One of my favorite singer-songwriters, Nanci Griffith, passed away in August at the much-too-early age of 68. This first Saturday Soundtrack after a summer hiatus is my recognition of this singular talent with the simple yet memorable writing and singing voice.
Griffith began her career in the late 1970s and gained prominence after a move to Nashville in the mid-1980s. At a time of electronic dance music, new wave, and grunge rock, she made it cool to like folk music again. Born near San Antonio and raised in Austin, Griffith’s Texas twang was authentic…and an acquired taste. Her mother was a real estate agent and her father was a bookseller and a fan of folk music. With his encouragement she listened to and was influenced from an early age by Odetta, Woody Guthrie, and singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, a fellow Texan. She once described her work — which she called folkabilly — by saying: “You take a whole lot of Woody Guthrie and a whole lot of Loretta Lynn, swoosh it around and it comes out as Nanci Griffith.”
An exceptional songwriter, Griffith spun narratives about small-town life and love as well as her social and political concerns. She is best known for her Love at the Five and Dime — a big hit for Kathy Mattea — with my favorite version being from Griffith’s 1988 live offering One Fair Summer Evening. The introduction alone is worth the price of the album.
It’s a Hard Life Wherever You Go is an excellent example of Nanci’s more social songs, weaving three small vignettes into a powerful statement. And Lookin’ for the Time (Working Girl) is her take on an often hidden and forgotten part of the human experience.
Besides Mattea, other artists also had successful covers of Griffith’s songs. Her Outbound Plane, from the Little Love Affairs album, was a big hit for Suzy Bogguss. The Irish song interpreter Maura O’Connell sang a memorable version of Trouble in the Fields (heard here with Griffith singing harmony).
Griffith was known as a talented interpreter of others’ songs, such as with her beautiful take on the Tom Waits tune about recognizing what we have, while we still have it — San Diego Serenade — from the Late Night Grande Hotel album. Those sentiments seem so appropriate today.
“I never saw the east coast until I moved to the west
I never saw the moonlight until it shone off of your breast
I never saw your heart until someone tried to steal it away
I never saw your tears until they rolled down your face“
Her Other Voices, Other Roomsalbum — the Grammy-winning 1993 compilation of songs by her folk mentors and heroes — showed off those interpretive sensibilities to great effect. On this album alone she pulls off Woody Guthrie’s Do-Ri-Me — with an assist from Guy Clark on vocals and the New Grass Revival’s Pat Flynn on lead flatpicked guitar — with a flair that is pure Griffith. I always felt that her interpretation of John Prine’s aching Speed of the Sound of Loneliness was the definitive one for this classic. She performs a heartfelt version of Dylan’s Boots of Spanish Leather, and provides a very personal touch to Townes Van Zandt’s Tecumseh Valley. And her simple version of the Carter Family’s Are You Tired of Me, My Darling?— with Iris Dement and Emmylou Harris on the harmony vocals — has always been my preferred interpretation of this very sad tune. The haunting line that ends each chorus reaches into the self-doubt that we all feel in one way or the other:
“Tell me, would you live life over, could you make another wife?
Are you tired of me, my darling? Answer only with your eyes.”
Nanci didn’t always sing from the folkie songbook. Give a listen to her cover of the Rolling Stones’ No Expectations from a 1991 Austin City Limits show with Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Gold, and the Indigo Girls.
Griffith suffered from two bouts with cancer and other health issues in later years. As she performed fewer dates, many younger music fans would only know her music through covers by other artists. Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson had a hit with the lovely country duet Gulf Coast Highway, co-written by Griffith and bandmate James Hooker, who sang the duet on the original. It has the line that seems so appropriate today:
“And when she dies, she says she’ll catch some blackbird’s wing,
and she will fly away to heaven, come some sweet Blue Bonnet spring.”
R.I.P. Nanci Griffith. You left us much too soon.
More to come…
DJB
Image: Cover of Nanci Griffith’s 1987 album Lone Star State of Mind
“Researchers estimate that the war in Afghanistan has cost more than 171,000 lives. It has wounded more than 20,700 U.S. service members and taken the lives of 2461 more. It has cost more than $2 trillion, which adds up to about $300 million a day for twenty years.“
Tomorrow’s twentieth anniversary of the attacks of 9/11* should lead us to step back from the failed policies of the endless war on terror and use fact-based evidence to think through the many challenges we face, which extend well beyond jihadist terror. It is past time to sort out national interests vs. partisan interests.
And it would be nice if the major news outlets would help. But as PressRun.Media founder Eric Boehlert recently pointed out, “the same press corps that said DeSantis ‘won’ the pandemic is now sure Biden ‘lost’ Afghanistan.”
So I have my doubts.
I asked a friend — a professional journalist who teaches journalism — about the media today. She shook her head and simply said, “They never learn.” Throughout August, many who write about the media for major news outlets expressed frustration with the way the issues we face are covered.
Jon Allsop in the Columbia Journalism Review contrasts the hawkish coverage of the media in Afghanistan to the overall lack of coverage about recent events in Haiti, both places where the U.S. has a history of complicity in creating crises. Much of the outrage is driven by “Washington-based politicians and national-security pundits with well-established hawkish views — and in some cases, as The Intercept has reported, ongoing professional and financial ties to the military-industrial complex.”
Throughout, the American government has lied to the American people about how well things were going in America’s longest war, as The Washington Post’s important 2019 project, “The Afghanistan Papers,” made abundantly clear….’Senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.’”
