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The Black National Anthem

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I originally published this post under the title Lift Every Voice and Sing in 2020 to honor Juneteenth. For the last Saturday in this year’s Black History Month, I am reposting it here in a lightly edited form.

In honor of Black History Month 2023, I am exploring the work of musicians of color who are reclaiming their musical heritage while taking us forward musically and socially. The first in this year’s series (a preview) featured Allison Russell. Others featured Kaia Kater, Joy Oladokun. and Liz Vice. For the MLK weekend, I featured the work of Ruthie Foster.

With words by James Weldon Johnson and music by his brother John, Lift Every Voice and Sing was written at the turn of the 20th century, a time when Jim Crow laws were beginning to take hold across the South and Blacks were looking for an identity. In a way that was both gloriously uplifting and starkly realistic, it spoke to the history of the dark journey of African Americans. “It allows us to acknowledge all of the brutalities and inhumanities and dispossession that came with enslavement, that came with Jim Crow, that comes still today with disenfranchisement, police brutality, dispossession of education and resources,” Shana Redmond — author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora — says. “It continues to announce that we see this brighter future, that we believe that something will change.”

Lift ev’ry voice and sing

‘Til earth and heaven ring

Ring with the harmonies of Liberty

Let our rejoicing rise

High as the list’ning skies

Let it resound loud as the rolling sea

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us

Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun

Let us march on ’til victory is won

Dr. Horace Clarence Boyer

I came to Lift Every Voice and Sing later in life. But when I did I had the privilege of learning the song and its history directly from one of the foremost scholars in African American gospel music, the late Dr. Horace Clarence Boyer, at a 1992 music conference in North Carolina. Dr. Boyer was the general editor of 1993’s Lift Every Voice and Sing II: An African American Hymnal for the Episcopal Church. I was fortunate to be a part of a group that he led in his week-long workshop on African American gospel music. It was life changing.

The version I learned is the one from the hymnal that you hear in churches and concerts, such as seen here from late November 2016 — an especially auspicious time — at Abyssinian Baptist Church.

Stony the road we trod

Bitter the chastening rod

Felt in the days when hope unborn had died

Yet with a steady beat

Have not our weary feet

Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered

We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered

Out from the gloomy past

‘Til now we stand at last

Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast

There are many popular arrangements of the song and I’ll only highlight a few. An all-star version from 1990 with Melba Moore features Dionne Warwick, Stevie Wonder, The Clark Sisters, Freddie Jackson, Anita Baker, Bobby Brown, Howard Hewett, Take 6, Stephanie Mills, BeBe & CeCe Winans and Jeffrey Osborne.

Beyoncé famously sang the anthem’s first verse in her 2019 Beychella concert.

For an earlier generation, enjoy the great Ray Charles from 1972.

And finally, in a recording uploaded in the midst of the pandemic and with the heightened focus on racial injustice, Nicole Heaston gathered 65 Black opera singers accompanied by Kevin J. Miller and conducted by Damien Sneed to sing Roland Carter’s arrangement of the Black National Anthem. As Ms Heaston says, “This song expresses the strength and resilience of the Black spirit during this time of turmoil and reflection.” It is one of the most moving versions I’ve ever heard.

God of our weary years

God of our silent tears

Thou who has brought us thus far on the way

Thou who has by Thy might

Led us into the light

Keep us forever in the path, we pray

Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee

Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee

Shadowed beneath Thy hand

May we forever stand

True to our God

True to our native land

I’d vote tomorrow to have The Star Spangled Banner replaced as our anthem by This Land Is Your Land along with Lift Every Voice and Sing. Until that glorious day arrives, listen or sing along and remember that Black Lives Matter.

More to come…

DJB

Image of James Weldon Johnson working at his desk.

A Lenten reading practice

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A Jewish academician, an Anglican historian, and a Catholic seeker walk into a bar.

This isn’t the start of a bad joke. Instead, you have the three authors that I’m taking on for my reading practice during the season of Lent. I read everywhere, so some of my time spent with these books will, no doubt, take place in establishments that serve adult beverages.*

Today, the first of the forty days of Lent, is known as Ash Wednesday. Its name comes from the custom of placing blessed ashes on the forehead of worshipers at services in churches, transit stops, coffee shops, and other places both traditional and quirky across the globe.

Ash Wednesday, in all seriousness, is where the symbolism of our mortality is the most overt and graphic during the liturgical year. I’ve heard it described as the church’s celebration of finitude.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Words spoken at the imposition of ashes, Episcopal Book of Common Prayer

The message that we have the human disease and will die doesn’t get any more direct.

For Christians, Lent is a season of repentance, fasting, and self-reflection. In some traditions, believers “give up” something for Lent. The more modern approach is to take on something for this journey, which is the same length of time that Jesus spent in the wilderness. In our time of so much anxiety and uncertainty, perhaps it is enough to give people the opportunity to just stop, pause, reflect, and try to breathe again.

So, back to our three authors.

This year, over the course of these forty days, I am going to take on the reading of three books that focus on difficult questions, doubt, and the intersection of faith and history. My guides for this journey are three writers I admire who come at faith from very different perspectives.

