In early March, when the thought of how best to express my gratitude first arose, it was near the milestone of a 65th birthday. But as the weeks passed and turned into months, the realization deepened that the specific action of writing one or more thank you letters each week was a perfect antidote to the poison that seemed to permeate our lives in 2020. It was, for me, an ideal pandemic project.
“I turned sixty-five in 2020,” each letter began…
“,,,which certainly falls in the “time flies by quickly” category. In ways that I never could have imagined, I have had a fortunate life. In wanting to recognize this milestone, I found some inspiration in two very different places. First, I was taken with the powerful scene in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood when Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers asks a reporter to take a minute of silence in the middle of a Chinese restaurant to consider the people who’ve loved him into being. The second is writer Nancy Davis Kho’s Thank You Project. Both have motivated me to write thank you notes over the course of this year to the people that have enriched my life. This week I want to thank you.
What followed was several paragraphs that described the reasons I was grateful to have that particular person in my life. The letters generally ended with the complimentary close, “With much gratefulness and admiration” sometimes augmented with “and love.”
When making the decision to begin this year of gratitude, my journal quickly filled with the names of siblings, in-laws, former bosses, teachers, and long-time friends. But as the weeks passed and I thought more and more about the people who had really been there in times of need — benefactors in one way or another — the list expanded to include a range of colleagues over four decades, spiritual and secular mentors, people in positions of power who demonstrated how I should support others when given similar levels of responsibility, and those who guided and stretched my intellect.
By December 20th, 52 individuals had received a letter, one for each week of the year. Those who would have been on the list had they lived included my parents and grandparents, of course; a board chairman who called every single morning during his two-year term to check my temperature and see how he could be of help; and an influential college professor and his wife, who became good friends over three decades.
Early in life I was taught the importance of saying thank you, to the point that it entered my DNA. However, real appreciation for the act of gratitude and the kindness that is conveyed through that action has come only in recent years. It can mean a great deal when people remember you with a short but pithy note, send a generous and unexpected recognition, or reach out across decades to recall long-ago friendships. I have been the recipient of each of those gifts in my lifetime and know their power.
This year of gratitude has provided an abundance of life lessons. By focusing on how to articulate what it is about someone else that has proven so beneficial in our lives, we are led to the realization of how much our thoughts, words, and deeds are shaped by others. Community, in all its meanings, is key to a fuller existence.
The first boss who truly shaped my career served as a role model in how to support staff by recognizing their individual needs. She also encouraged my professional growth, even when it meant leaving her office for new opportunities. Bosses and other mentors who followed her taught lessons in how to listen, in generosity that leads to sharing as opposed to hoarding, in ways to build and reward initiative, in the value of a wide and curious perspective, in the need for clarity in thought, and in the benefits that come in welcoming a stranger with a figurative embrace as people move into new and different circumstances.
So many mentors believed in me, providing affirmation that was there at critical times. They had a willingness to share work, decisions, credit, and praise; encouraged engagement and empowerment with boards and other leadership groups; and placed me in situations where I could learn, succeed, occasionally fail, and ultimately grow. It is a good lesson to keep front and center as the opportunities arise to support those in earlier phases of their life and careers.
It became clear over the year that many of my benefactors were vulnerable and human, revealing ways to open up to others that did not come naturally to me. So many have an uncanny ability to listen with empathy. Knowing how to laugh came through time and again. Abundant good humor — often of the self-deprecating variety — can help make suggestions easier to digest. I thought of friends, co-workers, and loved ones whose lives demonstrated the value of generosity, a positive outlook on life, forbearance, and simple kindness. A choral director changed my life when, through her patience and skill, she showed me the transformative nature of music. There were two individuals in particular who will forever be important in my life, as they taught me how to work through troubles and handle loss.
And some of the earliest and most enduring benefactors were my siblings, who challenged, nurtured, and supported me throughout childhood and beyond. From them I learned the warmth that comes from a spirit of hospitality, the fearlessness that makes life worth living, and the love that overcomes differences.
Writing weekly letters of gratitude did not begin as a pandemic project, but the intentionality of articulating what others have brought to my life could not have come at a better time. Besides recognizing the good fortune we have in those who shaped us, a benefit of giving is what comes back in return. I received dozens of kind and thoughtful responses, some several pages long, that spoke of the effect of the gratitude on the recipient and the depth of our relationship from their perspective. These are emails, notes, and letters that I will always treasure.
To all who have touched and supported my life, thank you. I cannot begin to truly express how grateful I am for you, but I am enriched beyond measure in making the time to try.
The world lost one of the greatest and most influential acoustic guitarists of the last 50 years when Tony Rice passed away on Christmas morning at the age of 69.
In the 1970s at the tender age of 21, David Anthony Rice — known to everyone as Tony — redefined bluegrass guitar when he joined banjoist J.D. Crowe’s New South and began playing guitar leads that referenced flatpicking greats Clarence White and Doc Watson, but were nonetheless uniquely Tony Rice’s music. Crowe’s band came to include Ricky Skaggs and Jerry Douglas, both of whom had long associations in various musical combinations with Rice. It was with the New South that Rice also began to make his mark as one of the new breed of vocalists in bluegrass, who owed as much to Gordon Lightfoot as he did to Bill Monroe. The New South’s self-titled album, known among aficionados by its catalog number 0044, is considered a classic in bluegrass. This 1975 video showcases the band — with Rice’s lead singing and guitar playing — at the height of their time together.
In the mid-1970s Rice left the New South to join with mandolinist David Grisman to create what became known as Dawg Music or, more broadly, New Acoustic Music. The group’s debut album, The David Grisman Quintet, remains as one of the most influential of its time. Grisman, Rice, and violinist Darol Anger — taking the leads — were playing a type of string jazz influenced by gypsy, blues, and bluegrass music that had a beauty and clarity that was unique for its time and jaw dropping in its inspiration. Now, 40+ years later every acoustic musician worth his or her salt can work their way through similar tunes, but the originality of Grisman’s vision in the 1970s reminds me of the breakthrough of bluegrass when Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs joined Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys in the 1940s and a whole new American music was created. The opening tune on the album, E.M.D. — seen here played by Grisman, Rice, violinist Mark O’Connor and longtime Grisman bassist Rob Wasserman — set the tone for what was to come. Rice’s dazzling guitar break begins at the 1:10 mark.
