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I’m just going over home

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The plaintive yet hopeful American folk tune Wayfaring Stranger, which we explore in this week’s Saturday Soundtrack, has long been a personal favorite. The Bluegrass Situation notes that some historians “have traced its genesis to the 1780s, others, the early 1800s. Depending on who you’re talking to the song may be a reworked Black spiritual, a lifted native hymn, or even a creation of nomadic Portuguese settlers from the southern Appalachian region.”

I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger / a-traveling through this world of woe, / and there’s no sickness, toil or danger / in that bright world to which I go. / I’m going there to see my Father, / I’m going there no more to roam; / I’m just going over Jordan, / I’m just going over home;

At one level Wayfaring Stranger is clearly a gospel song. You will occasionally hear it in churches, with this arrangement for choral group by Alice Parker — sung here by the choir at St. Alban’s parish in Washington — near the top of my list. It is also a standard in churches that use shape note singing, as heard below at the second Ireland Sacred Harp convention, in March 2012. *

But the song has lasted and reached so many because the more secular roots music world has taken it — and the story of walking through the trials of this world — for its own. For many, the definitive rendition is from the Roses in the Snow album by Emmylou Harris.

Emmylou’s aching vocals juxtaposed against the late Tony Rice‘s jazz-like guitar stylings and the wails of Jerry Douglas’ dobro all come together for a marvelous offering that has stood the test of time.

Others have also put their stamp on this classic. Let’s begin with some icons.

Johnny Cash’s recording of the song came out in his late period, when his voice was even more ragged yet in many ways more poignant. BGS says, “This song, which appears on Cash’s 2000 album American III: Solitary Man, perfectly captures the mortality that infused much of the Man In Black’s latter period recordings” and I agree.

Doc Watson‘s interpretation contains a few touches that clearly make it Doc’s music (like the southern pronunciation of Jordan and a reworking of some of the standard lyrics). This was just released on Life’s Work: A Retrospective, the new 101 track collection that celebrates the life, music and enduring influence of the iconic guitar virtuoso.”

The tune takes on a different texture when performed with old-time banjo.

For my money, Rhiannon Giddens has one of the best interpretations of Wayfaring Stranger. She performed this, with the remarkable Phil Cunningham on the accordion, as part of a BBC Northern Ireland program. Note how she stays on one chord throughout. This is one of what Giddens calls “the old songs.”

BGS has two choices among their top-twenty versions with old-time banjo accompaniment: Natalie Merchant and David Eugene Edwards.

“Former 10,000 Maniacs’ vocalist Natalie Merchant unfurled a hypnotic version of ‘Wayfaring Stranger’ on her 2003 traditionals album The House Carpenter’s Daughter.”

“16 Horsepower/Wovenhand singer David Eugene Edwards has made ‘Wayfaring Stranger’ one of his signature songs, with a version of the track appearing on the 16 Horsepower album Secret South as well as the 2003 Jim White documentary-adventure Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus.“

Jack White of the White Stripes also takes an old-time approach with the song.

I know dark clouds will gather over me, / I know my way is rough and steep; / yet beauteous fields lie just before me / where souls redeemed their vigils keep. / I’m going there to see my Mother, / she said she’d meet me when I come; / I’m only going over Jordan, / I’m only going over home.

Folk musicians, beginning with Burl Ives and Joan Baez, have long included the song in their set lists.

Tiff Merritt has an aching rendition stripped down to the simplicity of just her guitar. I especially like the calling out of each word when she gets to the phrase “meet me when I come.”

Once again, from BGS:

“Knowing the tragic story of American singer Eva Cassidy’s short life adds a sad edge to this mellifluous rendition from the Eva By Heart album which was released after her death in 1996.“

I want to wear a crown of glory, / when I get home to that bright land; / I want to shout salvation’s story / in concert with that heavenly band. / I’m going there to see my Savior, / to sing his praise forever more; / I’m going over Jordan, / I’m only going over home.

The song also appears on the big screen.

Two recent films featured heartbreaking versions of the song: The Broken Circle Breakdown and 1917. Both capture the weariness and trials of the lyrics that have made this song so memorable.

In addition, the 2000 film Songcatcher includes Wayfaring Stranger in its soundtrack. Cowpunk singer Maria McKee — who interpreted the song on the soundtrack — performs it here in an absolutely stunning performance on David Letterman, with Stuart Duncan playing the mournful fiddle fills.

Finally, the tune has always lent itself to instrumental improvisation.

Sam Bush, Bobby Hicks, and Alison Brown play a lovely instrumental arrangement in a concert at Harvard, Alison Brown’s alma mater. Hicks plays a soulful fiddle that cries and aches, Brown finds new tempos and chord changes as only a jazz-influenced banjo player can, and Bush … well he’s just Sammy. Amazing as always.

We’ll end with the guitar player who opened this Soundtrack. Fronting his own band, Tony Rice takes the introduction into places where no one has gone before. Then he is joined by his bandmates who explore the musical possibilities associated with traveling through this world of woe.

While listening to these different interpretations of Wayfaring Stranger, I kept thinking about the phrase that ends each chorus, which is some version of “I’m just going over home.” In that simple, poetic line, the song speaks to that belief I have that death is not the end but just a passage. I suspect that same hope for many — no matter one’s religious beliefs — helps keeps the song fresh to this day.

More to come…

DJB

Image by jwvein from Pixabay.