  • The Difficult Words of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to His Most Perplexing Teachings by Dr. Amy-Jill Levine promises to showcase the wit, wisdom, and first-class scholarship of this self-described “unorthodox member of an Orthodox synagogue and a Yankee Jewish feminist who until 2021 taught New Testament in a Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt.” As one of the blurbs on the cover suggests, Levine “goes for the doozies.” The first is that favorite of prosperity gospel preachers everywhere, “Sell what you own.”** I can’t wait!
  • The Hope of Glory: Reflections on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham, takes the seven phrases Jesus spoke from the cross and considers them through the lens of the intersection of faith and history. Lent is the season leading up to Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter. There’s no better individual to help us think through these intersections than the Canon Historian of the Washington National Cathedral.
  • Amen? Questions for a God I Hope Exists by Julia Rocchi is a new book from my friend and former colleague that is “a collection of prayers and essays for practicing penitents and devoted doubters.” I have read a number of Julia’s essays through the years and know that this new work from an observant Catholic will be thoughtful, engaging, and empathetic. My review of Julia’s book will feature my second author interview of the year, and I can’t wait to chat with her about Amen? and what she’s learned in the writing process.

UPDATE: I’ve joined another reading group, and we’re taking on the book The Cross and the Lynching Tree by the influential African American theologian James H. Cone for Lent. So, add a fourth to the list as well!

Please feel free to read along with me during this season. If these works don’t appeal to you, I’m highlighting three other books I’ve read over the past couple of years in the hope that you will find something that piques your interest here.

Short Stories by Jesus: The enigmatic parables of a controversial rabbi (2014) by Amy-Jill Levine is the highly praised study of the parables of Jesus written in an easy-to-read style spiced with humor. Levine helps her readers understand the parables in the same way as their original audiences did. She notes that these stories are less about revealing something new and more about tapping into “our memories, our values, and our deepest longings.”

The Spirit of Soul Food: Race, faith, and food justice (2021), by Christopher Carter speaks to the clear, Christian ethical basis for a new system of food justice. “Our foodways are an expression of our identity, a way of maintaining connections to our ancestors and our ancestral homelands; our foodways are personal and communal, emotional and habitual.” This book is a timely reminder of the often-oppressive underpinnings of our broken food system.

Being Home: Discovering the Spiritual in the Everyday (1991) by Gunilla Norris looks at the tasks we do — from awakening in the morning to locking the door at nightfall — and puts them in the context of living in place. “How we hold the simplest of our tasks,” Norris writes, “speaks loudly about how we hold life itself.”

May you find time for a meaningful season of self-reflection, no matter how that evolves in your life.

More to come…

DJB

*If you absolutely must have a bad joke, here you go: A priest, a rabbit, and a minister walk into a bar. The bartender asks the rabbit, “what’ll you have?” The rabbit says, “I dunno. I’m only here because of Autocorrect.”

**Snark alert

The Weekly Reader links to written works I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

Photo by Thays Orrico on Unsplash

Piecing together the puzzle

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At one point, the famed detective is sitting “in a square chair, in front of the square fireplace in the square room of his London flat. In front of him were various objects that were not square; that were instead violently and almost impossibly curved.” Each individually looked to be “improbable, irresponsible, and wholly fortuitous. In actual fact, of course, they were nothing of the sort.”

Yes, Hercule Poirot was home, five weeks after leaving a crime scene without having solved the murder, working on a jigsaw puzzle.

Dead Man’s Folly (1956) by Agatha Christie is a mystery where no one is quite what they seem. The owners of an estate in Devon, Sir George and Lady Stubbs, are hosting a charity fete for the local village. Along with local friends and visitors, they decide to stage a mock murder and ask the famous crime writer, Ariadne Oliver, to organize the hunt. After developing the plot and clues, Mrs. Oliver calls her old friend, the world-renowned, mustachioed Belgian private detective Hercule Poirot, and asks him to join her for the party. Without a full understanding of the request, the self-proclaimed “greatest detective in the world” nonetheless accepts her invitation and arrives by train, where he learns that his friend feels something sinister is afoot.

In fact, her suspicions are confirmed on the day of the party when Poirot and his friend find the young village woman who had been tapped as the victim in the drama actually murdered and lying in the boathouse — just as Mrs. Oliver’s plot had outlined. The grounds are filled with hundreds of villagers and young people from a nearby hostel, Lady Stubbs is mysteriously missing and may be a second victim of the murderer, several of those who knew the plot outlines are acting very strange, and the local police inspector is no closer than Poirot in figuring out what happened and why. And yet, as the detective says to Mrs. Folliat, the resident of the gatehouse whose family once owned the estate before she lost her husband and sons in the war, “Remember that, Madame. I, Hercule Poirot, do not give up.”

As Christie writes, “It was a very typical exit line.”

Events continue to unfold, but the answer seems no closer. An old, local ferryman, who had spoken to Poirot during his visit, falls off his boat and drowns, an occurrence the police determine is an accident after a night of drinking. Poirot is not so certain. Sir George returns to his house in London. Lady Stubbs has not reappeared, and her body has not been found.

Sitting back in his London flat, Poirot is attempting to put together the pieces of the puzzle before him and the one in his mind from the events five weeks earlier. He is an older man in this story, and many of the younger characters do not know of his reputation. Nonetheless, Poirot understands his skill at reading the criminal mind better than any other, and he is determined to solve the mystery. His fingers find an improbable piece of dark gray in the puzzle that fits in the blue sky and all of a sudden, he realizes that it is part of an airplane.