When Rice left Grisman’s band, he continued with the jazzy sounds of DGQ through his own Tony Rice Unit — featured here with Mar West — but he also began returning to his bluegrass roots with albums such as his tribute to country brother duets with Ricky Skaggs, captured here with The Soul of Man Never Dies, and the Bluegrass Album Band, seen in a 1991 performance at the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) awards show with fiddler Vassar Clements.
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Rice played with a number of musical collaborators, as he was the guitarist of choice for many musicians. Some of the best of those bands were the super-groups often consisting of Rice, banjoist Bela Fleck, mandolinist Sam Bush, dobroist Jerry Douglas, fiddler Mark O’Connor, and bassist Mark Schatz. Whitewater, a Bela Fleck tune played by the group at an early Merlefest, is a great example of these collaborations. Rice’s first guitar solo begins at the :50 mark and his second one begins around 2:45.
UPDATE: Since writing this appreciation on Sunday, I’ve listened to hours of Tony Rice on YouTube, and I have to add in another song from this wonderful Merlefest set with Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Bela Fleck, Mark O’Connor, and Mark Schatz. Freeborn Man is just the coolest of the cool from what is arguably the best bluegrass supergroup ever assembled. Don’t take my word for it, listen to what Tony said:
“Have you heard any of the stuff that was done by the group of myself and Sam, and Bela and Flux, and Mark O’Connor? Have you heard any of that stuff? It was back at MerleFest, there’s quite a bit of footage of us playing live. There’s tunes like Freeborn Man and Nine Pound Hammer, were – you talk about an ensemble. And uh – I don’t know – Mark O’Connor playing that bluegrass fiddle like that was just absolutely mind-blowing. I’ll go and get on my computer and listen to that stuff and listen to him paying the solos in Freeborn Man and Nine Pound Hammer – listen to Jerry Douglas’s solos and I think Jesus, this is just amazing shit.” –Tony Rice (taken from “A Conversation with Tony Rice directed by Jan Johansson, in 2019)
And if to prove my point, my younger brother sent me this video of a guitar teacher breaking down this song. His mind is blown, as every solo in here is just amazing in its complexity and in the way the ensemble interacts.
BACK TO THE ORIGINAL POST: Rice continued to honor others who made the acoustic flatpicked guitar such a force in roots music through his collaborations with Watson and Norman Blake, among others.
Manzanita was a signature tune for Rice, that he played and replayed on various albums and with different musical collaborators throughout the years. Here is a version from Tony’s 2000 album Unit of Measure.
In the Nineties, Rice was diagnosed with dysphonia, an affliction of the vocal cords that all but robbed him of his singing voice. Rice also battled arthritis and elbow issues that affected his playing. He gave his last public performance on guitar during his 2013 induction into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and delivered an emotional acceptance speech.
The obituary also quoted numerous musicians and acolytes who noted Rice’s influence.
“’The list of guitarists who reinvented the most played instrument in the world is very short. Eddie Van Halen, Jimi Hendrix… a few others. Tony Rice is on that list,’ Charlie Worsham told Rolling Stone in an email. ‘Hang out long enough with a couple guitar players, and you’ll hear phrases like ‘Manzanita, or ‘Cold on the Shoulder,’ dropped into the conversation like code, like a test to see how much you know about the good shit. Anyone who strives to flat pick a guitar with a solid right hand, to meld raw physical power with the grace and precision of a hummingbird’s wings owes a debt of gratitude to Tony Rice.’”
I first heard Tony live with the David Grisman Quintet in Atlanta around 1978, and I last heard him with the Tony Rice Unit at Merlefest in 2009 and again in 2012, a year before he stopped playing in public. He was always inventive, thoughtful, and stretching boundaries in ways that pointed paths for others.
My personal copy, inscribed “To my old pickin pal, David – Tony Rice”
UPDATE NUMBER 2: In 2010, I reviewed Still Inside: The Tony Rice Storyon More to Come. It was part of a blog where I looked at several books, and you can find the full review by clicking on the link above, but this is the bulk of what I wrote:
“Rice is — in my humble opinion — the best acoustic guitarist on the planet, and this work covers his entire life’s story and musical development. Much of it is written in Tony’s own words or comes from remembrances from fellow musicians and friends. The section on the development of David Grisman’s Dawg music, when Rice left his bluegrass roots and joined the seminal David Grisman Quintet in 1975, is worth the price of the book. As Tony says, there are now at least 10 guitarists who can play circles around him while playing Rice’s own music, but none have the tone and touch…and none came up with the beautiful combination of roots, bluegrass, jazz, and even classical influences that makes the best of Dawg music still fresh some 30+ years later. After reading the book, I recalled all those great Rice albums that I had listened to on vinyl and immediately went online and downloaded several CDs worth of music from Tony’s four decades of music. Backwaters is Tony’s favorite, and with fresh listening I can see why.
The best part of Still Inside? My copy of the book is inscribed “To my old pickin’ pal, David – Tony Rice.” Now, there’s not a shred of truth in that, but my grandchildren (should I ever have any) will never know! Thanks to my friend Leti, who stood in line at Merlefest when I couldn’t go this year and snared the best inscription ever for a guitar lover.”
BACK AGAIN TO THE ORIGINAL POST: Tony Rice’s music was part of the 2004 documentary film Bluegrass Journey, and a fitting place to end this tribute is with his haunting solo version of Shenandoah, which — with a short commentary on art at the end by Tim O’Brien — puts a coda on Tony’s life and work.
Rest in peace, Tony Rice. Your music influenced generations and will live on in those whom you have touched and blessed.