*As noted in the comments to another shape note singing, “the first time through is sung using solfege. Each voice part is singing not the words but rather the names of the scale, la, sol, do. Even more important is that the music they are reading from is written using shape notes. Each tone of the scale has a corresponding note head shape. (re = cup, mi = diamond, fa = flag etc.) A person can see the shape of the note and know what note to sing based on the shape. Since you learned the notes on the first read thru because you sang the solfege, now in the second time thru you can sing the words!”

Building is slow, hard work

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On Monday, President Joe Biden signed the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, known as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, into law. It is the type of investment that America made in itself from the 1930s through the 1970s, putting in place some of the world’s most impressive infrastructure, extending public education to everyone, and building the country’s first real middle class.

From WPA-era post offices to the bridges connecting rural communities separated by rivers and lakes; from dams that generate hydro-electric power across the South and West to the interstate highway system; from free public education that was finally available for everyone to the building of the internet we now take for granted, Americans experimented and built with an eye toward the future. In the process, we also built the world’s greatest representative democracy.

In The American Spirit, David McCullough speaks of the sense of building and experimentation that’s at the core of the American story.

“Once, in the last century, in the Cambria Iron Works at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, after working for months to build an unorthodox new machine for steel production, the engineer in charge, John Fritz, said at last, ‘All right boys, let’s start it up and see why it doesn’t work.’ It is with that very American approach to problems that I think we will find our course.”

In this land where the whole idea of our country is an ongoing experiment, what could be more American than building, experimenting, and improving on what we have? This edition of the Weekly Reader features links to writings by Heather Cox Richardson and other historians that focus on the idea of building up our country.

Several recent posts in Richardson’s Letters from an American series suggest that only one party is currently putting in the effort to build America. That’s what makes the new infrastructure bill such an anomaly in what passes for politics today, and points to a new investment in real people, not just Wall Street.

“This bill is more than a needed investment in our roads and bridges. In 1981, in his first Inaugural Address, President Ronald Reagan called for the scaling back of government investment in the country, famously saying: ‘In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.’ After 40 years of cutting government along the lines of that philosophy, this measure signals that the Democrats intend to use the government to invest in ordinary Americans, in the belief that such investment will help the country prosper. …

“It is a historic bill, not least because it recalled times when the government just…functioned, with members of both parties backing the passage of a popular bill that reflected a lot of hard work to hammer out a compromise.

The new law makes the most significant investment in roads and bridges in the past 70 years, the most significant investment in passenger rail in the past 50 years, and the most significant investment in public transit in our nation’s history. Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) noted, “This is what can happen when Republicans and Democrats decide we’re going to work together to get something done.”

And yet, Trump loyalists have attacked the bill as ‘Joe Biden’s Communist takeover of America’ and have attacked any Republican who supported it as ‘a traitor to our party, a traitor to their voters and a traitor to our donors.’ Some of the Republicans voting for it have gotten death threats.“

Another recent post in Letters from an American, finds Richardson writing about Donald Trump’s failed attempt to create his own media corporation and suggesting this highlights that “since 1980, the project of the Republican faction that is now in control of the party has been to take things apart rather than to build them.”

Focused on dismantling the government and stopping legislation, they have been engaged in a “negative project, rather than a positive one.” It takes hard work and creativity to build things up… 

“When those accustomed to breaking things try to build them, they seem to have little idea of how much work it actually takes. They seem to think that actual accomplishments are there for the taking, and that splashy announcements and dramatic actions can solve intricate problems.”

Building is slow, hard work.

Richardson makes this point again in another post about how corporate America is waking up to the dangers of undermining democracy and what that will do to our economy.

“Still, while there is increasing focus on the attempt to overturn the 2020 election and keep former president Trump in power, there has been little discussion of what the destabilization of our democracy means for the economy. This is no small thing, because since the late nineteenth century, it has been the stability of our nation that has attracted investment. That investment, in turn, has built our economy.

An October 27 article by Courtney Fingar, Ben van der Merwe, and Sebastian Shehadi in Investment Monitor warns that ‘efforts to undermine the integrity of US elections carry a heavy cost for businesses and could weaken investment in the country.’”

Unfortunately, not enough businesses have grasped this fact. As Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby write at Popular Information, Republican operatives are increasing their push on corporations to break their pledge not to donate funds to the 147 members of Congress who objected to the certification of President Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

“At least 38 major corporations pledged not to donate to any of the 147 Republican objectors and have kept their word. This group has not donated to the Republican objectors directly or indirectly through multi-candidate PACs. …

Another group of 48 companies announced that they had suspended all donations after January 6 and subsequently have not donated to any Republican objectors or multi-candidate committees that support Republican objectors.“

Republican lobbyists are confident the spigot is about to be turned back on. Breaking things — like a pledge — is easy. Building a stable economy, on the other hand, is slow, hard work.

In her blog, lawyer and author Teri Kanefield writes why it is important that Democrats not fight as Republicans do. Among other things, it speaks to the work of building up a democracy.

She is writing in response to those who suggest Democrats fight fire with fire, and she calls on the work of historians of authoritarianism to help provide an answer.

People who want to save the rule of law shouldn’t use the same tactics as those who want to destroy it. According to Professor Steven Levitsky, “The greatest danger to democracy is escalation.” He says: “Escalation rarely ends well” …

Finally, Stacey Abrams is someone who understands that building things of value takes time. She’s been doing it for years. In The Bitter Southerner, Abrams is interviewed by Charlayne Hunter-Gault.