“Yes,” murmured Poirot to himself, “that is what one must do. The unlikely piece here, the improbable piece there, the oh-so-rational piece that is not what it seems; all of these have their appointed place, and once they are fitted in, eh bien! there is an end of the business! All is clear. All is — as they say nowadays — in the picture.”

Speaking to the Inspector in his flat, the detective notes that “Mrs. Folliat knows a great deal that we do not.” When the Inspector and Chief Constable protest that Poirot’s thesis is “impossible” and they know it is impossible, he replies, “Oh no, it is not impossible at all! Listen, and I will tell you.”

Mrs. Folliat and others in Devon are surprised to see Poirot return. It only takes a few key interviews, some on-site sleuthing, and then the detective sits with the key individual who knows what happened and accurately describes the circumstances of the three murders. That individual thanks Poirot for coming to describe what the detective now knows to be true and asks him to leave. The story ends with: “There are some things that one has to face quite alone. . . .”

Greenway House in Devon, the holiday home of Agatha Christie, now owned by The National Trust (credit: National Trust)

In reading the backstory for the publication of Dead Man’s Folly, I learned that Christie originally wrote it in 1954 with the intention of donating the proceeds to a fund set up to buy stained glass windows for her local church at Churston Ferrers. She filled the story with references to local places, including her own home of Greenway, but then decided to expand the novella into a full-length novel, Dead Man’s Folly, which was published two years later. Christie donated a Miss Marple story (Greenshaw’s Folly) to the church fund instead.

The country house in Dead Man’s Folly was inspired by Agatha Christie’s own holiday home, Greenway House in Devon, which looks over the River Dart. Now owned and managed by the National Trust, it was also used in the filming of the 2013 TV adaptation of the novel.

So much of life is working to figure out the puzzle. There are many things we do not know and will never know. But unlike in life, the fun of the mystery novel is knowing that in the hands of a wonderful writer and storyteller like Agatha Christie, all will be revealed. Eh bien, mon vieux.

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: I am on a mission to read one murder mystery each month during 2023. Click here to read the review of And Then There Were None.

Photo by Gokhan Polat on Unsplash

Liz Vice’s road to redemption

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In honor of Black History Month, I am exploring the work of musicians of color who are reclaiming their musical heritage while taking us forward musically and socially. The first three in this year’s series featured Allison Russell, Kaia Kater, and Joy Oladokun. For the MLK weekend, I featured the work of Ruthie Foster. Today we’ll celebrate the music of Liz Vice.

Liz Vice is a musician best known for her gospel, soul, and R&B-infused sound. The Bluegrass Situation (BGS), among other reviewers, has noted her debt to earlier gospel-based civil rights advocates such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sam Cooke, Mavis Staples, the Staples Singers, the Ward Sisters, Aretha Franklin, and Mahalia Jackson.

We often forget how much religious music was infused in the counterculture back in the 1960s, and as the BBC mentions in a great article about the era, “The music of the black church was infusing and inspiring the political consciousness of folk music; gospel was no longer just for the religious but the foundation for much ‘60s protest.” 

Vice’s breakthrough album came in 2015 and is entitled, There’s A Light. Raised in Portland, Oregon, and now living in Brooklyn, Vice — as Glide noted in a review —

…has performed with artists such as Joss Stone, Blind Boys of Alabama, Boz Scaggs, and Lake Street Dive. No matter how large the venue, Vice’s genuine approach to her artistry and playful interaction with the audience makes everyone feel as if they are at home sitting on the couch, witnessing a friend sing their heart out.

Here’s the title track from that first album, performed during the Portland Soundcheck sessions.

2018’s Save Me was Vice’s next album, and the title track is a powerful song that blends her beautiful voice with the bass of the piano and the calming, ethereal sound of the strings. It was featured on the CBS series The Equalizer, which generated another group of Liz Vice fans.

In this temporary world, I tired out my tongue / Empty conversations with the enemy’s lies / Which way to go but onward, soldier, know we leave inside / So like a storm, I’m moving forward / Like an eagle in flight [Chorus] Save me from myself / Release me from my own hell / Save me from myself / Release me from my own hell

The song Fancy Feet celebrates “the hope and love of living plainly without expectations or affectations”

I clean up really nice when I need to / I’m no princess crystal slippers ain’t my thang / Oh I feel fancy when my feet are runnin’ wild and free.

The official music video is a partnership with Vice and her friends at Bridge of Hope Africa Ministries (BOHAM). As Vice says, after BOHAM graciously agreed to participate, “in return I thought it would be super fun to allow people to see the beautiful work that BOHAM is doing in Uganda.”

BGS described Vice as someone “who is bringing her own vision of social justice and the powerful, playful bounce of soul back to modern religious music.” You can experience that vision in See the Day, which came out in 2020 and shows Vice bringing those social justice issues to the forefront of her work.