More to come…
DJB
Image: Tony Rice with his younger brother Wyatt at Merlefest 2012 by DJB
In October of 2019, the realization hit that blog posts around music had slowed to a trickle on More to Come. To push away from always writing about politics, work, life lessons, or leadership issues, a commitment was born to write a new post each Saturday to focus on music and musicians that had caught my ear.
Soon it became clear that people were actually reading these things! One dear friend, who has since passed away, commented on the obscure musicians that “only Oakley Pearson (a mutual friend) and David Brown have ever heard of.” Yet a family member on my wife’s side wrote to say that an album by one of those obscure musicians just discovered was on his “Best of 2016” list. Sometimes I’m ahead of the pack and sometimes a bit behind. A friend and former work colleague from Chicago suggested he was finding all sorts of new music, although some of it “had a bit too much twang” for his tastes. A retired lobbyist and friend here in DC commented on a singer’s Amy Winehouse sensibilities. It helps that we have young adult children to keep us cool. A lawyer in Cleveland mentioned at the end of a business-related call that our musical sensibilities were very similar, and we found a shared love for Darrell Scott. (Post coming soon.) And then a former colleague wrote to say she would follow my playlist on Spotify, if I had one. Whew! All high praise that keeps me going.
So 2020 was the first full year of that commitment. At year’s end, we are going to turn to see what you — the readers and listeners — enjoyed by highlighting the top ten viewed/listened to posts from the Saturday Soundtrackseries, beginning with….
The July 4th post was a pitch to change the national anthem from the unsingable and militaristic Star Spangled Banner to the Woody Guthrie song that no less an authority than Bruce Springsteen has said is “one of the greatest songs ever written about America” because it “gets right to the heart of the promise of what our country was supposed to be about.” Listen to Springsteen’s live version and see if you don’t agree. “With a country, just like with people, it is easy to let the best of yourself slip away.”
Country musician Tyler Childers is from Kentucky, having grown up with a father who worked in the coal industry and a mother who worked as a nurse. Like many a country musician, he began singing in church — in his case the local Free Will Baptist congregation. His grandfather gave him a guitar, he absorbed the music of the 1980s, and began writing songs. To my taste, Childer’s best work to date is the solo acoustic work you find on the Red Barn Radio sessions and on YouTube videos. White House Road may be one of the best of these songs, as the singer from Paintsville, Kentucky — famous for its lawlessness, religion, and booze — puts his own spin on life in rural Appalachia.
Posts during the five Saturdays in February highlighted different musicians at the forefront of the work to reclaim the African American contributions to folk, old-time, country and roots music. Giddens is the woman who has one of the most visible roles in leading, in Rolling Stone’s words, the “movement of 21st-century singers, artists, songwriters and instrumentalists of color who have been reclaiming the racially heterogeneous lineages of folk, country and American roots music.” From another post this year which featured Giddens, enjoy her haunting version of Wayfaring Stranger.
“When you go to heaven and hear singing, it will sound like these three women.” That’s a quote from mandolinist Chris Thile, and apparently a lot of readers agree with his assessment of the overall wonderfulness of the Grammy-award winning roots music trio I’m With Her comprised of Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan, and Sara Watkins.
I’m With Her – Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, and Aoife O’Donovan – at July 2015 Red Wing Roots Music Festival
Having heard this band live on multiple occasions, in 2020 I featured them in the Soundtrack series as both a trio and as individual musicians. Call My Name was awarded the Grammy for 2020’s Best American Roots Song, and their performance on Thile’s Live from Here show is a great example of the beautiful harmonies that are integral to their work.
It was great fun selecting grim and scary songs for Halloween. The best of the Halloween songs have been hiding out in the roots music bin, just as the great, old folktales were ones that really hit the mark when it came to ghosts, goblins, and other things that go bump in the night. This led to many views and some great feedback. The song that took me down this spooky path is the Del McCoury Band’s title track from the album It’s Just the Night, with backing vocals by the classic gospel group Fairfield Four.
Sturgill Simpson is the hard-to-classify, but always intriguing singer and songwriter who sounds like Waylon Jennings or Merle Haggard (take your choice, as both were great singers); writes about topics not often heard on contemporary country radio; has outspoken progressive politics sure to rub many country music fans the wrong way; and who has a gift for surprise. Two examples of the many routes his music has taken can be found in his performance with the Dap Kings of All Around You at the Grammys and the anti-war rocker Call to Arms from his Saturday Night Live show.
In June 2020, Simpson posted a video of a live-streamed one-hour concert held on Friday, June 5th, at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium — the mother church of country music — with an all-star bluegrass band in anticipation of his fall release of two albums of his own music in the bluegrass style. It is wonderful! If you have the time to pull up a chair and crack open a cold one, I won’t stop you. If you don’t have time for the entire concert, give a listen to Breakers Roar from his Cuttin’ Grass, Vol. 1 album.
Suffice it to say that my son Andrew and I share a deep love for unaccompanied vocal ensembles singing beautiful and intricately-crafted compositions from the classical canon. Realizing that one of the Saturday Music post in April would fall on the final day of Holy Week, I reached out to Andrew — who was in his London flat, sheltering in place during his final year at the Royal College of Music — and asked for some help. He was all in! His curated collection of beautiful and moving vocal music was a big hit with readers, coming in #4 on this year’s top ten list of Soundtrack favorites.
Tenebrae, under the direction of Nigel Short, is one of the world’s leading vocal ensembles renowned for its passion and precision. Their version of Like as the Hart by the English composer Herbert Howells is a beautiful and thoughtful rendering of this classic, which is based on Psalm 42 vv. 1–3. Howells taught composition at the Royal College of Music for almost 60 years, and this particular composition has long been a favorite.
Coming in at #3 on the countdown — God, I feel like Casey Kasem — is a musical celebration of Juneteenth. On the post one can find various versions of the song known as the “Black National Anthem.” Here it is in a classic setting from late November 2016 — an especially auspicious time — at Abyssinian Baptist Church.