“We’ve got to acknowledge the existence of misinformation,” Abrams notes. “And instead of being critical of those who believe in it, we’ve got to be thoughtful about how we dispel it. And right now, the response is more of a “Oh, God, how can you believe that?” as opposed to, ‘OK, do you believe this? Talk to me about why and let me help you think about a different way to frame it.”’

The full interview is well worth the read.

Building is slow, hard work. So let’s get to work.

More to come…

DJB

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Welcome to your empire

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As I return from my morning walk my wife often asks, “How is your kingdom?” I chuckle at the playfulness of this comment before telling of my daily interaction with the street cleaners, baristas, dog walkers, and members of the street-dependent population who are the “residents” of my “kingdom.”

The humor in those conversations came to mind as I read a recent LinkedIn post from Stephanie Stuckey, the CEO of Stuckey’s Corporation. Two years ago, after a career in politics and environmental law, she bought the company founded by her grandfather in 1937 that was once a respected and welcoming part of roadside America.

It soon became clear that what she bought was just a shell of the company she knew while growing up in Georgia. She wrote about one experience in her recent post.

“Finding humor in a difficult situation is an essential skill if you’re going to make it as an entrepreneur. When I first took over Stuckey’s almost two years ago, I optimistically set out to visit every one of our 65 branded locations. What I quickly found is that some of our stores needed some TLC — a LOT of TLC in fact.”

One of the worst locations Stuckey found was in Marion, Arkansas. That store had literally been hit by a hurricane.

“With the roof caving in, it was still operating as a business, albeit looking beyond pathetic. I remember visiting that Marion store that was also poorly stocked with dusty merchandise and feeling completely dejected. Here I’d sunk my life’s savings into buying back my grandfather’s company that had once been a shining oasis on our highway exits. I got in my car and started to cry. I called our Vice President and shared what terrible condition the store was in and how low the company had sunk.

He paused for a second and said in a totally upbeat voice, ‘Welcome to Your Empire.’

For some reason, that struck me as hilarious. I just started laughing because — well, what else can you do? Since then, things have started to improve, we’re profitable, we’re de-branding some of the stores that are beyond help and doing our best to revive the ones that show promise. … All this is to say that it does get better. But now whenever we hit a low point — like when I discovered yet another case of unsold fidget spinners in our warehouse last week — it’s become our mantra to say, ‘Welcome to Your Empire.’ Because laughter is the only way to survive”

Good humor in action…Stephanie Stuckey models a t-shirt based on the chain’s old highway signs

I love this story on so many levels. It speaks to resilience. It ties past memory with hope for the present and future. It addresses the managing of our expectations. Finally, this story reminds us that cultivating a wise sense of humor is a good way to navigate life. Krista Tippett writes that she has “yet to meet a wise person who doesn’t know how to find some joy even in the midst of what is hard, and to smile and laugh easily, including at oneself.”

Too often we take everything too seriously. We want to conquer the world, or at least our part of it, and we feel we have to be deadly serious in order to reach our goals. In Steven Pressfield’s novel about Alexander the Great, The Virtues of War, there is a scene where Alexander reaches a river crossing. There he is confronted by a philosopher who refuses to move. “This man has conquered the world!” one of Alexander’s men shouts. “What have you done?” The philosopher calmly replies, “I have conquered the need to conquer the world.” *

There you have it. Once we conquer the need to have an empire, to be the top dog, to seek total control, we find ways to do the work before us. Along the way unexpected and unwanted things will happen to each of us. Rather than get mad, focus on the response, which is the one thing we can control.

Oh yes, and our response often goes better when we employ a wise sense of humor. As you head out into your kingdom, give your funny bone some exercise this week.

More to come…

DJB

Image by free photos from Pixabay

*Hat tip to Ryan Holiday for the story, from his book The Daily Stoic.

Tré Burt follows his songwriting muse

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Sacramento songwriter Tré Burt is one of a talented group of musicians today who uses his personal experiences and perspective to reconnect folk music with its African American and protests roots. In the process, he also goes into territory that’s sometimes unexpected. Like his affinity for country and folk singer-songwriter John Prine.

“Like his late label mate and songwriting hero John Prine, Burt showcases his poet’s eye for detail, surgeon’s sense of narrative precision and his songwriters’ ability to transpose observation into affecting verse. You, Yeah, You is a cohesive body of work that illustrates the ever expanding space in which Tré Burt’s voice belongs.” 

For this edition of Saturday Soundtrack, we’ll explore the music of Tré Burt, who records on Prine’s Oh Boy Records label. Like his hero who famously came to songwriting after delivering the mail in Chicago, he comes from a working-class background, in Burt’s case as a maintenance technician servicing airplanes at SFO International Airport and taping boxes as a UPS worker. One of the more direct associations with Prine’s legacy is Dixie Red from Burt’s most recent album. Burt describes the connection this way.

“I prayed under an old oak tree in my neighborhood a lot for John Prine and his family while he was in the hospital last year. In the days following his passing I was mostly silent and listened to The Tree of Forgiveness non-stop. One night, I was standing on my porch looking at the full moon through a break in the trees over my street. It was especially silver and awfully large. The moon looked as if it were signaling John’s safe arrival to the other side. I felt privileged to witness this message sent for his family. ‘Dixie Red’ is a southern-grown peach and that line from ‘Spanish Pipedream’ has always been so potent to me. So I used a peach as imagery to represent John’s body of work he left behind for all of us.”