I wanna see the day when justice rolls / Like a mighty river floods out of control / May that day be today when together we say / Let justice, let justice roll

This Land is Your Land is one of my favorite songs, and I wasn’t sure that I felt a rewrite was necessary. But as Vice told Glide:

“I sat down and re-wrote lyrics of Woody Guthrie’s song “This Land Is Your Land” with my friends Paul Zach and Orlando Palmer just one day shy of the Unite The Right Rally one year anniversary. The purpose was to write lyrics that told the origin story of America. There are a lot of reasons to celebrate being American but one thing that must first be talked about is the history. Healing can’t begin without first acknowledge the gaping wound created by the colonization, the mass genocide of the Indigenous people, and the enslavement of African slaves. There is still much work to be done,” says Vice.

And after I listened to her moving revision, I understand Vice’s important perspective on the need to hear origin stories in everything — even our iconic songs.

I want to end this sampling of Liz Vice’s music with her latest release: Promise Land.

So I’ll press on until we make it to the Promise Land / I have been up the mountain and back again / Oh my eyes have seen the glory and I heard God’s plan / I’ll press on until we make it to the Promise Land.

Vice has always had a gift for storytelling that gets at the heart of living. As No Depression magazine noted,

The road to redemption is filled with uncertainty, doubt, self-deception, pain, and anguish, and even when you find salvation, there’s no guarantee that joy and love will erase completely the pain and doubt….Liz Vice walks the stony road to redemption, delivering tunes that celebrate the victory over the illusions that hold us down while acknowledging the heavy weight of self-doubt and missed opportunities for loving others that we bear.

Join her on this walk!

More to come…

DJB

Things just take the time they take

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We often push back against simple reality, living as if we are the masters of time. Our lives are filled with to-do lists that we’ll never complete, increasing the anxiety that is an all-too-common feature of 21st century living. As technology gives us the ability to work faster, we quickly fill up the time “saved” with more tasks. We become increasingly impatient when we can’t force life to keep the pace we’ve chosen.

Sound familiar? If so, realizing that if you live to be 80 years old, your life span will only total 4,000 weeks may be a good place to begin facing reality.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021) by Oliver Burkeman begins with the simple fact that we won’t live forever. In the grand scheme of things, we won’t even live very long at all. We all know this intellectually, but we structure our lives and our priorities as if our time will stretch on indefinitely. While many of us have used up more than half of that 4,000-week allotment of time, we nonetheless buy into efficiency experts and productivity gurus who push us to make almost infinitely ambitious plans. If we stop to notice, we’ll see that we are frenetically doing tasks instead of experiencing the wonder of life that is all around us.

And why do we fail to make the best use of a small amount of time? Because to embrace a life with limits is to admit that we’re not superhuman; to acknowledge that we cannot master time. It is to accept the fact that we’re mortal, and that we’ll die. Probably sooner than we wish.

Burkeman, a self-described “recovering productivity geek”, tells us in this thoughtful book that we’ll only truly live the life we’re given when we accept those limits and understand our mortality; when we acknowledge we have “the human disease” and understand, as Kate Bowler has written, that there is simply no cure for being human.

The first half of Burkeman’s work is focused on facing “finitude” — how being human is bound up with our finite time. The details differ, but

We all recoil from the notion that this is it — that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at.

How do we deal with this challenge? If you’ve been paying attention to anything I’ve written over the past few years, you’ll not be surprised to find that Burkeman’s paradox of limitation rings true to me. The more one tries to manage time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more one confronts “the facts of finitude instead — and works with them, rather than against them — the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.”

We’ve all heard the Greek myth of Sisyphus who is punished for his arrogance by having to push an enormous boulder up a hill, only to see it roll back down so he has to repeat the action for all eternity. Burkeman suggests that in the contemporary version, “Sisyphus would empty his inbox, lean back, and take a deep breath, before hearing a familiar ping: ‘You have new messages . . .'”

The book’s second half is structured to help the reader move “beyond control” to where we confront life on its terms, not ours. You’ll never be liberated. “And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining.”

Burkeman isn’t suggesting that we shouldn’t plan for the future. That’s not the problem. “The problem — the source of all the anxiety — is the need that we feel … to be able to know that those efforts will prove successful.” We can’t know that things will turn out all right. The struggle for certainty, he writes, “is an intrinsically hopeless one.” And many spiritual traditions point this out. “Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place” cautions one of the founding texts of Taoism.

I have a spiritual mentor who is fond of saying, “the job of God is already taken.” Throughout this provocative book we learn how to mind our own business, which is the only thing we really control.

We are also taught to give up seeing everything we do in life as laying the groundwork for something else. Those caught up in the capitalistic world’s pressure to instrumentalize our time learn how breaking our days into billable hours saps meaning from our lives. Burkeman provides a much more satisfying — to my thinking — way to consider “living in the moment.” We’re always “living in the moment” he asserts. We never had any other option.

One of the most useful chapters focuses on the need to rediscover rest. We have seen the decline of pleasure since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Even in our time off we’re supposed to be “investing in our future.” But is work — especially in the modern capitalist model — the highest human calling? To fully inhabit the only life we ever get, we have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth. As one Marxist writer put it, we have the right to be lazy. Burkeman would add, we not only have the right, but we have the need to do so.

This book came to me via recommendations from high-powered and highly productive colleagues who are taking time mid-career to figure out what’s next. It is certainly an appealing book for that cohort, but also for the young student and professional as well as those of us who have already passed through the first two “thirds” of life. There is much for each of us to consider.

Things just take the time they take. The sooner we accept that fact and admit that the level of control demanded by the efficiency experts will never be attained, the sooner we can live the only life we have more fully.

