can display assimilationist tendencies, too, but it’s also home to a small but growing number of artists — including Leyla McCalla and her sometime bandmate Rhiannon Giddens, Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra, Dom Flemons and Kaia Kater — who don’t stand by and accept the whitewashing of culturally distinct origins. Instead, their work does the intellectual labor of clarifying; of reconnecting the dots, reconstructing context, retelling and sometimes personalizing neglected stories.”

McCalla’s upcoming tours include the premier of Breaking the Thermometer to Hide the Fever in Durham, North Carolina, on March 4-6. She’s also performing at Ginny’s Supper Club in New York City on April 1st, and at the New Orleans JazzFest on April 30th.

Enjoy!

More to come…

DJB

Image: Leyla McCalla (photo credit: LeylaMcCalla.com)