“Boundless in the evergreen waters / Gently down the stream / Green River knows you as its father” is a nod to Prine’s “Paradise” and his final resting place in the Green River in Kentucky’s Muhlenberg County. It’s a fittingly reverential ode to the immensity of Prine’s songwriting and legacy.

Tré Burt wrote his protest anthem, Under the Devil’s Knee, in 2020, in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner and the unending police violence across the country. It features other African American singers from the new folk tradition: Allison Russell, Sunny War and Leyla McCalla.

“He came back after 2 years / lookin for a job but got wrapped back up in bullshit/ pled guilty to the law / George came outta prison with his head on straight / teachin’ all the neighborhood children the good ol christian way / till his life was taken from him / for no reason but his race / on the twenty fifth of May”

Under the devil’s knee oh lord, / I’m under the devil’s knee / screamin’ “I cannot breathe” oh lord, / from under the devil’s knee“

Real You is from Burt’s first Oh Boy album, Caught from the Rye.

“If I should say to her farewell / It’s just because I cannot tell / Is it her or I who is hidden in the dark / When her eyes close, mine open / Want the real you now / For the real you now”

In this mini concert from Paste Studios recorded in September of this year, Burt plays three songs live off his most recent You, Yeah You album.

Tré Burt is playing at the DC9 club in Washington on December 1st with Katie Pruitt. Both are worth your time.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Headshot credit TréBurt.com

Remembrance for D-Day

Armistice Day and the banality of evil

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Yesterday, November 11th, was celebrated as Veterans Day in the U.S. It used to be called Armistice Day. On that day in 1918, the major fighting of World War I ended. It was when, Kurt Vonnegut has written, “millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another.”

Historian Heather Cox Richardson remembers George Lawrence Price, a private serving with Company A of the 28th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in Belgium during World War I on this day.

“As the moment of the armistice approached, a few soldiers continued to skirmish, and Price’s company set out to take control of the small town of Havre. As they crossed a canal to their target, a German gunner hidden in a row of houses tried to stop them. Once safely across, just ten minutes before the armistice, the Canadian patrol began to look for the German soldier who had harassed them. They found no one but civilians in the first two homes they searched. And then, as they stepped back into the street, a single shot hit Price in the chest. He fell into the arms of his comrade, who pulled him back into the house they had just left. As Price died, German soldiers cleared their guns in a last burst of machine-gun fire that greeted the armistice.

Price’s life ended just two minutes before the Great War was over.

Even at the time, Price’s death seemed to symbolize the pointless slaughter of WWI. When an irony of history put Price in the same cemetery as the first Allied soldier to die in the conflict, disgusted observers commented that the war had apparently been fought over a half-mile of land. In the years after the war ended, much was made of George Price, the last soldier to die in the Great War.“

But Richardson also wants us to remember the man who pulled the trigger, who decided — knowing that peace was only two minutes away — to take another life and deny him a future. It was legal. It was also surely, she writes, immoral.

“He went back to civilian life and blended into postwar society, although the publicity given to Price’s death meant that he must have known he was the one who had taken that last, famous life in the international conflagration. The shooter never acknowledged what he had done, or why.

Price became for the world a heartbreaking symbol of hatred’s sheer waste. But the shooter? He simply faded into anonymity, becoming the evil that men do.“

Political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” after watching the 1961 trial of Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann. “Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet — and this is its horror — it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.”

We’re also reminded on this day of what the leader of the Republican Party, Cadet Bone Spurs, really thinks about those who gave up their life for this country. “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” Jeffrey Goldberg quotes Donald Trump as saying in 2018 when he refused to visit the World War I Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris. West Point graduate Lucian K. Truscott IV reminds us that Trump blamed rain for the visit’s cancellation, claiming that his helicopter couldn’t fly and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him to the ceremony. Neither claim was true.

Donald Trump is the leader of a Republican party that, as Truscott notes, “isn’t a political party anymore. It’s a safe deposit box filled with grievance and anger and hate.” But Donald Trump didn’t make this once proud party what it is today. As is his custom, he only showed the ugliness behind the veil when you pull back the curtain. Last Tuesday, former United States Senator Max Cleland, a distinguished veteran, passed away. Senator Cleland left his arm and both legs in Vietnam. He was dishonored by evil men in the Republican Party in the 2002 mid-term elections as being soft on terror, well before Donald Trump came on the scene. In a similar vein, former Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry, another distinguished veteran decorated for valor who bravely spoke out against the Vietnam War, was dishonored during the 2004 presidential campaign by the same evil men.

Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote of Armistice Day in the preface to Breakfast of Champions.

“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Rest in peace, George Lawrence Price, and all the men and women who have sacrificed their lives for good over evil.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Remembrances for D-Day 2019 in the British village of Chipping Campden (photo by DJB)

Toko-ji Lantern details

The allure of the pilgrimage

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Poetry doesn’t turn up in my reading list very often. Haiku even less. So I was somewhat surprised to find myself enthusiastically picking up Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku as part of my recent Natalie Goldberg reading binge.

Truth be told, it was the subtitle that was the real appeal. In my third stage of life, pilgrimages have a certain allure. Reading about others’ journeys can be enlightening, sowing seeds for personal reflection and encouraging us to seize the day.

As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent books and articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. 