Political scientist Larry Sabato suggested that much of the slant to the Afghanistan coverage came about because the media has “been waiting for an opportunity to harshly go after Biden to prove anew how ‘balanced’ they are.”
The stakes in these decisions are incredibly high, as Heather Cox Richardson outlined in writing on national vs. partisan interests. There are important questions of when it is in America’s interest to fight a ground war. They are not easy questions, and reasonable people can disagree.
“But none of them is about partisan politics, either; they are about defining our national interest.
It strikes me that some of the same people currently expressing concern over the fate of Afghanistan’s women and girls work quite happily with Saudi Arabia, which has its own repressive government, and have voted against reauthorizing our own Violence Against Women Act. Some of the same people worrying about the slowness of our evacuation of our Afghan allies voted just last month against providing more visas for them, and others seemed to worry very little about our utter abandonment of our Kurdish allies when we withdrew from northern Syria in 2019. And those worrying about democracy in Afghanistan seem to be largely unconcerned about protecting voting rights here at home.“
Not to mention that many of those wanting to protect Americans in Afghanistan seem uninterested in stopping the spread of a disease that has already killed more than 650,000 of us.
The twentieth anniversary of 9/11 is a good time to invest in evidence-based solutions to our nation’s biggest problems which, as MichaelGerman, Elizabeth Goitein and Faiza Patel have written, isn’t jihadist terrorism any more.
“When something is labeled a “national security” threat, it is often assumed that the response will require extraordinary assertions of executive power and diminished protections for civil rights and civil liberties. This assumption has dominated our government’s response to 9/11. Yet it is rarely tested, as few counter-terrorism tactics have been evaluated for effectiveness using scientific, evidence-based methods. Indeed, in many instances, there is reason to believe these heavy-handed responses have been ineffective or even harmful.…”
And their conclusion nails it for me.
“The billions wasted on military and intelligence programs that do not demonstrably make Americans safer need to be reinvested in evidence-based solutions to our nation’s biggest problems.”
More to come…
DJB
*My post Isolated mind. Dead hearts from last Thanksgiving builds on a sermon given the Sunday after 9/11 by one of my mentors, The Rev. Dr. Frank Wade.
Oscar Charleston is the best baseball player you’ve never heard of. Don’t believe me? Bill James, the father of baseball analytics, rated Charleston as not only the greatest Negro Leagues player of them all, but as the fourth greatest baseball player of all time. According to the stats that James uses to rank player value from different eras, only Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, and Willie Mays were greater than Charleston, who was slotted just above Ty Cobb.
As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent books and articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy.
Charleston put together an other-worldly career in the Negro and Cuban leagues decades before white major league baseball decided to integrate.* A centerfielder with the range and smarts of Willie Mays, a hitter with as fearsome a stroke as Babe Ruth, and a baserunner built like a linebacker with the fast fearlessness of Ty Cobb, Charleston was the whole package. Yet in the era when he was at his best, from the late-1910s to the mid-1930s, the Negro Leagues were little noticed outside the Black community and seldom appreciated by those who ran the white leagues. That didn’t, however, keep Charleston’s fame from growing.
Negro Leagues players and sportswriters from Satchel Paige to Buck O’Neil to Turkey Stearnes said he was the best player they had ever seen. Former white baseball commissioner Happy Chandler said that Charleston and Cobb were the “greatest ballplayers he had ever laid eyes on.” Dizzy Dean said of Oscar, “He could hit a ball a mile….he didn’t have a weakness. We just threw and hoped like hell he didn’t send it out of the park.” And the great Honus Wagner, two months before Charleston’s death, said, “I’ve seen all the great players in the many years I’ve been around, and have yet to see one any greater than Charleston.” Oscar Charleston was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in 1976, and yet his reputation was still largely hidden due to his race, the era he played in, and the lack of biographical material written about him as compared with other Negro Leagues players.
Oscar Charleston played for and managed what many consider to be one of the top Negro Leagues teams of all time, the Pittsburgh Crawfords of the early 1930s. He also played for the other great team of that era, the Homestead Grays. Besides Charleston, those two teams featured Hall-of-Famers Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Willie Foster, Judy Johnson, Smokey Joe Williams, and Jud “Boojum” Wilson. As his playing days drew to a close, he built a reputation as a talented manager. Branch Rickey — who broke baseball’s color barrier when he signed Jackie Robinson — hired Charleston as the first African American scout for major league baseball.
All of this and much more comes out in Beer’s fascinating book. Using previously unknown sources, he has brought forward the forgotten history of a man who, although he was the best known player of the Negro Leagues, was identified by the occupation “baggage handler” on his death certificate. Beer’s work helps illuminate the history of this important American, who deserved so much more in life and death.
Kevin Blackistone, writing in the Washington Post, also addresses the delegitimization of Negro Leagues baseball in Shohei Ohtani and the Negro Leagues’ two-way stars. In writing of how two-way phenom Ohtani is often compared to Babe Ruth, who pitched early in his career, Blackistone makes the case that the better comparison is Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe. It was New York baseball columnist Damon Runyon who gave Radcliffe that name.
Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe
During a 1932 doubleheader that pitted Radcliffe’s Pittsburgh Crawfords against the New York Black Yankees at Yankee Stadium, Runyon witnessed Radcliffe hit a grand slam and catch Satchel Paige’s shutout in the twi-night opener, only to turn around and throw a shutout of his own in the second game.“
Radcliffe did double duty as a pitcher and catcher from 1930 to 1946. Only he did them in the Negro Leagues.