In November, our own Andrew Bearden Brown was a part of the concert series Music at Emmanuel in his program Dream & Escape. Featuring works by Samuel Barber, Mozart, and Gerald Finzi, the program was inspired by the vivid and strange dreams many of us were experiencing at the beginning of the lockdown. Christian Lane is the pianist, and the concert was beautifully edited by Max Kuzmyak. The recital was taped in historic Emmanuel Episcopal Church in downtown Baltimore. I may be biased, but the program and music are lovely.
If anyone had to knock Andrew out of the top spot this year, he can’t complain because it was that incomparable national treasure, Mavis Staples. The picture at the top of the post may have given it away!
There was no better musical artist to celebrate during The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend than Staples. Readers seemed to agree, and kept coming back week-after-week. This post often ended up on the “trending” list.
Her reach and impact as a once-in-a-generation artist has been astounding. Staples is a member of both the Blues Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a Grammy Award winner, a Kennedy Center honoree, and a recipient of the National Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. As someone who began singing during the civil rights movement and marched with Dr. King, her longevity in the spotlight is a testament to her magnificent talent. Mavis Staples performed at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration and sang at President Barack Obama’s White House.
Let’s salute her work with one of her best-known songs, I’ll Take You There and with her great cover of Bob Dylan’s Gotta Serve Somebody.
Music is a language that helps us process loss. Throughout 2020, Americans have had to call on that language time and again as more than 300,000 of our fellow citizens have lost their lives to COVID. Overall, “25% of U.S. adults say they or someone in their household was laid off or lost their job because of the coronavirus outbreak, with 15% saying this happened to them personally.” On top of this health and economic crisis, we are facing the potential loss of our democracy to minority rule.
So many have suffered personal losses during this year, holes in their lives that shake their soul. For those who find nurture in roots, country, folk, and acoustic music, the death of singer/songwriter John Prine to COVID early in the pandemic still creates a void that is difficult to fill.
When a tribute to Prine’s song Paradise came in just outside the top ten, the More to Come editors decided to add it as a special bonus to help sum up the year. This celebration premiered October 3rd on, “Let The Music Play On”: A Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Broadcast, featuring many of John’s friends. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is a Bay Area institution in San Francisco and Prine was a regular. His full sets from 2014 and 2017 are available to watch on the HSB website.
The artists in the tribute range from a handful of our most cherished roots musicians to some of the youngest and most innovative performers of our times. These are the type of people who are attracted to John’s music and his sensitivities as a songwriter. Bonnie Raitt — who had a huge hit with Prine’s Angel from Montgomery — takes the lead on the song’s final verse.
When I die let my ashes float down the Green River / Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam / I’ll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin’ / Just five miles away from wherever I am.”
[Chorus:] And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County / Down by the Green River where Paradise lay / Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking / Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away
Paradise is, of course, a song about loss. Loss of youthful innocence and the loss of our environment. In accordance with Prine’s wishes, half of his ashes were spread in Kentucky’s Green River. The other half were buried next to his parents in Chicago.
It is a wonderful tribute to someone whose loss still stings.
Thanks for listening during this most difficult of years. You chose some exquisite music for your 2020 favorites. Let’s look forward to sharing more great musicians and their craft in 2021.
As is true for so many of our fellow travelers on this earth, Christmas 2020 is unlike any other in our family.
In years past we would travel to be with family, siblings, cousins, and friends. Christmas 2020 will be celebrated without travel and without a large gathering of loved ones. Because our parish buildings are closed to help defeat the spread of a deadly virus, we won’t be able to join in some of our family traditions, such as serving at the annual parish Christmas dinner. Even in a year when we have avoided serious health issues and so desperately want to hold our loved ones close, the desire to defeat the spread of the coronavirus means that for the first time in 27 years, the four of us won’t physically be in the same city and the same house to celebrate the season.
So much of Christmas 2020 brings a feeling of dislocation, as noted by our rector in his online Christmas Eve sermon. And yet, we can use this year’s season — in whatever way you celebrate this time of year — to begin to relocate what is important in life, in relationships, in building hope for a future where love trumps hate.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays, with best wishes for 2021.
More to come…
DJB
Image: The Brown family Christmas 2020 tree (credit: Andrew Brown)
The Weekly Reader features links to articles of interest from this week as we celebrated winter solstice. Here’s hoping you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.*
“On Dec. 19, 1793, Vice President John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, “my Country has in its Wisdom contrived for me, the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived.” Most vice presidents in American history have agreed with Adams’ assessment of the No. 2 office in the country. Despite being a heartbeat away from the presidency, the office of the vice president has often been relegated to obsolescence.“
Dr. Chervinsky takes the reader through the changes that took place in the office, most in the latter half of the 20th century and now into the 21st. And since she mentioned the lack of attendance by VPs at Cabinet meetings, I dug a bit to find that Calvin Coolidge was the first to attend those meetings, during the Harding administration, but “He sat at the farthest end of the table from Harding, listening to what was said and saying almost nothing himself.” I guess he was always Silent Cal, even as VP.
Trump tried to steal the election after being soundly defeated. He failed. Trump will be removed from office at noon on January 20, 2021, just as the Constitution requires. Mystal notes that “we won” but we may not understand what that means. It certainly does not mean, in Mystal’s analysis, that our institutions held firm.
“(T)hat analysis appears overly sanguine. Trump failed to steal the election because he and his legal team are incompetent criminals, not because our democratic institutions defeated him. Saying that our democracy proved resilient against Republican attempts at subversion is like saying the fences at Jurassic Park proved resilient against raptors. Yes, technically Trump kept getting zapped on the electrified fence that is the federal judiciary. But his willingness to try—and the willingness of large swaths of the Republican Party to help him—shows that if the guardrails give way for even a moment, Republicans will break out and start eating the votes of Black people.“
In an article that speaks to what we will need to do to make sure our guardrails are more secure, she begins by suggesting that the Biden administration ignore those who say we should look forward and not backward.
In her lengthy post, Hawkins outlines different ways to correct the mistakes of the past, including,
Criminal prosecution and professional accountability;
Civil litigation and restitution; and
Fact-finding, acknowledgment, and reform.