More to come…

DJB

The Weekly Reader links to written works I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

Image by annca from Pixabay

Happy Valentine’s Day

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Candice had selected a special book to take with her today to the Takoma school in DC where she tutors young children in reading. When I saw it, I smiled. It was the perfect choice.

Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch (1991) by Eileen Spinelli is — to put it simply — the best Valentine’s Day book ever. Mr. Hatch is the loneliest man in town. He would leave his brick house at 6:30 sharp every morning to walk to the shoelace factory, where he worked. At lunchtime he would sit alone in the corner, eating his cheese and mustard sandwich and drinking a cup of coffee. Sometimes he brought a prune for dessert.

Then one Saturday, the postman dropped off a mysterious package. Mr. Hatch didn’t normally receive much mail because he didn’t have any friends. But inside he found a big heart-shaped box tied up with a bow and filled with candy. The note with the package simply said, “Somebody loves you.”

Mr. Hatch had a secret admirer!

Over the course of the next few pages, Mr. Hatch is transformed. He takes the candy to share with his fellow workers at the factory. He helps out the men running the newspaper stand and the meat counter. He bakes brownies for the neighborhood kids. He even pulls out his old harmonica to play for backyard parties.

Suddenly, though, his mood changes. Only one other person knows why. But by book’s end, Mr. Hatch learns who loves him. And it is more wonderful than he ever imagined.

As I do virtually every time I read this story, I cried.

You can listen — and cry if you wish — to the story as told in this beautiful reading by Hector Elizondo.

Here’s wishing you a Valentine’s Day where you discover — and hear from — all those who love you.

Flowers for my Valentine…from a not-so-secret admirer

More to come…

DJB

Photo of abstract valentines by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash

The best journeys are the long ones

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The mail brought a friend’s new book about the journey from her childhood home in Minnesota to life today in a village in France. Her adventures include years in New York, working as Caroline Kennedy’s editorial assistant, and living in a gypsy caravan outside Paris. I dug in with anticipation.

A Long Way from Iowa: From the Heartland to the Heart of France (2023) by Janet Hulstrand is a delightful memoir that takes us from her grandmother’s hometown in Bonair, Iowa, to the author’s home in the French countryside. We learn much about Janet’s journey, including the complicated relationship with the two women who fueled her love for learning and exploration. A testament to family and the writing life, A Long Way from Iowa will interest those who seek to understand the people and places that shape the path they choose.

I caught up with Janet who enthusiastically agreed to chat about her newest work.

DJB: “A Long Way from Iowa” is a memoir. What’s the difference between a memoir and an autobiography?

JH: They’re both the author telling his or her own personal story. But a memoir is focused on a particular aspect of a life: it doesn’t attempt to tell the whole story, like an autobiography does. There are two main threads in my memoir: one is my coming to terms with my mostly positive, but often conflictual relationship with my mother, and to a lesser degree with my grandmother as well. And the other thread is about my becoming a writer. These two threads are very strongly interwoven, since I believe that both my mother and grandmother would have liked to be able to be writers themselves. But they didn’t have that chance; I am the lucky one who got to live out their unspoken dreams. I wanted to pay tribute to them for the legacy they left me; so I’ve tried to tell a bit of their stories, as well as mine.

You begin by writing about your grandmother. You say you didn’t really like her, yet she was a big reason you wrote this book. Why was she such an influence on you?

As a child, I thought that she didn’t like me, and as a child I felt that the only thing I could do about that was to not like her back. But then as an adult I realized, through a series of little epiphanies that I describe in the book, that she was almost certainly a frustrated writer. That gave me more sympathy for her. It also set me on a 30-year search for her lost diaries. I didn’t find them, but I did learn quite a bit more about her — about who she really was, what was important to her, and some of the frustration and loneliness I think she felt in her life — in the process of looking for them. I also realized that a large part of the reason I became a writer started with her: with her love of reading and writing, and with the way she instilled that love in her children, and indirectly in her grandchildren as well.

(Janet in her grandmother’s hometown)

Your story is grounded in place. How important are places in understanding who you are?

I think they are very important. There are three places where I feel most at home: Minnesota, Brooklyn, and France. These places are very different from each other, and yet all of them are very important to me. I want to explore the power of place even more in my next book, which is in the very hazy planning stage right now.

As a professional writer and editor, how difficult is it to write about yourself?

The writing is not difficult at all. It’s publishing that is! As an editor and writing coach, I spend a lot of time telling my clients that everyone’s story is worth telling.  And I believe this with all my heart and soul. Having said that, now that I’ve published my own memoir I find myself waiting anxiously to see how people will receive it. It’s a bit intimidating to wait for people to judge not only your writing but perhaps also the life you’ve lived and what you have to say about it.

You are very open about life’s challenges, from times of social isolation to a broken marriage. What advice would you give other writers who want to tackle sensitive subjects in their past?

I think it’s important to share the parts you feel you want to share with others, the parts that might help others in living their own lives; and then you have to have the courage to just tell the truth. But you also have to think about the repercussions for other people. What things do you have a right to tell, and what things might impinge on the privacy, or the happiness, of others? In my case, in order to tell my story I had to write about the fact that my marriage failed, but I chose to say very little about the details of it for a variety of reasons. I took great care in writing my book — and most especially in editing it — to think about how any of the personal details I revealed in telling my story might affect others. I hope I’ve been sufficiently respectful in that regard, and I hope I haven’t hurt anyone’s feelings. It can at times be tricky.