“But that Ohtani would be compared reflexively by most of us in the media to Ruth — skipping over the career not only of Radcliffe but of other Negro Leagues stars who routinely pitched and played the field, such as Hall of Famer “Bullet” Joe Rogan — reminds how baked-in the continued delegitimization of Negro Leaguers’ accomplishments is. An asterisk still hovers over their achievements, while none does for White players who also played only among themselves and not against all of the best players of their time….Negro Leagues ballplayers continue to deserve better.“
Blackistone could have called out his fellow Washington Post columnist, the recently retired Tom Boswell, over the same issue. I love Boswell’s work and encourage you to read Thomas Boswell’s best Washington Post sportswriting. However, as Beer points out, Boswell criticized the Sporting News in 1999 for listing Charleston as the sixty-seventh best player of all time, pouring on sarcasm (Was he a nineteenth-century player? A Negro Leagues star? A legend in Antarctic sandlot ball?) that makes one cringe at the white privilege and ignorance of his statements. Even the great ones swing and miss on occasion.
*Charleston’s slash line over 27 years was .350/.430/.573. His OPS was 1.003 and his OPS+ was 173. As a comparison, Babe Ruth’s career slash line was .342/.474/.690 with an OPS + of 197.
With a hint of fall in the cooler air, let’s rise early for our daily walk.
Coming by my love of the morning naturally, I gravitate to others who are facing the day at sunrise, getting an early start. Even with traditional work responsibilities in the rear view mirror, I still choose to begin the day with a walk when much of the world is throwing off its bedcovers and throwing open the windows. The possibilities for the moment, for the day, for life are clearer as I put one foot in front of the other, over and over again.
I see others up with the sun, including some familiar faces. Like Carter, the 68-year-old gentleman sitting in his wheelchair outside Ace Hardware. With his radio playing and Carter spreading smiles and sunshine, he is ready to get his Covid booster shot and do his part to help the community. There is the young man striding through downtown, listening to a podcast on his headphones while sporting stylish shorts made from the much-loved design of the Maryland flag. Or our neighbor Ed, who — as his retirement project — is training a young English Labrador on various aspects of good dog behavior. The lab also looks sharp, sporting a well-groomed pale yellow coat.
First encounters when stepping off the stoop will invariably be with those, like Ed, on labors of love: dog walkers, for instance, or parents strolling their children to the day care center. While their canine and human charges are eager to meet the day, the adult parts of the tandem display every state of being from catatonic to highly caffeinated.
Several city blocks separate me from my morning shot of caffeine. At Kaldi’s Social House there’s a warm and welcoming “hello David” waiting as Betty, Jo, Kadiato, Rayyana, and Sahr begin to make my favorite summer drink (cold brew with oat milk) before I’m ten steps into the shop. The conversation ranges from the changing seasons (Rayyana, from Saudi Arabia, has never adjusted to the cold of winter) to fashionable glasses (Betty owns more pairs than I do). From school (“Whatever possessed me to sign up for a class that ends at 9:40 at night when I have to be up and out to work at 6!”) to smiles (Jo says she can see them through the masks by looking at the eyes). From health care (dental coverage seems to be a luxury for many) to sleep (no one ever gets enough).
One of the hardest jobs I ever had was waiting tables, so their cheerfulness early in the morning while serving a steady stream of customers is a treat I cherish. Labor Day is an especially good day to acknowledge, appreciate, and admire all those who make our day better.
Penguin Rush Hour (Credit: WMATA)
Face-to-face with the 21st century labor force
Living across the street from the Metro station, I encounter people heading to their labors. Prior to the pandemic, many would be dressed alike in the professional Washington uniform — which is key context in making the 100-foot-long Penguin Rush Hour mural at the station so deliciously delightful.
The professional classes and knowledge workers have their own set of issues, but Labor Day is a celebration of those who work with their hands, their backs, their full bodies, and — yes — their brains. Among those millions of workers are the morning people I see on my walks — those of the underpaid labor class who are up early to make sure the rest of us can function.
Besides the crew at Kaldi, I see a range of those working early and long hours for much less pay than the men and women heading to Washington’s gleaming office buildings. People with names and jobs that matter.
Like Jorge, one of the numerous street sweepers and trash collectors who turn the space in front of Georgia Avenue’s bars and clubs from a mini-version of New Orleans the morning after Fat Tuesday into a welcoming space for the day.
Plant whisperers like Raphael, who move heavy hoses, watering trucks, and wheelbarrows full of mulch around to keep downtown lush and blooming.
Farmers like Elda and George from Barajas Produce who work seven days a week and drive up to two hours on a Saturday morning to bring juicy peaches, striking red and yellow sweet peppers, creamy milk, eggs with yolks bursting with flavor, delectable honey, and rich goat’s milk cheese to fill our refrigerators and freezers.
Small business owners like Kim and Young, who open their dry cleaners at 7 a.m. with a smile (Kim) and a quip (Young) to ensure that on the increasingly rare days when I need a suit and dress shirt, mine are cleaned and pressed.
Recognize the humanity
Inevitably old school in nature, I always try — at a minimum — to smile and say hello when I pass the people who inhabit my mornings. I thank the street sweepers and plant whisperers. I say a word to admire the handiwork of the construction crews. I connect when the Ethiopian immigrant setting up the outside tables at Whole Foods urges me to “seize the day!”
Silver Spring is enriched with one of the largest Ethiopian communities in the DMV.