Three Simple Lines is part poetry, part history lesson, part travelogue. Mostly it is memoir of a writer’s pilgrimage, from Goldberg’s introduction to the form in 1976 by Allen Ginsberg to her study of the masters of haiku. From her visits to Japan to take in the places and spirit that drove masters such as Basho and Yosa Buson, to her return home to join a haiku writing class. She wants to experience these places and this work through “bare attention, no distractions, pure awareness.”

Goldberg is a master storyteller, and her capturing of details is part of what makes this book come alive. Sometimes it is a scene as simple and frivolous as the description of the “kissing couple” sharing their love as her tour group waits for a morning train.

“The young couple are at it again. One long tender kiss, arresting lip-on-lip action. This is a kiss that leaks last night’s love, spreading it all over the morning. I am so happy they came along. What’s better than a good, lingering canoodle?”

Delightful detail also shows up in her description of the landscape and atmosphere as she travels to a distant temple. From my short time in Japan, this feels right.

“We keep climbing — my calves are burning — and come to a raised wooden walkway and then occasional wooden bells, which I know are used to scare away bears. When I reach one, I ring it hard.

We keep walking in silence, hearing the creak of the wooden planks in each step. It’s late and the air is cold. We are in ebony shadows that swallow up the giant cryptomerias. The walk ends in a wide path through groves of tall bamboo, which draw our gazes up to the entrance of Chuson-ji. It has appeared out of nowhere, at the top of Mount Kanzan.”

There is one passage that, to me, speaks eloquently of why people go on pilgrimages. Goldberg has been to Buson’s grave, and she wants to read the group something he had written.

“‘What you want to acquire, you should dare to acquire by any means. What you want to see, even though it is with difficulty, you should see. You should not let it pass, thinking there will be another chance to see it or to acquire it. It is quite unusual to have a second chance to materialize your desire.'”

Three Simple Lines is a beautiful book, both thoughtful and illuminating. There are numerous examples of this shortest of creative writing throughout, including several pages from Chiyo-ni, one of the few women to be recognized as a haiku master. I’ll leave you with one from Chiyo-ni, written after the death of one of her mentors, touching on her familiar theme of impermanence.

“sad, so sad / to miss the plum flower / before it fell”

More to come…

DJB

Images of temple grounds at Toko-ji in Hagi and bamboo grove in Japan by DJB

Being fearful of being ourselves

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To live into who we really are, we have to stop living our lives trying to satisfy the dictates of other people.

Out of all life’s lessons, this one has proven especially difficult in my personal journey. We are bombarded with the opposite of this truth almost from the moment our mothers deliver us from the womb. Yet the reality is fairly simple to acknowledge, if not implement, when we stop and consider our past and the hoped-for future.

“To be alive is the biggest fear humans have,” writes Don Miguel Ruiz in The Four Agreements. “Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive — the risk to be alive and express what we really are. …We have learned to live our lives trying to satisfy other people’s demands. We have learned to live by other people’s points of view because of the fear of not being accepted and of not being good enough for someone else.”

Miguel Ruiz calls this the “domestication” of humans. We initially develop concepts of what makes up a man or a woman based on what others tell us. We hear about the type of acceptable behavior expected of humans. And, he adds, “we also learn to judge: We judge ourselves, judge other people, judge the neighbors.” We establish punishment and reward in our minds based on the beliefs we have accumulated and accepted. In today’s world, too many of those beliefs come from online sources.

Having grown up wanting to please parents, teachers, bosses, partners, and some undefined tribal rules, I have come to find that I developed rationales and excuses for why I live the way I do. Those justifications are easy, but that doesn’t make them right.

Of course, the uncovering of our personal story is never just an individual story. Pádraig Ó Tuama, host of Poetry Unbound, notes that ours is always a community story, it’s a story of many “we’s.” Yet experience tells me that when we face our oft-hidden agreements honestly, we can change our understanding and personal dreams that may have been set by the larger community. I have tried to do this with gender roles, judgement, and new ways of thinking about perfection that alters my approach to punishment and reward.

Published more than twenty years ago but still relevant today, Miguel Ruiz’s short book suggests that everything we do is based on thousands of agreements we have made — agreements “with other people, with God, with life” and, most importantly, with ourselves. In these agreements we learn to tell ourselves who we are, what we can do, how to behave, and what to believe. We lump these together and call them our personality, as if it is set into our DNA. Yet too many of these personal agreements come from the dictates of others or worse, a Facebook algorithm, and are self-limiting.

His four agreements to move beyond those restrictions are simple:

  • Be impeccable with your word
  • Don’t take anything personally
  • Don’t make assumptions
  • Always do your best

Simple, yes, but there is a lifetime of learning in the living. The idea that your word “is the power you have to create” pushes me to explore the many ways I use words. Taking things personally, Miguel Ruiz suggests, “is the maximum expression of selfishness, because we make the assumption that everything is about ‘me.'” When we make assumptions, we too often believe they are the truth. Doing your best is important, especially when we accept that what is best is constantly changing because everything is alive and changing.

This doesn’t mean we can do what we want without consequence. Instead, accepting the fact that we should take responsibility for our actions without judging or blaming ourselves puts the focus where it belongs.

“Action is about living fully. Inaction is the way that we deny life….Expressing what you are is taking action….Without action upon an idea, there will be no manifestation, no results, and no reward.”

Epictetus said something similar when he suggests we focus on what is ours alone to avoid blaming the fates and other people. When we do that, “no one will ever be able to coerce or to stop you.”