What books do you like to read?

I love reading good fiction, but I tend to spend more time reading nonfiction. It gives me the chance to fill gaps in my knowledge of history that I’d like to fill. But memoir is really my favorite genre. There are a couple of memoirs set in France — French Spirits by Jeffrey Greene, and I’ll Never Be French by Mark Greenside — that I read over and over again because I teach them. And I will be teaching an online class in April for Politics and Prose bookstore. We’ll be reading four memoirs set in the Midwest, including A Long Way from Iowa. I’m really looking forward to that.

Many thanks, Janet.

The pleasure was mine!   

More to come…

DJB

Author photo: Kevin Sisson

A new kind of American troubadour

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In honor of Black History Month, I am exploring the work of musicians of color who are reclaiming their musical heritage while taking us forward musically and socially. The first two in this year’s series featured Allison Russell and Kaia Kater. For the MLK weekend, I featured the work of Ruthie Foster. Today we’ll celebrate the music of Joy Oladokun.

Nigerian American singer-songwriter Joy Oladokun was born in Delaware, raised in Arizona, and is now based in Nashville, that hotbed of country and Americana music. Yet in many ways, Oladokun reminds me of the folksingers of my youth. She has a beautiful and soulful voice, often heard over the delicate sound of her acoustic guitar. Her songs are poetry for today’s America, sung with pain and passion.

Oladokun is a Black Christian lesbian singer-songwriter who works to connect with people across the full breadth of their emotional experience. Billboard touted her album in defense of my own happiness as one of the “top 10 best LGBTQ albums of 2020.” As Nikki Birch of NPR wrote for her Tiny Desk concert, “Oladokun shines a light on the subjects of grief, politics and life in America via the lens of someone who looks and loves differently.”

Taking the Heat, performed for her Austin City Limits debut as well as in her Tiny Desk concert, is dedicated to the late rapper Mac Miller. As Birch notes, “the song examines the way we, as consumers, treat the artists who create the music that resonates with us: ‘Does anybody ever wonder when the legends die young / If there’s anything we could have done…'”

I See America (seen here from Jimmy Kimmel’s show and also on the NPR concert), is introduced on the latter with the admonition to be strapped in for a “deep dive into my mental health, or lack thereof.” The song is written as a response to “the low value placed on American lives, be they Black or other.”

Oladokun opens her Tiny Desk performance with If You Got a Problem, “a sweet ballad that pledges unconditional friendship through the lonely and the messy times.” It concludes with Sunday, a tale of identity crisis. Birch notes that “While the theme is heavy, the delivery is uplifting, once again demonstrating how Oladokun’s penetrating gaze into the human psyche yields beautiful storytelling in spite of the pain that surely inspired it.”

Oladokun’s website bio — written in her all-lower-case style — tells how Tracy Chapman changed her life.

the daughter of nigerian immigrants, she was the first in the family to be born in america. after some time in delaware, they moved to arizona. dad’s record collection included hundreds of titles, and he introduced joy to everyone from phil collins, peter gabriel, and king sunny adé to conway twitty and johnny cash. as mom and dad stressed academics, she wasn’t allowed to watch tv on weekdays. on saturday, they would “either rent a movie from blockbuster or watch the thousands of hours of concert and music video footage dad had recorded since coming to the states.” one afternoon, she witnessed tracy chapman pay homage to nelson mandela during his 70th birthday tribute at wembley arena.

it changed everything…

“i grew up in casa grande, which is in the middle of nowhere in arizona,” she goes on. “i was surrounded by images of white dudes with guitars. i was programmed to believe people around me listened if somebody had a guitar. as a shy kid and one of the only black children in town, i had a lot of social anxiety. seeing tracy chapman up there with a guitar in front of a full stadium was such an empowering moment. i ran into the next room and begged my parents to buy me a guitar for christmas—which was six months away,” she laughs.

As Oladokun has reached a wider audience, she is joined in duets and onstage by some of Nashville’s brightest artists and up-and-coming musicians. Bigger Man, performed with Maren Morris, begins with the powerful lyrics of what it means to be marginalized in America.

Here you go again | Still loud | Still right | Still not listening | How it’s always been | Doesn’t make it | Make any kind of sense

Oladokun’s duet with the always amazing Chris Stapleton, Sweet Symphony, is already becoming a classic “wedding dance” song. Not bad for a folk/soul singer-songwriter and an alt country/bluegrass legend … and you gotta love the puppets in the video.

In this 2021 concert footage from the Ryman, the uber-talented Jason Isbell stops by to play some sweet lead guitar, joining Elliott Skinner on keyboard and Jaime Woods on backing vocals, as Oladokun covers Bonnie Raitt’s I Can’t Make You Love Me.

And singing alone, with just her guitar, Oladokun does one of the most beautiful and heartfelt covers ever of Paul McCartney‘s iconic Blackbird. As the former Beatle has noted,

“You were only waiting for this moment to arise” was about, you know, the black people’s struggle in the southern states, and I was using the symbolism of a blackbird. It’s not really about a blackbird whose wings are broken, you know, it’s a bit more symbolic.