Many of those I meet are immigrants, and as I learned from my barber — a registered nurse before coming to the U.S. from the Republic of Georgia — they have often taken less “professional” jobs than their training and backgrounds would suggest. As Anand Giridharadaswrote in his book The True American,
“Selling Americans three tamales for a dollar was a strange landing for a twenty-seven-year-old who had trained to command fighter jets and qualified as a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. But so it is with the many who leave their native soil and find that to rise, they must first sink into the fresh earth below. Rais was no longer a Bangladesh Air Force man. He was a Buckner Food Mart man.“
They are the ones doing work that many of us don’t want to do. They have the names that many of us mispronounce — or, in fact, dispronounce — which is a term for people saying names incorrectly on purpose, to ensure that immigrants know whose country this really is. Natalie Goldberg reminds us of the importance of names. They tell us that people exist. “Seeing names makes us remember. A name is what we carry all our life, and we respond to its call in a classroom, to its pronunciation at a graduation, or to our name whispered in the night.”
Those with names we forget or mispronounce are too often being used by our capitalistic system for our benefit, and we much too frequently overlook them in our rush to get through the day.
I see people every morning who remind me how much the quality of my life is enhanced by their willingness to sink themselves into the fresh earth of a new country, get up very early even if they are hurting, face the sunrise, and get to work. I think about the millions in factories, driving trucks, in hospitals, in Amazon warehouses, on high-rise construction projects I don’t see, who do the same. Rather than push back against people of color and immigrants, perhaps we could focus on all they have done for this country, welcome them, and help them realize their part of the American dream. We are all, in a fashion, immigrants.
Oligarchy and the American way
To see a way forward, we must first take a brief look back at America’s relationship to the people who build and take care of the things and people in our country.
For most of its existence, American capitalism has grown on the backs of cheap, disposable labor.
Southern slaveowners ruled the country from its founding to 1860, supported by major commercial interests in the North.* To break the hold of chattel slavery it took the creation of an anti-slavery, pro-business Republican party and a civil war.
Robber barons ruled the country from the 1870s to the 1930s with their repressive labor practices and outright theft of land, minerals, and life. To break their hold on power it took a country overwhelmed by the needs of the Great Depression, the creation of a progressive wing of the Democratic party, and leaders like Frances Perkins. It took the election of an administration and Congress that passed federal legislation in the form of the New Deal. Strong unions gave us the weekend, the 8-hour work day, the 40-hour work week, paid vacations, sick leave, and more. The New Deal and unions — though far from perfect and far from all-inclusive — nonetheless produced the country’s first true middle class. In the 1970s, we had no billionaires.
That lasted until 1980 and the ascension of an anti-regulatory, anti-civil rights, anti-union, anti-voting rights, pro-corporate Republican party and the election of Ronald Reagan, supported by the conservative Supreme Courts of Chief Justice William Rehnquist and especially Chief Justice John Roberts. Regulations on business were slashed, taxes were cut, protections for the working class were weakened, access to the polls for people who did not vote Republican was limited, and income inequality soared. We are now in our third period of oligarchy, this time led by Wall Street, Silicon Valley, multinational business interests, and a corporate media. Income inequality has reached Gilded Age levels, with the top 0.1% of Americans taking in more than 196 times the income of the bottom 90 percent.
As in the previous two periods, this unfettered capitalism is built on cheap, disposable labor and the fostering of hatred between working classes.
A way forward
The top 0.1% is working hard to obscure the fact that it is in the best interest of 90% of Americans to seek out what Heather McGhee has called a solidarity dividend. To achieve their goal, those at the top want us to forget that labor is composed of human beings: real, breathing, loving people, striving to advance and meet their own American dream. But the deck is stacked against them as long as the top 0.1% hold the power of government.
Teri Kanefield has written that we have the power to change. “What we learned from getting out of our second oligarchy, the age of robber barons, is that federal legislation can solve the dark money problem and move us toward a fully functioning multi-racial democracy.”
We need to elect people to office who believe in the project to — in the unforgettable words of Langston Hughes — “Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed.” We need to push Congress hard to pass laws to protect our democracy against the oligarchs and approve legislation so everyone can make a decent living. We need to tax those who for too long have taken a free ride on our backs and on our time and wealth. We need to make sure everyone can vote.
We also need to recognize the humanity of those who toil for our benefit. It becomes much harder to demonize someone you know. In addition to taking steps to make government fairer for all, Labor Day is as good a day as any to begin to take the time to stop, smile, talk, learn their stories, and thank the morning people in your life. You may be amazed at what you learn.
More to come…
DJB
*Almost two-thirds of the presidents before the civil war were slave-owning southerners — nine of the first fifteen presidents — and one more had strong southern leanings. Of the 21 four-year terms during that period, this southern group held office during 16 of those terms.
Next week More to Come will awaken from its summer slumber with posts on a range of current issues, places that matter, roots musicians, and occasional bursts of radical common sense. But before we get back into the thick of things, let’s take the time to honor that great tradition of the August holiday.
“…anybody who travels knows that you’re not really doing so in order to move around – you’re traveling in order to be moved. And really what you’re seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you’re sleepwalking through your daily life.”
To get back into the swing of blogging, and — more importantly — to celebrate current trips and anticipate future adventures, here are links to a bakers dozen old MTC favorites from places I’ve visited since this blog began in 2008 as a way to capture a family trip to the Four Corners. If you want to see more, check out the Heritage Travel section of the blog.
A few “classic” photos features a small collection of the 140 black-and-white photographs Claire took and developed in her high school dark room from that same trip.
The beauty of the Dutch Antillesis my whet-your-appetite post from a trip — in February of 2010 — to the Dutch Antilles on the Sea Cloud II.