“The truth may not be enough to free us from a repetition of all the terrible things that have happened in the past four years. But exposing it, and learning from it, is the only hope we have of doing better.“
In celebration of Monday’s Winter Solstice, here’s Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie with Give Me That Old Time Religion.
“We will pray with those old druids / They drink fermented fluids / Waltzing naked though the woo-ids / And it’s good enough for me.“
In this piece, he tells the story of a year “through objects — commercial stuff, material things, designed goods, products and artifacts large and small.” Face masks are clearly at the top of his list, but see why he includes a bookcase (spoiler alert: how would we know that Dr. Fauci has a real love for Sicilian cooking?) and leaf blowers.
Bananas seem to be a wonder food. They can help you fall asleep faster and provide an energy boost (hopefully not at the same time). And let’s see…can I recall that other one that appealed to me? Oh yeah…
“Bet you never realized that eating a banana could enhance your memory. Well, according to the BCC, it can. It’s the richness in B vitamins that give bananas the power to support memory function as well as protect the brain. Studies have found that students who eat bananas perform better on exams as well as learn more efficiently.“
*In the words of that great philosopher Jimmy Valvano, “If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.“
Last year’s listing of the top posts on More to Come as selected by reader views was a hit, so we’re back for 2020. I’ve spent days with our MTC analytics team to find the top posts as selected by you, the reader. (Well, actually I spent about ten minutes because Word Press does all the work.) In the process, I discovered that we’ve broken our personal record for views in a year (even with a sevenweek summer hiatus) and the total number of views is up almost 75% from last year. Thank you!
The list of the top posts is split fairly evenly between music-related stories from my Saturday Soundtrack series, several history-themed posts on the relationship between places from the past and the events of 2020, and family favorites. What follows is your selection of the top posts for the year. Let’s begin with some music. And yes, you have to go all the way to the end to see what’s #1.
Saturday Soundtrack posts that cracked the top ten
During April, I asked my son Andrew, from his quarantine flat in London, to curate a selection of songs appropriate for the days leading up to Easter. Saturday Soundtrack: Holy Week was a big hit, with one reader writing “Wonderful music! I’m a fan of Byrd / Gibbons / Tallis et al. The links to Voces8 are VERY cool.” The English composer William Byrd has long been a favorite of mine as well, and in this video from the post VOCES8 sings Byrd’s double motet Ne Irascaris Domine and Civitas Sancti Tui. The Catholic Byrd wrote these motets in the 1580s as a protest against the Elizabethan Catholic persecutions, and the text refers to the Babylonian captivity of the Jews.
Dr. Horace Clarence Boyer
The second musical post to make the top ten — Saturday Soundtrack: Lift Every Voice and Sing — was written in honor of Juneteenth, when I celebrated the song known as the “Black National Anthem.” I came to Lift Every Voice and Sing later in life. But when I did I had the privilege of learning the song and its history directly from one of the foremost scholars in African American gospel music, the late Dr. Horace Clarence Boyer. I was fortunate to be a part of a group that he led in his week-long workshop on African American gospel music. It was life-changing.
In a recording uploaded in the midst of the pandemic, with the heightened focus on racial injustice, and during the celebration of Juneteenth, Nicole Heaston gathered 65 Black opera singers accompanied by Kevin J. Miller and conducted by Damien Sneed to sing Roland Carter’s arrangement of the Black National Anthem. It is an inspiring version, and I remind you to stand up during the national anthem!
Mavis Staples from her “Live in London” album
The top-rated post from the music category in 2020 featured American icon and national treasure Mavis Staples. Saturday Soundtrack: Mavis Staples was posted in celebration of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend, and readers kept coming back to this post throughout the year. That’s no surprise since I include such wonderful music as Oh Happy Day with Mavis and Aretha Franklin, which brings together two of the greatest and most powerful Soul and Rhythm & Blues voices not just of their generation, but of all time. (Check out the interplay at about the 1:50 segment and then again at 4:00. Good gawd!)
Saturday Soundtrack: Andrew Bearden Brown could fit in either the music or family and friends category, so I’ll use it to bridge the two. Our own Andrew Bearden Brown was recently featured as part of the Baltimore concert series Music at Emmanuel in the program Dream & Escape. With works by Samuel Barber, Mozart, and Gerald Finzi, the program was inspired by the vivid and strange dreams many of us were experiencing at the beginning of the lockdown.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was involved in a wonderful musical community in the Shenandoah Valley. One of the dear friends I made during that time was the organ builder John Boody. When John saw this post he wrote:
“Our very own son whom we love so very much. He made me weep. He has a sweet and ringing bell. He has a wonderful confidence and handsome in all respects. Bravo.”
I thought it was pretty wonderful as well, so I’m glad it made the top ten!
Rest in Peace, The Rev. John D. Lane was a tribute I wrote on the passing of a dear family friend, our former rector, and Andrew’s godfather. John touched our lives in so many ways, and we were fortunate to spend time with John, his wife Bizzy, and daughter Mary during the last months of his life as he was in D.C. and Baltimore for treatments. There’s a lot to say about John’s life, so go read the post.
The Browns, December 2019
The perennial favorite Our year in photos — 2020 made the list again this year, as I chronicled life in the Brown family during the year of the pandemic. It has everything from a Zoom Mother’s Day brunch to the securing of the ever elusive rolls of toilet paper. You just have to go and see for yourself.
The times we live in
Babe Ruth and the creation of the modern celebrity would normally be seen as either a sports or book-related post, but I think what drove reader interest in this book review was the way I discussed how Babe Ruth paved the way for people like Donald Trump. I couldn’t help but think of the current occupant of the White House when reading Leavy’s description that “Ruth’s relationship with New York’s sporting press was cozy, complex, and complicit.” One sportswriter of the era said Ruth had more talent for staying on the front page than your average earthquake. Sound like anyone we know? But Ruth produced in his chosen field: on the baseball diamond. As he said in a different context, when asked about making a higher salary than the president, “I know, but I had a better year than Hoover.”