Stop fearing life and the dictates of others. Focus on what we can control: ourselves.

More to come…

DJB

Image of watch and glasses by Georgi Dyulgerov from Pixabay. Image of watch in sand by anncapictures from Pixabay

Keeping the faith with The McIntosh County Shouters

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One of the last upholders of the African American ring shout, the McIntosh County Shouters “keep the faith, form, and fervor of the generations-old tradition rooted in their small community of coastal Georgia.” In this week’s Saturday Soundtrack, we’ll examine the work and music of this acclaimed group.

Named a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellow in 1993,

“The McIntosh County Shouters are the principal, and one of the last, active practitioners of one of the most venerable African American song and movement traditions — the “shout,” also known as the “ring shout.” The ring shout, associated with burial rituals in West Africa, persisted among African slaves and was perpetuated after emancipation in African American communities, where the fundamental counterclockwise movement used in religious ceremonies integrated Christian themes, expressed often in the form of spirituals. First written about by outside observers in 1845, and described during and after the Civil War, the shout was concentrated in coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia.

These shouting songs “have resisted slavery, strengthened spirit, and left us a cultural keystone for the future,” notes the group on their website.

I first heard the Shouters on the eTown show, so we’ll begin with the moving Blow, Gabriel, one of the tunes from that live performance.

James Calemine, in a loving and insightful piece on the Shouters in The Bitter Southerner, says the group’s ancestors “were literally the original American songwriters, rappers and folk artists.”

“The 20th century’s greatest collector of American folk-music recordings, Alan Lomax, once said, ‘The Georgia Sea Islands are the home of the American song’.

Lomax first recorded the Georgia Sea Island Singers in 1935 with writer Zora Neale Hurston. Lomax returned to the Georgia sea islands to record the group again in 1959. But the Sea Island Singers dissolved around 2006, leaving the McIntosh County Shouters as the last of their kind. It was the legendary founder of Folkways Records, Moses Asch, who first recorded the Shouters in 1983. The resulting album — still in print — was called “Slave Shout Songs From the Georgia Coast.” The Shouters practice the “ring shout” — a hypnotic counterclockwise shuffle accompanied by call and response singing, the percussion coming only from clapping hands and sticks beating drum-like rhythm on a wooden floor. But notably, during their performances, the McIntosh County Shouters do not cross their feet. Why? That would be considered dancing.“

Move Daniel shows this call and response song pattern, along with the percussion sounds of feet and sticks as the women in the group move in this shuffle pattern.

In 2017, Smithsonian Folkways recorded Spirituals and Shout Songs from the Georgia Coast in association with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, where the Shouters sang at the museum’s opening. I Wade the Water to My Knees is from that album.

Next is a beautiful trailer put together for the record by Smithsonian Folkways explaining more of the background for the shout. It includes interviews with several of the group members. Shouts often took place around holidays. One of the major times for shouting, as we hear in the video, was after midnight every year on “Watch Night,” which commemorates gatherings of African-Americans on New Year’s Eve in 1862, who came together to await President Abraham Lincoln’s January 1, 1863, signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Adam in the Garden is a short clip that shows the shuffle of the ring shout. and Religion, So Sweet is another of the performances from the eTown show.

Of course, ring shouts grew from burial rituals, so topics of death and judgement are prevalent, such as in The Sign of the Judgement.

I see the sign (Hail) / I see the sign (Hail) / I see the sign / Hail lord time draw nigh

The sign of the judgement (Hail) /The sign of the judgement (Hail) / The sign of the judgement / Hail lord time draw nigh

Sign in the fig tree (Hail) / Sign in the fig tree (Hail) / Sign in the fig tree / Hail lord time draw nigh…

It May Be the Last Time is another shout song about moving through death. You hear it in the short video documentary above and also in the Folkways album. The eTown folks incorporated it very nicely in a medley to wrap up their show. The Shouters join the finale and bring down the house at about the 3:30 mark of the video.

“It may be the last time we sing together / It may be the last time I don’t know /

It may be the last time we sing at all “

As we move into a festive time of year, many will feel the pain of the loss of those they love at a deeper level. The traditions and music of the Shouters can remind us that those who have gone before us felt the same pain, and have done so for centuries often under very difficult conditions.

The McIntosh County Shouters are not currently performing, due to the pandemic. But in the typical caring fashion that grows out of their community, faith, and tradition, the website notes that they continue to “pray for those who are sick and the families who are caring for them.”

We could all do the same, out of our own beliefs and traditions, as we continue to battle a deadly, worldwide virus.

More to come…

DJB

Image credit: McIntoshCountyShouters.com

Do they get paid when they are wrong?

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The little girl looked up at her teacher with a question as sincere as it was naive.

“Does the weather man get paid when he’s wrong?”

My wife enjoys telling that story from decades ago, when weather forecasting was not as reliable as it is today. It is story of young innocence. It is also a story of the budding realization we all encounter when we come face-to-face with the fact that those with responsibility and authority, those who have the microphone, are often wrong.

What if you applied that question to “experts” in other fields with prediction success rates to rival the weather forecasters of old?

We just had an off-year election in the U.S. As is always the case in the odd-numbered years following a presidential election, the voters in Virginia and New Jersey go to the polls to elect governors for a four-year term. Many cities also elect their mayors on the same cycle.