The most ignored building on college campus (tours) provides a snippet from our two-week tour through New England in 2010. You have to go that long when you have twins who are looking at different colleges in the same year.
Beautiful Stockholm captures several days out of our March 2014 family trip to see Andrew, who was studying abroad.
In 2014, Claire and I took a 22-day cross-country trip that I dubbed the Not All Who WanderAre Lost tour. There are posts and pictures from each day on that wonderful experience, if you want to explore. I’ll just say that every dad should have the opportunity to explore the riches of our country for three weeks with his daughter.
Going to the sun is a nice sample from that trip, capturing our day in Glacier National Park.
48 hours in Tuscanyis just one of many posts from our lifetime-changing six weeks in Rome in 2016, for my sabbatical.
These Observations from Romewrapped up those six weeks. You can get a sense of what we did and find links to specific posts. (There were many.)
I took a gap year in 2019 after retiring from the National Trust, and the first thing on the agenda was travel. I’ll end this post with three links to my time in Japan, followed by one post from our visit to England.
Buddhist statues, decorated to protect children and travelers, at Daisho-in Temple, Miyajima, Japan
Eight days before the architect I.M. Pei passed away at the age of 102, we visited his Miho Museum in Japan. I wrote about it in I.M. Pei, Rest in Peace.
Children of the drum was written from Japan as a reminder that we need to remember the basic things that make us human, helping us work together in community. We need to get to the heartbeat.
Japan by sea is the wrap-up to that wonderful two-week tour.
We were in England for the 75th anniversary of D-Day. One of the reasons we travel is to understand that our perspective isn’t the only one when it comes to historical events. I wrote about this in Remembering D-Day.
Happy travels, whenever you have the opportunity to see distant places.
Early in this year’s Stanley Cup playoffs, a 40-year-old backup goaltender for the Washington Capitals filled in admirably for two games in an emergency, but was unable to play for the rest of the series. Hockey teams, it turns out, are notoriously opaque when it comes to injuries, preferring euphemisms to transparency. No one tweaks a groin or pinches a nerve. Instead, they have a “lower body” or an “upper body” injury. Craig Anderson, the old man in goal, was out because of something called body maintenance.
Quickly latching on to this genteel way of describing recovery work in progress, I decided to let you know that More to Come is taking a summer break for body maintenance. Or perhaps the better way to phrase it in my case would be body, mind, and soul maintenance.
Taking time for body, mind, and soul maintenance
There is no injury involved with the staff at More to Come, but a sabbath respite is both biblical and practical.* As you can see below, I’ve been doing it all my life!
Taking my summer break as a two-year old
Last year’s summer hiatus from blogging worked out so well that I decided to extend the 2021 break over July and August to rest, reset, and focus on other projects, including some special attention on those pandemic pounds. This is it until the Tuesday after Labor Day (7 September for the international readers) unless something momentous comes along.**
Should you want to take this time and explore what you may have missed on the blog, what follows are the top reader favorites from 2021 (so far).
Three of the top posts came from the less than smooth transition of power in the U.S.
The Hill We Climb — Amanda Gormon’s poem was among the best moments in an inaugural ceremony of hope and historic firsts.
Heartbreaking and galvanizing — Our emotions were whipsawed between heartbreak and elation the week around January 6th.
Another day that will live in infamy — As citizens attacked our Capitol, we remembered that violence and paranoia are part of our character. As is hope.
Two other highly-rated posts were more personal in nature.
Tending the heart — The family celebrated a significant birthday for my wife this year, who is, in the words of a friend and former colleague, “fantastically lovely in every way.”
Reminders — New Year’s Day seemed an appropriate time to consider how personal reminders of what matters can help us regain equilibrium after a tumultuous year.
Continuing with the family theme, fathers often provide guidance as we seek a way forward. These two posts are about lessons learned from two extraordinary fathers.
The practice of breakfast — My father’s morning practice of centering, and then cheerfully making breakfast, was the example I needed all along.
Two of this year’s top posts dealt with the return of optimism.
Les Colombes — Visit the beautiful photographs from an art installation in the National Cathedral.
Time to reinvigorate the bucket list — As winter departed and we discovered newfound optimism, perhaps it is time to revisit what we “really” want to do.
And finally, I found myself writing a good deal this year about our need to depend on others.
Assisted living — I have a confession to make. I have lived in assisted living my entire life.
Beach Reading – the best kind
Summer is also a great time to catch up on your reading. Some of the best books I’ve read this year include:
The top two Saturday Soundtrack posts by reader views featured the musical artists Low Lily and The Avalon Jazz Band.
If these don’t interest you, check out the top 10 posts in terms of reader views from the time the blog began, or simply rummage around in the archives. In any event, have a great rest of the summer.
**I won’t have to worry about covering Donald Trump’s fantasy of being reinstalled to office in August. As we used to say in the South, it ain’t gonna happen.
Summer is the time of outdoor music festivals. Following a year of coronavirus lockdown, many musicians are able to return to the road and play in front of fans for the first time in months.
Just a short note added at the first of August: Some of the summer music festivals, especially in areas with low vaccine rates and high anti-vax sentiment, are likely to turn into super spreader events with the Delta variant of Covid on the rise. Be smart and be safe in choosing which festivals/events to attend.
As More toCome heads into our summer hiatus, we’ll highlight several of the festivals I’ve attended through the years along with the songs from favorite bands that are guaranteed to set off a buzz in the crowds on this edition of Saturday Soundtrack. Perhaps one or more will encourage you to find a nearby festival to attend.