Let’s stop celebrating a past that never existed. Instead let’s understand and honor the one that did. During October, I wrote six articles on how history and the places where history happened can help us understand the issues we are facing as a country and a democracy.* This was the first in the series, which I began by telling how I first stood at Jamestown as a history-enthralled 11-year-old. The picture of the 17th century ruin of the church tower, abutted to the 1907 Memorial Church, is seared in my mind.
While I didn’t know it at the time, the narratives of life in early 17th century Virginia — told by the guides, the plaques that lined the walls of the 1907 church, and the books I devoured — were incomplete and sometimes egregiously false. White Christian Europeans were the focus. However, those Europeans were not home. They were the outsiders. Yet we are still fighting over how to interpret their presence in what would become Virginia.
Patriotism as I envision it involves a willingness to examine, rather than paper over, the troubles in our past. My stories of the places from my history — coming from my very privileged status in the South as a straight, white, Christian, male — celebrate both triumphs and difficulties. But I write them out of a spirit of hope. Hope that is grounded in memory. When we make the choice to hope, refuse to paper over our troubles, and go down into our figurative basements to work on the often hidden issues that divide us as a country, perhaps then we can move beyond a celebration of a past that never existed and begin understanding and honoring the past that did.
Early in my preservation career, I was privileged to serve five years as the executive director of Virginia’s Historic Staunton Foundation. Just as we like to return to this gem of a community, visionary leadership has made Staunton a year-round destination for tens-of-thousands of visitors annually and has generated national recognition for the city, including more than forty awards and accolades for its historic downtown from national organizations and media in the past ten years. Great communities don’t remain that way by chance recounts the city’s recent battles over Augusta County’s plan to demolish seven historic buildings in the downtown around the historic courthouse. The post — which reached the #2 spot in the top ten list — includes my letter on the issue to the Staunton City Council. At last report, negotiations are underway to modify the plan.
Which brings me to the #1 post, in terms of reader views, in 2020.
Places and perspective was written this past summer in the midst of the controversy over Confederate memorials. It is a personal take which includes the story of my journey on this issue, beginning with a pick-up basketball game.
I had a pretty idyllic childhood, and Murfreesboro’s history — which was very real and very present to me as a child — is one reason. It was also a history that challenged me as I grew older, and continues to challenge me today. I am challenged by the fact that I could look at places such as the county courthouse and the Johnny Reb statue that stood guard there and not give much thought to how others — like my African American teammates on that basketball court — reacted to the messages and symbolism.
When the editors of Business Week named Murfreesboro as one of the great places to raise a family in 2008, I wonder how much thought they gave to what it feels like to raise a child in a community where the seat of government is still guarded by a symbol of the soldiers who fought to keep one class of citizens enslaved. Did they think about how, a century later, white men still felt it was okay to spit on black children? Did they consider the ingrained racial injustices in our communities, systemic injustices that we are now facing following the death of George Floyd and so many others? I look at controversies over Confederate statues and consider how I would respond if I was in the minority, beyond for just an hour or so on a blacktop basketball court.
I’ll admit that it took me too long to come to this conclusion, but like other preservationists, I “support the removal of Confederate monuments from our public spaces when they continue to serve the purposes for which many were built — to glorify, promote, and reinforce white supremacy, overtly or implicitly.”
We more than owe that to our fellow citizens who have walked in the suffocating shadow of Johnny Reb for far too long.
It is a long post that clearly had some resonance back in June, and I suspect it may still resonate today.
And that’s the “Best of the blog” with our top ten posts from 2020. I hope you find something in these posts that makes you think, smile, laugh, cry, or love.
Have a wonderful week, and thanks so much for reading.
Many of the musicians I write about each week in these Saturday Soundtrack posts are like old friends who have been in my life for a long time. Yet I began this segment, in part, to discover musicians who weren’t playing in the ’70s (that’s 1970s). So occasionally I highlight musicians new to me, recommended by friends, You Tube, Sirius XM, the Fretboard Journal, or Pandora. They are gifts, if you will. So for this holiday version of Saturday Soundtrack, I want to revisit a few of those “new favorites” that may be well known, but that I just discovered in 2020.
“Dig” by Amythyst Kiah
We’ll begin with the very first Soundtrack of the year, which featured Amythyst Kiah. This native Tennessean is a self-described “Southern Gothic” singer of “alt-country blues” who has been receiving rave reviews and was nominated for a 2020 Grammy in the Best American Roots Song category for her spell-binding “Black Myself.” When you listen to Kiah sing that tune live with Our Native Daughters — a song which is a perfect kick-off for a year when Black Lives Matter moved to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness — you’ll be up and rockin’ in no time.
Another member of Our Native Daughters, Leyla McCalla, was relatively new to me as well. McCalla grew up in the cultural mix of New York City but relocated to Accra, Ghana for two years while a teenager. She returned to the States to study cello performance and chamber music at NYU. Taking that knowledge—and “armed with Bach’s Cello Suites”—she left to play cello on the streets of the French Quarter in New Orleans. There she sang in French, Haitian Creole, and English, and played cello, tenor banjo and guitar. McCalla spent two years and gained greater fame as cellist of the Grammy award-winning African-American string band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, alongside bandmates Rhianna Giddens and Dom Flemons. She left the group in 2013 to pursue her solo career. Money is King is from her 2018 album Capitalist Blues. The song highlights McCalla’s incorporation of traditional Creole, Cajun and Haitian music into her contemporary work.
Eric Skye came to my attention through the pages of the Fretboard Journal. Although new to me, the Portland, Oregon-based acoustic guitarist certainly has a devoted following, and not just from Richard Hoover and the folks at Santa Cruz Guitars who made his beautiful instrument.
Skye has a very broad minded approach to music, which he explains came in part from a classical guitar teacher who turned him on to blues and jazz as well. As his website notes, while often billed as an acoustic jazz guitarist, “Skye actually occupies a unique niche between traditional acoustic music, modal jazz, folk, and blues. Give a listen to him play Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man.