Joy Oladokun’s songwriting is “brutally honest, yet inviting, as she fearlessly tackles tough topics.” Coupled with a powerful yet welcoming voice, hers is a talent one wants to revisit again and again. And she wants us to immerse ourselves in her music. Her website biography ends with this note:

“when you listen to me, i want you to feel like you’ve taken an emotional shower,” she leaves off. “that’s what i’m trying to accomplish for myself. to me, music is a vehicle of catharsis. i write a lot of sad songs, but i always push for a sliver of a silver lining or glimmer of hope it could be better. that’s why i’m writing in the first place. i want you to be changed when you hear me, and not because i’m special, but because i make music with the intention to change myself.

Let’s go out with Judas from the in defense of my own happiness album.

More to come…

DJB

Image credit Joy Oladokun

I’ll see you at the ground-breaking

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The effective leaders I have worked with all have similar traits. They are good listeners. They are empathetic. They use their own histories and personalities to set an effective narrative around a positive vision. They are quick to praise others and embrace a wide circle. They are forward facing. They are optimistic but practical. They have a sense of humor. Most of all they understand how to meet the moment they are given.

Tuesday evening’s State of the Union address was just another example of how the president personifies those qualities and is meeting the moment.

In America, it is easy to get caught up in the never-ending stream of right-wing grievance. “Inflation! Recession! Balloon! Fentanyl! The Border! Hunter’s laptop! China! CRT! Antifa! Debt!” The media takes the bait and says, “Biden’s achievements are not breaking through to the public!” And they are not breaking through because the media doesn’t want you to know.

The owners of the country’s most lucrative media properties have more in common with the beneficiaries of the status quo than they have in common with you and me and everyone we know on account of their being among those who benefit from the status quo. They dislike inflation…it makes their planetary fortunes worth less.

All the while, President Biden has had one of the most consequential presidencies since FDR and the New Deal. In meeting the moment of our multiple national crises of the looming loss of democracy, heightened domestic terrorism, inflamed racial tensions, environmental degradation, falling international stature, obscene wealth inequality, inequitable application of justice, and loss of fundamental rights for more than one-half of our citizens, he has remained steady, firm, and resolute.

After graciously congratulating both Republican and Democratic members of Congress by name, Biden — unfiltered by the media for 70 minutes — laid out his promise to “continue to rebuild the middle class, hollowed out by 40 years of policies based on the idea that cutting taxes and concentrating wealth among the ‘job creators’ would feed the economy and create widespread prosperity.” He rightly noted that this has created a very biased and rigged system that protects the wealthy.

“Capitalism without competition is not capitalism,” he noted. “It’s extortion. It’s exploitation.”

Biden reminded us of this fact as he drove a stake in the heart of neo-liberalism philosophy that says government should leave the all-wise markets alone.

I’m not a big believer in trickle-down economy, (Biden said) and so everything I look at from the time I took this office, but even before that when I was a senator all those years, is what’s the best shot to grow the economy from the bottom up and the middle out because when that happens everybody does well. The wealthy do very, very well. 

Historian Heather Cox Richardson notes that the trickle-down theory never worked under Ronald Reagan and it hasn’t worked since. Biden’s vision is proven and invests in all of us.

He listed the accomplishments of his administration so far: unemployment at a 50-year low, 800,000 good manufacturing jobs, lower inflation, 10 million new small businesses, the return of the chip industry to the United States, more than $300 billion in private investment in manufacturing, more than 20,000 new infrastructure projects, lower health care costs, Medicare negotiations over drug prices, investment in new technologies to combat climate change. He promised to continue to invest in the places and people who have been forgotten.

In place of the failed economic policies begun in 1980, Biden sees a “national vision that includes everyone. It is a modernized version of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.” As historian Eric Rauchway has written,

The New Deal mattered then, at the cusp of spring in 1933, because it gave Americans permission to believe in a common purpose that was not war. Neither before nor since have Americans so rallied around an essentially peaceable form of patriotism. The results of that effort remain with us, in forms both concrete and abstract.

President Biden sees the same need to have Americans believe in a common purpose. And in his address to a joint session of Congress, he repeatedly offered to work across the aisle for a range of widely popular programs with those Republicans who still believe in the American idea of democracy and freedom for all Americans.

In a key moment of setting his own narrative, President Biden thanked those Republicans who voted for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, “then tweaked those who had voted against it but claimed credit for funding.”

Biden said they didn’t have to worry. He had promised to be the president for all Americans, not just those in blue states. “We’ll fund your projects,” he said. Then, with a smile on his face he added the kicker:

And I’ll see you at the ground-breaking.

Joe Biden knows his ideas and plans are popular. Americans understand our roads and bridges are crumbling, and we want them to be fixed. And he knows that Republican members of Congress — who are rewarded for outrage by FOX and other media outlets — will show up at the ground-breaking for infrastructure work, after voting against the funding for those very projects. They’ll take credit to try and fool their constituents.

Mitch McConnell’s appearance at the ground-breaking for the bridge across the Ohio River that will be repaired using union labor by the “Cowboys in the Sky” is just the most obvious example of many.