In the beginning
Parking Lot Picking by John Balch (l), Jody Kammerud, and DJB in Athens, AL 1976
During the 1970s, I saw the Earl Scruggs Revue — the band formed by the banjo legend with his sons following the breakup of Flatt and Scruggs — at multiple festivals. No matter the venue or audience, the final tune was always the Scruggs classic, Foggy Mountain Breakdown, performed here with Gary and Randy Scruggs, fiddler Vassar Clements, and dobro master Josh Graves.
During our fifteen years in Staunton, I often attended the local Oak Grove festival. There we heard a number of wonderful musicians — Guy Clark, Bryan Bowers, Stephen Bennett, Claire Lynch, Trapezoid, Bill Staines — in this intimate, wooded setting. For many of those years local favorites Robin and Linda Williams were the hosts, and their song (co-written with Jerome Clark) Rolling and Rambling (The Death of Hank Williams), is always a favorite.
Robin and Linda Williams at Red Wing
Oak Grove 2021 is scheduled for August 27-29 and will feature Robin and Linda Williams, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, and others.
The tradition-plus festival begun in 1988 by Doc Watson following the death of his son and long-time musical partner Merle was my festival of choice for many years beginning in the early 2000s. I’ve heard countless bands and unexpected collaborations there through the years, but the 2012 festival really stands out for me.
The Steel Wheels set the tone for a great 2012 Merlefest with their opening tune on Thursday night.
The Steel Wheels were Thursday’s bridge on the Cabin Stage between two more famous main stage artists. The crowds were headed for the food tents when lead singer Trent Wagler slammed his cymbal stick into the floor and the band went into Rain in the Valley. People literally turned around in the aisle and went back to their seats to hear the 30-minute set that led to full crowds at other venues whenever they performed throughout the weekend.
Merlefest 2012 was also the final one for the 89-year-old festival patriarch Doc Watson, who passed away a month after the event. Beginning with a 1974 performance at the old Exit/In in Nashville, I saw Doc live more times than any other performer in traditional and acoustic roots music. This video from 1979 of his signature Tennessee Stud — with Merle on guitar, T. Michael Coleman on bass, and Marty Stuart on mandolin — is the Doc I remember from my younger days. Tennessee Stud, which he made famous on the Will the Circle Be Unbroken album, often closed out his show in those years.
Finally, Sam Bush had played at each of the 24 previous Merlefests before 2012, and you figured he had something up his sleeve for the 25th anniversary. The Sam Bush Band opened the final set on Friday evening with John Hartford’s Vamp inthe Middle. After a few more songs, Sam introduced Derek Trucks and his wife Susan Tedeschi of the Tedeschi Trucks Band — Saturday evening’s headliner. They kicked off Bell Bottom Blues and the night, which was already special, turned magical. Next came Gimme Shelter, followed by Bush bringing out his former New Grass Revival band mates Bela Fleck and John Cowan for a tribute to the late Levon Helm. When the music morphed into the old standard Cripple Creek, banjo wizards Fleck and Scott Vestal traded licks and choruses. The crowd was buzzing about the show the rest of the weekend.
Susan Tedeschi, Sam Bush, Derek Trucks, and John Cowan (l to r) onstage at Merlefest 2012
The Steel Wheels – hosts for the Red Wing Roots Music Festival
Red Wing, held in Mount Solon in the splendor of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, is another festival I’ve attended on multiple occasions. The event is hosted by The Steel Wheels, and they always have a great set. One of the fan favorites is Long Way to Go, with their extended jam in the middle that takes a ride into the frenetic finish.
Sarah Jarosz at the 2014 Red Wing Roots Music Festival
Sarah Jarosz has played Red Wing on several occasions, both as a solo act and as part of I’m With Her. A masterful song interpreter, I’ve always favored her version of Dylan’s Ring Them Bells.
Frank Solivan and Dirty Kitchen gave a spirited performance late one evening at Red Wing. I enjoy the energy in their instrumental M80, which they played that evening to the delight of the festival’s night owls.
Frank Solivan and Dirty Kitchen at Red Wing III
The incomparable Claire Lynch has played Oak Grove, Merlefest, Red Wing, and the Institute of Musical Traditions shows here in the Washington area. I’ve attended them all and can say that she never disappoints. Claire will often end her performances with one of her fan favorites, the extended version of Wabash Cannonball, with an encore that was written by my cousin Hershey Reeves, Your Presence is My Favorite Gift.
My signed copy of the great Claire Lynch album “Dear Sister”
Besides The Steel Wheels and Sarah Jarosz, other headliners at this year’s festival on July 9-11 include The Tim O’Brien Band, and the amazing instrumental group Hawktail.
Let’s take it home
Based on the east coast, I haven’t had the pleasure of attending the iconic festivals in the west, such as Telluride and San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. Nonetheless, I’ve heard great acoustic music through the years at venues from Annapolis to Charlottesville, Nashville to Claremont (California). Among those musicians who always pleases, Jerry Douglas is one of my personal favorites, especially when he rips into Who’s Your Uncle, the closing song of one of his recent sets in Annapolis and heard here live in the Bluegrass Underground show on PBS.
Darrell Scott and Tim O’Brien display incredible songwriting talent, improvisational genius, and vocal chops in all their performances. Long Time Gone, which the Chicks made a hit, was written by Scott. This live version from Raleigh has some tasty interplay of mandolin and guitar beginning at the 3:33 mark.