Hawktail came to me as a gift one day via a Sirius XM acoustic music show. Although I knew some of the members of the band — which is composed of fiddler Brittany Haas, bassist Paul Kowert, guitarist Jordan Tice, and mandolinist Dominick Leslie — this particular configuration was one that I had not encountered before they were featured on Sirius
Hawktail plays some of the most beautiful, complex yet accessible music from the American contemporary acoustic music scene you’ll ever want to hear. After beginning life as a trio, this band’s first album, Unless, was released in 2018, and earlier this year their second offering, entitled Formations, hit the streets. Both are excellent, but in Formations the band really hits its stride. Give a listen to this medley of Polly Put the Kettle On / Say Old Man, Can you Play a Fiddle? / Johnson Boys. Brittany Haas and Paul Kowert shine throughout, with a special mention of their work in Johnson Boys.
Brooks Williams is a Statesboro, Georgia- born/Cambridge, England-based country blues guitarist who gets a wonderful groove going on You Don’t Know My Mind and never lets it go.
Williams is a talented singer and guitarist who has a devoted following. For something completely different, check out this 2014 slide version of the traditional tune Sitting on Top of the World, played on an electric cigar box guitar!
When I was calling for This Land Is Your Landto be our new national anthem, I came across a version of the Woody Guthrie tune by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kingsthat blew me away. Good Gawd! Where has this wonderful musician been all my life? Jones, unfortunately, died from pancreatic cancer in 2016, but her music lives on. Give a listen to some of her other tunes when you have a chance. You will not be able to sit still!
In my Halloween Soundtrack entitled Roots music for ghosts, goblins, and other things that go bump in the night I uncovered a wonderful acoustic version of Who Do You Love by Elise LeGrow. She howls about her “tombstone hand and a graveyard mind / just 22 and I don’t mind dying” in a way that makes you feel it in your bones.
I’m planning on doing a full Soundtrack on LeGrow’s acoustic work in the coming weeks, but this wonderful version of Chuck Berry’s You Never Can Tell should whet your appetite until I can get the whole post together.
Rusted brandy in a diamond glass / everything is made from dreams / time is made from honey slow and sweet /only the fools know what it means / temptation, temptation, temptation / oh, temptation, temptation, I can’t resist!
I can’t resist the chance to hear musicians who are new to me. I hope you’ve found gifts of music this year and have enjoyed getting to know some of my favorites — old and new — from 2020.
For next weeks Saturday Soundtrack, I’ll highlight the top ten posts in this series, based on readers’ views. It is a great list!
The Weekly Reader is an occasional feature with short descriptions and links to a variety of articles that I found worth considering this week. I hope some of them will interest you as well.
“The language we use to describe political reality can create its own reality so we end up fighting over a fiction, not a fact,” notes Stoehr. “(W)e’ve always been divided in one way or another, because the United States is a federation of different regions and states.” But using the anti-democratic Electoral College to describe our division is using the wrong frame. Remember, Trump could have won the Electoral College but lost by 7.1 million votes.
What each stood for and against matters, too. Biden for order, union and cooperation. Trump for chaos, disunion and negation. Biden stood for equal human rights and against fascist collectivism. Trump stood for inequality in all its forms and against republican democracy. Talking up a divided America is privileging the loser over the winner. The privilege ought to go to the candidate who brought as much unity as it’s possible to bring to a country as heterogeneous as ours. It should go especially to the 81,283,485 people who smashed all the old records to save our democratic republic.
Stroop argues that “the United States, an ostensibly secular country, has a de facto Christian public sphere.”
“If we want to have a serious conversation about Christianity in the United States, we must consider the ways in which Christian hegemony harms others, including through its normalization of Christian extremism. Instead of systematically silencing the voices of leavers, nonbelievers, and religious minorities in discussing Christianity and “religious freedom,” any serious discourse on these matters must include us as stakeholders in hashing out a fair and equitable approach to American pluralism.
Indeed, any serious discussion needs to start from a place of acknowledging the ways in which the often unacknowledged white Christian hegemony in this country harms those who are othered by conservative Christians—not least youth raised in conservative Christian environments who are unable to conform, and LGBTQ youth in particular.“
“After nearly a decade of Auburn fans bouncing between Fire Gus years and Keep Gus years, the Tigers fired coach Gus Malzahn after their regular season–ending win over Mississippi State. Per his contract, Malzahn—who had eight winning seasons in eight years—is now due $21.5 million in severance, half of it within 30 days. That means Alabama’s highest-paid state employee during this fiscal year, a pandemic year, will be an unemployed football coach. (Counting salaries plus buyouts, fired coaches top several state budgets every year, though those funds largely come from athletic department revenue and private boosters.)“
I’m sorry, but no football coach is worth anywhere near that type of money. Ever.
Robert Glazer, in a recent Friday Forward, speaks to what Being Credible means in the real world (and not politics).
“(Former Trump lawyer Sidney) Powell and (Denver Mayor Michael) Hancock’s examples prompted me to consider the importance of credibility in leadership and how it is defined,” writes Glazer. Leaders must show competence and character to be credible, “both of which were absent in these two examples.”
“Competence is demonstrated through expertise, consistency and objective factual evidence. Think about someone in your life who you consider competent. Do they change their story every day? Do they peddle conspiracy theories? Would you give them your life savings to manage or trust them with your kids?
Similarly, demonstrating character requires being trustworthy and authentic. It means a person’s word can be relied upon, and that there is consistency between what they do and say.“
“(S)ome of the most binding rules in English are things that native speakers know but don’t know they know, even though they use them every day. When someone points one out, it’s like a magical little shock.
In 2016, for example, the BBC’s Matthew Anderson pointed out a “rule” about the order in which adjectives have to be put in front of a noun….”
Werber quotes “professional stickler Mark Forsyth” in noting that adjectives…
“absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.”
Mixing up the above phrase does, as Forsyth writes, feel inexplicably wrong (a rectangular silver French old little lovely whittling green knife…), though nobody can say why. It’s almost like secret knowledge we all share.“
Fascinating.
And in my “graphic language warning section,” I’ll end with the notorious Shower Cap in his American Madness Journal. If you can take the language and the frat house humor directed toward Republicans, you can read the entirety of Please! No More Winning! It’s Like a Goddamn Kesha Song in Here! But the paragraph I really want to highlight deals with the right wing outrage theatre, which is surely going to zoom into high gear now that they no longer hold the presidency.