Over the past 40 years, here is what has happened in those two states in the first year of a new president’s term:

  • 2021 – Joe Biden (D) is in his first year as president. Virginia elects a Republican governor. New Jersey reelects its Democratic governor in a close race, the first time a Democrat has been reelected in NJ in 44 years.
  • 2017 – Donald Trump (R) is in his first year as president. Both Virginia and New Jersey elect Democratic governors.
  • 2009 – Barack Obama (D) is in his first year as president. Both Virginia and New Jersey elect Republican governors.
  • 2001 – George W. Bush (R) is in his first year as president. Both Virginia and New Jersey elect Democratic governors.
  • 1993 – Bill Clinton (D) is in his first year as president. Both Virginia and New Jersey elect Republican governors. (Seeing a pattern here? *)
  • 1989 – George H.W. Bush (R) is in his first year as president. Both Virginia and New Jersey elect Democratic governors.
  • 1981 – Ronald Reagan (R) is in his first year as president. Virginia elects a Democratic governor. New Jersey elects a Republican governor by a margin of less than 2,000 votes.

What happened last Tuesday is that Democrats actually outperformed the normal expectations based upon the historical pattern. But instead of that story, we were told that with “surprise losses” the “Democrats were in disarray” (a phrase that may be trademarked by the New York Times).

The losses were only a big surprise to those who don’t know their history. Both states, evenly divided politically, have regularly gone with the opposite party in off-year elections over the last four decades.

The Times seemed to understand that pattern in 2009, during Obama’s first term in office, when the newspaper had only a single piece of analysis on the races in Virginia and New Jersey. Somewhere along the way they lost that knowledge. Journalist Eric Boehlert, who studies the press, noted on Wednesday that the Times had already posted at least 9 articles about Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe’s loss last night in Virginia.

Meanwhile, some of the election news was good for progressives and people of color.

  • Progressive Michelle Wu became the first woman and the first person of color to win the mayorship of Boston in 199 years.
  • Democrat Eric Adams became New York City’s second Black mayor.
  • Cities across the country elected Democrats of color.
  • Three Michigan towns — Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, and Hamtramck — elected their first Muslim mayors Tuesday.
  • The promised swamping of local school boards by anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-CRT candidates really only worked in districts that are already heavily Republican.

Judd Legum notes that 2022 will be very different than 2021, because politics is much more dynamic than the coverage suggests. Those “surprise” losses may portend dark days ahead for the Democrats. Or they may not. As Legum reports, nationally famous pundits and reporters are wrong all the time. And they still get paid.

I am not innocent or naive, understanding that those who are in positions of public responsibility and who have the microphone often behave badly. But when you consider how often the political coverage of the news is wrong, one may want to ask an updated version of the little girl’s question.

There is much of consequence to cover in the news. Our democracy is under attack, several people who participated in the violent coup attempt at the Capitol on January 6th were just elected to public office, and Senate Republicans have filibustered a motion to begin debate on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, to name just a few news items. It would be helpful to our understanding of these events if the incentive system for the press was not so focused on showing divisiveness and short-term political warfare. Political fortunes shift quickly. Building things of value takes time.

Perhaps we could have less coverage of the political horserace and more on the ideas and goals behind those things being built to help ordinary Americans.

More to come…

DJB

*Hat tip to Rachel Maddow for pointing out the pattern.

Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay

The 2021 World Series: The good, the bad, and the ugly

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What is the lifelong baseball fan to do when you have two problematic franchises in the sport’s championship showcase? One team’s players have had serious issues around fair play. The opposing team is composed of likable players, but their owner has made terrible decisions for his team, baseball, and the city.

And both fan bases can be intolerable.

This Weekly Reader, focused on the World Series, features links to recent articles about those games that grabbed my interest. 

I watched the 2021 World Series without any real rooting interest, but did suggest that Atlanta most resembles the Washington Nationals from 2019. Their slow start to the season followed by a hot second half, generally likeable players, and low expectations were all similar to the Nats. Fashion accessories went from rose colored glasses (2019) to pearls (2021). Also, like the Nats of 2019 they vanquished the mighty Dodgers this year.

Atlanta entered the World Series playing with house money, while all the pressure was on the Astros. So what did we see?

The good will be short

Congratulations to Atlanta — The first championship since 1995 is a big deal. And like the 2019 Nationals, Atlanta not only defeated the Dodgers but they also took down a strong Houston team.

Brian Snitker — The Atlanta manager is a baseball lifer who toiled in minor-league oblivion for years before getting his chance to manage in the show. He made the most of it.

Freddie Freeman — Atlanta first baseman Freddie Freeman has a well-deserved reputation as a Nats killer. He is also one of the nicest people in the game and apparently he loves to chat-up opposing players when they reach first base. If there is any position where you want a sociable extrovert, then first base is it.

Dusty Baker — Houston Astros manager Dusty Baker is, by all accounts, a gem of a person who was given the difficult task of trying to be the lovable face of an unlovable team. His Hall-of-Fame-worthy career doesn’t require winning a World Series as a manager. Of course, he’s been in the World Series before, and the memory I like from that fall classic is different from the Game 6 incident most people bring up.*

The youngsters — We were also able to see some other great players who made me smile this postseason, like Houston’s Yordan Alvarez and Luis Garcia and Atlanta’s Jorge Soler and Ozzie Albies.

Then, there is “bad for baseball” bad

Front office data nerds don’t care about fans — That’s the conclusion one gets from watching this World Series. In Game 3, Atlanta pulled its pitcher, Ian Anderson, after five innings. In today’s game it happens all the time.