Tony Rice is another musician I enjoyed watching countless times in multiple venues before his death last Christmas Day. One of his most memorable shows for me was at the old Lime Kiln Theatre in Lexington, Virginia. While the Tony Rice Unit often closed their show by playing the fiddle tune Sally Goodin, it is hard to get more of a crowd favorite than Freeborn Man as played by Rice at Merlefest 1991 with Mark O’Connor, Bela Fleck, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, and Mark Schatz
Another festival favorite from that same performance is Sam Bush, singing of the demise of William McKinley, in the White House Blues. Fun historical fact: this was the song Bill Monroe chose to have Earl Scruggs play on his debut with Monroe’s band on the Grand Ole Opry. Many musical historians point to that event as when bluegrass music was founded.
Nickel Creek 25th reunion tour in Charlottesville, VA
It may be difficult to find a better festival favorite than Nickel Creek’sThe Fox, which closed all their shows (and their reunion show) for years. Depending on how they were feeling, the mid-song jam could go on for a looong time. My daughter Claire and I heard this version at Merlefest 2006*, when they only did a “modified” jam (i.e., under 10 minutes). Check out Thile’s mandolin solo beginning at 4:04. I remember it well. I remember it when they closed out the show in Charlottesville from the Farewell for Now tour in 2007. And I remember it as they closed their 25th Reunion Tour shows in 2014. A true signature tune, The Fox is a festival favorite that never grows old.
Enjoy some live music this summer.
More to come…
DJB
Image: The Hillside Stage — ready for another Album Hour with the Waybacks and friends — at Merlefest, by DJB.
*No matter what the description says below the video, this was from Merlefest. Just look at the signage on the stage.
Late in 2019, a series of pithy proverbs — those bursts of truth in 20 words or so — debuted on the blog and were brought together in a post entitled More to Consider.* Six months later we had A plethora of pithy proverbs followed — as 2020 turned into 2021 — with A profusion of pithy proverbs. So as long as this segment is sponsored by the letter P, we’ll take a look at A plenitude of pithy proverbs for the first half of 2021.
My love for the short and to-the-point adage comes from my Grandmother Brown, who was known to say things such as, “The graveyard is full of folks who thought the world couldn’t get along without them.” Good advice for those of us who like to share our opinions. Speaking of which, Ryan Holiday, who writes about the philosophy of the Stoics, reminds us that we don’t have to opine about everything we notice.
“Remember you have the power to have no opinion.”
Ryan Holiday
The next two quotes came during the rather difficult (to state it mildly) transition of power in Washington. Journalist and writer Anand Giridharadas reminded us that there are progressives and there are reactionaries. Writer John Stoehr framed this battle as one in which different groups have different relationships to the law.
“We are living through a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.”
Anand Giridharadas
“In defending Trump, (the Senate Republicans) are declaring loyalty not to America as it stands, but to an imaginary nation-within-a-nation, a white-power confederacy of the mind and spirit seeking to carve out a country where a minority is protected but not bound by the law while a majority is bound but not protected by it.“
John Stoehr
As the Biden administration took office, we began to see the difficult but doable path forward. The quote from President Kennedy was a reminder that almost all good things are hard. American poet and activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died in February, had a beautiful reminder of what love can bring to a country and a civilization, if we allow it to bloom.
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win…”
President John F. Kennedy
“There’s always hope in love. Love and hate are viruses. Love can make a civilization bloom and hate can kill a civilization.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Both Ella Bakerand Frank Wade had pithy reminders that we have to work to see a better future.
“People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves.”
Ella Baker
“Hope is hearing the music of the future; belief is dancing to it.”
The Rev. Dr. Francis Wade
In reading how the Germans have dealt with their history of Nazism much better than the U.S. has dealt with slavery and racism, I came across this important quote from 1985 by the president of West Germany. It reminded me of the continued danger in our country.
“Anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present. Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity is prone to new risk of infection.“
Richard von Weizsäcker, President of West Germany
Poet, Emily Dickinson scholar, and friend Judith Farr passed away in June of this year. At her funeral the last page of the service leaflet had her 2019 poem What Lies Beyond, which ends with the following lines:
“To live with ugliness, we must hallow loveliness / the more, remembering that it often springs / from mud into light-filled air.”
Judith Farr from “What Lies Beyond”
Click on the link to read her obituary. Judith Farr was a remarkable woman.
Jazz great Miles Davis, who adopted a variety of musical directions in the 20th century, had a great quote about the need to “just do it.”
“Do not fear mistakes. There are none.”
Miles Davis
And finally, another good bit of advice from a Stoic philosopher.
“The reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is so we might listen more and talk less.”
*To capture some of my favorite sayings without having to write an entire blog post, I created a feature on More to Come that I labeled “More to Consider.” I update these quick bursts of truth every couple of weeks.
As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy.
Giridharadas takes us to the final days of March “in the crushing year of 2020.”
We knew by then that a plague was upon us. Like me, maybe you had had your first meetings canceled. Maybe your kids were home, climbing on your lap during a novel thing called Zoom meetings. Maybe you were watching those handwashing videos — the ones that made me realize I had never done it right ever before. Maybe you were discovering that, despite getting no respect at work, you were suddenly now something called “essential.” Maybe you were among the early ones to fall ill with Covid, or you knew someone close who did, or you once dated a guy whose sister knew someone who works with a lady whose chiropractor got it.
It was March. It was early. It was the beginning of the beginning.“
After 423 days of agony and loss, the United States had reached — on May 29, 2021 — the point where the Covid death count had fallen below where it stood at the beginning, on the last day of that fateful month of March 2020.