And then, (Richardson writes) when he began to talk about future areas of potential cooperation, Republicans went feral. They heckled, catcalled, and booed, ignoring House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) attempts to shush them. At the State of the Union, in the U.S. Capitol, our lawmakers repeatedly interrupted the president with insults, yelling “liar” and “bullsh*t.” And cameras caught it all. 

Extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), her hands cupping her wide open mouth to scream at the president, became the face of the Republican Party.

This is NOT what leadership looks like

James Fallows wrote, “Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last night was effective — for him, for his policies, for his party, and I think for the country.”

It’s what leadership looks like.

More to come…

DJB

Image of SOTU Address from WhiteHouse.gov

In search of paradise

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Paradise — that often sought-for and always-elusive vision — is integral to many religious traditions. It seems appropriate, given the elusiveness, that the culture which officially invented Paradise was, upon closer inspection, a “treasure house of riddles.”

That observation came from one of the world’s most seasoned travelers and astute cultural commentators, who set off around the globe to explore a number of our holiest, yet very troubled, sites of paradise. Almost immediately he wondered what kind of paradise could ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict. It was a question that would continue to surface throughout his travels.

The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise (2023) by Pico Iyer — both an external odyssey and an internal journey — is the result of those travels. In a series of memorable essays, Iyer takes the reader from places like the mosques and gardens of Iran, where paradise was invented, to the lakes of Kashmir, which were part of his mother’s childhood. From what one reviewer aptly described as “the wrathful Old Testament landscape of Broome, Australia,” to the Hindu holy city of Varanasi. From the contested center of Jerusalem to the sterile towers of North Korea and the temples of Koyasan, Japan.

Iyer, as one expects from such an experienced travel writer, leads the reader with skillful and expressive descriptions of the physical places. But he also calls upon a rich array of literature to flesh out the meaning of these holy shrines while examining the conflicts — open and hidden — often found there. We learn of the contradictions of paradise, such as in Iran where passionate, holy pilgrims were eager to live their faith and dreams but who wished to have no part of religious rule.

In one essay, Iyer recalls his days traveling throughout Japan with the Dali Lama and recounts the story of how, inevitably, someone would ask what to do after having been disappointed by a dream not realized. The dreams differed but the disillusionment was always the same.

“Wrong dream!” the Dalai Lama would respond.

While he has Buddhist sensitivities, Iyer is a secular seeker at heart who invites us into a deeper spiritual meditation by using these travels to explore his personal journey toward his dreams and paradise. Why search? In one answer he quotes the Irish poet Seamus Heaney who, upon the release from prison of Nelson Mandela, wrote lines that dared to believe that longed-for possibilities can come true: “Once in a lifetime . . . hope and history rhyme.” Heaney “was wise enough to know that a life that doesn’t know possibility takes in only half the truth.”

But what we know of reality has its limits. Jerusalem, Iyer writes, “was a parable that had turned into a cautionary tale, a warning about what we do when we’re convinced we know it all.” Some aspects of paradise defy explanation. Outside the city’s Basilica of the Agony, an unintentionally ironic sign reads, “PLEASE, No Explanations Inside the Church.”

There is usually a gap between our preconceived notion of happiness and a deeper truth. “The places we avoid [are] often closer to us than the ones we eagerly seek out,” Iyer notes.

Other observers have considered the limits of our understanding of reality in this life. C.S. Lewis, for instance, has written that “he — along with every other mortal at any time — may be utterly mistaken as to the situation he is in.”

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them — never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

The contradictory notions about reality are of our own making, says Lewis, and the notions will all eventually be knocked from under our feet. Lewis has the sense that “some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer.”

The fact of the simplicity is clear, even if the true understanding of reality remains cloudy, for some Christian and Buddhist mystics. Iyer has clearly read and embraced the work of the Christian monk and mystic Thomas Merton, who traveled to the paradise of Sri Lanka and immersed himself in Buddhist thought just weeks before he died in Bangkok. In a reflection of his time with the Dali Lama, Iyer quotes Merton approvingly when the Trappist monk says that to have all the answers might be proof that you weren’t asking the right questions. “Uncertainty was perhaps the place,” adds Iyer, “where all of us — even a monk — have to make our home.”

Iyer ends this fascinating journey in a paradise his relatives encouraged him to avoid. The holy city of Varanasi is where many Hindus are cremated on funeral pyres after death. Iyer brings it together as he quotes scholar Diana Eck: “Death is not the opposite of life. It is, rather, the opposite of birth.”

The epic poem Paradise Lost, ends with “perhaps its most beautiful line: Adam’s task, the archangel who accompanies him to the gates of Eden observes, is to find ‘a Paradise within thee, happier far.'” Reviewer Thúy Đinh writes that “Seeing the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden as a necessary fall, and the Buddha’s departure from his princely estate as a conscious acceptance of human frailties, Iyer concludes that a true paradise is only attainable through displacement.”

Paradise on earth is a paradox. Often located in unimaginably beautiful landscapes or containing great holy shrines, these cities and sites have also seen incalculable suffering. Life is and. There will be good and bad. But as Merton put it, “The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer.”

It is the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, Iyer reminds us, who says, “Our goal in life is not to become more spiritual, but to become human.”

That’s where we find paradise.

More to come…

DJB

This Weekly Reader features links to recent articles, blog posts, or books that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

Image by Harkiran Kaur from Pixabay