Except that Anderson was pitching a no hitter in the WORLD SERIES at the time! As our president might say, its a BFD!

Anderson is 23 years old and had only thrown 76 pitches. He still had gas and wanted to stay in. But we are watching the game change in ways that don’t bode well for building a new fan base. Barry Svrluga, writing in The Washington Post, put it this way:

“Baseball on a given night in a particular ballpark is at war with baseball as a sport that was once the national pastime. What’s good for a manager to win an individual game — backed by reams of data from his front office — is bad for baseball as a product to be voraciously consumed by fans.“

Every fan of baseball knows that Don Larsen has thrown the only no hitter (a perfect game, no less) in the World Series. Anderson was most likely not going to throw a no-hitter in Game 3. For the sake of the game and for the fans, however, Anderson should have gone back out for the 6th. Yet the data grunts have the stats to ” prove” why that’s the wrong decision. But their “right” decision is bad for baseball.

The length of games. — The only thing longer than a DJB blog post** is a major league game in 2021. They are slow and start too late, but most of all they are too damn long. I fell in love with Houston’s José Urquidy in Game 2 because he caught the ball from the catcher, got his sign, and threw his pitch. No fuss. Just do it. That game came in at the rocket-like pace of 3 hours and 11 minutes. Too many games now bump up against, or go over, 4 hours. I’ve not been in favor of a pitch clock in the past, but my opinion has changed. Put them on a 15 second clock so batters won’t have time to fidget with their batting gloves, pitchers won’t have time to wander around the infield, and I’ll get to bed at a reasonable hour. Again, Barry Svrluga at The Washington Post has a great piece on this issue.

Finally, there is bad at the existential level…which turns into ugly

I don’t want game announcers Joe Buck and John Smoltz talking about the over/under on the number of strikeouts a pitcher may get — You’ve heard this before, so I don’t need to say more.

The Astros have a well-documented history of egregious cheating. As well as obnoxious fans — While the owner (mostly) did the right thing early in 2020 when the manager and GM were fired, none of the players of this “player-directed” scheme was punished. In fact, they were allowed to keep their 2017 World Series title and make tens of millions of dollars. There are multiple pieces on why you can’t forgive the Astros for cheating. And their fans, who didn’t even know Houston had a baseball team six years ago, now act like they are god’s gift to the world.

But as Kevin Blackistone writes, Atlanta may be even worse, at least at this level — Atlanta has a team full of great players, but as Adam Kilgore and Chelsea Janes note, it also has an offensive nickname and that stupid tomahawk chop. Period. Full stop. We’ve known forever that they need to change the name and get rid of the chop, but their owner has retrenched in the age of white grievance, and many of the fans have joined in that defiance.*** In this day, that alone makes their transgressions worse than Houston’s.

But there’s more. They built their new stadium in the wrong place for very troubling reasons. In the process they abandoned their African American fan base.

Pulitzer-prize winning architectural critic Paul Goldberger spoke to this issue in his wonderful book Ballpark. The fourth and very ominous period of ballpark design — sterile corporate campuses/amusement parks — is most easily seen through the terrible decision in Atlanta to move the team to Truist Park in the city’s far northern suburbs in 2017.

It was a move away from the city, public space, public transportation, and — most egregious from my point of view — communities of color. Goldberger describes Truist as “a mallpark as much as it is a ballpark,” and notes that what makes it different from most of the post-Camden Yards parks is that it “extends the entertainment zone outside the ballpark into a pseudo-urban neighborhood that has been created solely as a complement to the ballpark. A real city, by contrast, is “created over time, with its mix of different types of buildings, different kinds of neighborhoods, and, most important, different kinds of people.”

Bottom line: baseball has long been about making money for the rich owners. It has gotten worse in recent years, at the expense of building loyal, local support among a broad fan base.****

There are solutions to these problems, which are included in the links I’ve posted. Baseball will simply need to do what is right.

I’m not betting on that outcome.

Enjoy the winter.

More to come…

DJB

*In Game 6 of the 2002 series, Baker gave the ball to pitcher Russ Ortiz as he was leaving with a 5-0 lead. The Angels roared back to win 6-5. For my memory, there is a nice bit of baseball history. Darren Baker was drafted in the 10th round in 2021 by the Washington Nationals.

**I do have some sense of self-awareness.

***That all sounds familiar to Washington folks accustomed to suffering in the age of Daniel Snyder. And of course the former guy had to put in an appearance.

****Examples include:

  • Your team won’t make the playoffs just two years after winning a World Series (and you are only 3 games behind Atlanta at the time, which decided to go all-in for this year)? Well, trade the popular core of your team, including a sure Hall-of-Fame pitcher (Max Scherzer) and one of the two young stars of your team (Trea Turner) to shed salary and acquire prospects and to hell with the fan base.
  • Television (which pays those outrageous rights fees) wants prime time slots so they can sell almost three minutes of commercial time between innings? No problem, even if fans young and old can’t stay awake past midnight.
  • Clubs want to forget their sport’s own history of gambling and cheating to get in bed with betting sites that dislocate the joy in the game all for the money? Fine, let them in to turn broadcasts into one long gambling commercial. They’ve even pushed out the ED advertisements!
  • Owners want to thumb their noses at an African American fan base that has loyally supported the team since 1966? Sure, let them move to South Chattanooga.

Image by Cindy Jones from Pixabay