As talk intensifies about a return to normal, Giridharadas asks his readers to consider themselves as runners who begin and end at the same point after a grueling race. Think about where we really stand and what we’ve learned from this experience. We have changed.
“You are stronger and more broken. Those who were running beside you may no longer be there. You are shaped and redefined by their absence. And, along the way, you saw things, thought of things, realized things, and these you now carry.“
The plague year was not only a killer, a terrorizer, and a “thief of dreams and work and fellowship and time.” It was also a teacher. We learned:
How much harder it is to work, how much harder women in particular have it, how much female brilliance we sideline, when we make childcare a luxury product.
There are no great equalizers, not even viruses — that inequity is a preexisting condition, and viruses, like so many other disasters on record, hit people according to their position in the caste hierarchy.
When we allow monopolies to corner every market, we become vulnerable to shortages and supply issues we usually associate with the Soviet Union — even as the owners of those monopolies profit from crisis.
And so many of us learned that what we’ve learned our whole lives about America is wrong.
“We learned that we in America so often fixate on a childish understanding of freedom — of negative freedom from government power, from masks, from being told what to do — that we often deprive ourselves of the no less valuable freedom to remain alive.
We learned, with apologies to Ronald Reagan, that government is not, in fact, the problem.“
Consider his full list and then think, “what will we do next?”
“(E)very so often in history, ‘the zeitgeist moment hits and persistent voices can finally be heard.‘”
Maybe this is the time those voices for meaningful change will be heard.
“‘The bare minimum requirement’ of competing in the Olympics should be ‘that you believe in the country you’re representing,’ Crenshaw (R-TX) told Fox….As if Berry, a 32-year-old native of Ferguson, Mo., the daughter of an Iraq War veteran, and a college graduate with a minor in criminal justice, must be some kind of liberty-loathing infiltrator….
Compulsory patriotism is not at all an American value; it is its own form of treachery. In fact, it’s hard to identify a braver American impulse than the one to speak freely from a platform in the face of pressure.”
Just another reason to take this moment as a prime time for transformation.
As we approach the celebration of Independence Day 2021, I turn for wisdom to a sermon more than three decades old.
Why a sermon for a secular holiday? As The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray noted when she left the practice of law in the early 1970s to become an Episcopal priest, most of the questions around inequality that we face as a nation are at their core moral issues that require reconciliation among all people. It is in community where we should affirm “the richness of individual diversity as well as the common human ties that bind us together.”
A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that I have endured, enjoyed, nodded off during, squirmed through, and been deeply moved and challenged by more than 4,500 homilies in my life.* In all those sermons from a number of exceptional priests, pastors, and mentors**, I never heard a more consistent preacher week-in-and-week-out than The Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade. After moving to Washington, I was fortunate to hear Frank at St. Albans Episcopal Church from 1998 until he retired as rector in 2005. As former U.S. Senator and ordained Episcopal priest John Danforth writes in the Foreword to Rites of Our Passage: Reflections Through a Christian Year — the 2002 collection of Frank’s writings — “All his sermons are, at least, very good, and many of them are astonishingly good.” Former Senator Danforth isn’t right about everything, but he is certainly right about this.
Frank likes to say, “I believe in many things but I do not believe in coincidences.” It was no coincidence that I was given the opportunity to learn from someone so wise. In returning to re-read the entire collection, I learned anew that Frank’s timeless and clear-headed observations — about the dangers that occur when isolated minds create dead hearts, about the need to give forgiveness a chance in a world riven by violence, and how hope and joy require the action of belief if we want to live as if something good were true — are building blocks for personal growth. In today’s troubled world, Frank’s thoughts from July 1987 about the need for a new American agenda speak to our challenges.
The purpose of wealth
For most of us, wealth is relative. Wealthy people are those who have more than we do. Frank suggests we think instead of wealth in absolute terms. “It is simply what we have no matter what other people have, and what we do have is ours so that this world can be a better place.” Wealth is there so all of life can be better. Americans could begin to think about wealth in a new way.
Power and community
“Giving up individual power to serve a greater and common good” should also be a part of our new July 4th agenda. That happened in Philadelphia in the Constitutional Convention when several states gave up individual power to serve a common good, the community. As we move to a majority-minority nation, “how we share the power that we have” in order to “share life” with others will be our question.
The goal of justice
And Frank — as an equal-opportunity offender of the status quo — notes that justice, for many of us, is “the idea of letting everyone be equal at the starting lines of life, letting everyone be equal before the law.” However, Biblical justice in Frank’s telling shows “a heavy favoritism to the poor, the hurt, and the lost,” and suggests that we should want everybody together not at the starting line, but at the finish line.
In considering this new agenda, we may need to see “life as a pilgrimage rather than a race.”
Frank believes that “the basic task of a Christian is to make other people’s lives better.” That’s a very different vision than one we hear from money-hoarding mega church televangelists, prosperity gospel hucksters, patriarchal bullies, or fire-and-brimstone moralists. If we think about our wealth in different ways, share our power and influence with people very different from us, and begin to think of justice “as more than where people start in life and more of how we and they live life,” each of us — no matter our faith beliefs — will go a long way towards making people’s lives better.
And that is a real American dream.
More to come…
DJB
*Growing up Baptist, we went to church on Sunday morning and evening, for Wednesday evening prayer service, plus at least one week-long “revival” each year. I joined the Episcopal church at age 22 to get a life!
MORE TO COME... 