The weekend provided an insightful little lesson on the mechanisms of Wingnut Outrage Theatre: the Wall Street Journal dug up some crusty old chauvinist to puke out an almost satirically condescending op-ed shi**ing on Dr. Jill Biden, that uppity broad, for having the audacity to use the title she earned through years of hard work. Following the entirely predictable (and deliberately provoked) avalanche of pushback, the editorial page gleefully published a non-apology so cynical they surely had it prepped in advance, bemoaning the thousand tyrannies of “cancel culture,” because the tree of conservative victimhood must be refreshed from time to time with the crocodile tears of mediocre white dudes.
That last line is so delicious, I pulled it out and put it in as this week’s “More to Consider” quote. We need to remind ourselves of this fake outrage at least once per week for the next four (and hopefully more) years of a Democratic administration. Remember the audacity of tan suits?
As 2020 — the year of the coronavirus pandemic — draws to a close, More to Come is the platform for sharing the annual list of books I’ve read over the past twelve months. As regular readers know, since returning from sabbatical early in 2016 I’ve committed to reading more, and to seeking out a wider range of works beyond my favored histories and biographies. But 2020 — with the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the mass attacks on our democracy — called me to read more about race, social justice, and our democracy than may normally have been the case. With that in mind, here — in the order I read them — are the treasures I found on my reading shelf this past year.
I began the year by re-reading Michelle Alexander’s seminal work The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. It still stands, some ten years later, as a stinging rebuke to those — like Chief Justice John Roberts in his terribly misguided ruling on the Voting Rights Act — who make the case that we are a post-racial society and should quickly move beyond our racist past.* And I read it before the racial justice reckoning that we began facing after the death of George Floyd and others at the hands of the police. Alexander wrote in her essay around the book’s 10th anniversary, that “We are now living in an era not of post-racialism but of unabashed racialism, a time when many white Americans feel free to speak openly of their nostalgia for an age when their cultural, political and economic dominance could be taken for granted — no apologies required.”
The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution is historian Eric Foner’s most recent book, bringing together a lifetime of scholarship around this most contentious era in our nation’s history. In spite of its look at a period some 150 years in the past, this is work with great resonance for this day, this political climate, and the major questions of how we will advance as a nation. As Foner states in his preface, “Key issues confronting American society today are in some ways Reconstruction questions.”
Alex Krieger’s 2019 book City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present examines America’s long history of living with an eye on the horizon, seeking something shiny and new. Krieger, longtime professor in urban design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a practicing urban planner, has written an accessible book about the many strands of utopia that have shaped the American landscape and personality.
In Margaret Renkl’s wonderful debut book Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, she makes the comment that “It takes a lot of nerve” for someone like herself, who is “so ignorant of true wilderness” to put herself forward as a nature writer. But then she adds, “the flip side of ignorance is astonishment, and I am good at astonishment.” In another passage in this beautiful collection of short essays about nature, family, community, love, and loss, Renkl writes, “Every day the world is teaching me what I need to know to be in the world,” Late Migrations opens the reader to Renkl’s experiences growing up in Lower Alabama and the inevitable imperfections of life. We are all drifting towards death, as Renkl explains so lovingly to her three-year-old in the essay “All Birds?” (As in “All birds die? All dogs die? All teachers die? All mommies die? I will die?”) Yet we are missing why we’re here if we don’t inhabit this imperfect world fully, with astonishment and awe.
The recently released second edition of Giving Preservation a History, edited by Randall Mason and Max Page, is a strong attempt to reverse our trend at historical amnesia in the preservation field. Through seven essays retained from the first edition, six new essays prepared for the 2020 book, and two concluding chapters to wrap both works together, the editors have endeavored to put forward arguments that may rebut old myths around the elite nature of the movement’s founding while also challenging the field to consider how it has fallen short in the embrace of multi-culturalism and issues of social justice. Like much else in life, historic preservation has a mixed, layered history. But Giving Preservation a History reminds us that understanding our own past is worth knowing as we envision the future. With the preservation movement adapting amid significant societal change, those who understand this past are best equipped to use preservation as an effective tool today and tomorrow.
If you are looking for a good sports book to fill up your hours, I wish I could send you to Jane Leavy’s 2018 The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created with more enthusiasm. While there are good parts to this work, Leavy has gone all Ruthian on us with prodigious amounts of material. But, just like the Babe, she plows through almost 500 pages without a sense of discipline in deciding what’s worth keeping and what is best left untouched. In Leavy’s portrait, Babe Ruth comes across as the man who helped shape many facets of modern America that we know today. His love for baseball, food, beer, women, and attention are at the forefront of this work. Unfortunately, the excesses of modern life in the new age of celebrity also come across in ways intended and unintended in The Big Fella.
At the very beginning of 2018’s American Dialogue: The Founders and Us, historian Joseph J. Ellis lays out his personal self-evident truth. The guide star that leads his work is simple yet important: “The study of history is an ongoing conversation between past and present from which we all have much to learn.” Over the book’s 200+ pages, Ellis demonstrates how just such a dialogue takes place in the hands of a talented historian, biographer, writer, and thinker immersed in the study of our nation’s founding. Focusing on key issues of our day — race, inequality, law, and foreign policy — he carries on a rich, thoughtful, and challenging conversation with four founders that helps us go back to the beginning and understand some of their controversial decisions, and how they differ from choices we are making today.
As it became clear that isolationism isn’t an option with a global pandemic taking place, I turned to Robert Kaplan’s Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World. Kaplan argues that America became a great country not just because of our constitution and values, but because it occupies some of the best, most fertile land on the planet that is connected by a river system (running diagonally) that unites the heartland into a strong political unit. “America’s greatness,” in his words, “ultimately, is based on it being a nation, an empire, and a continent rolled into one.” And in taming the frontier, America learned how to be a global power. There’s much to consider here during an age when our role in the world is very much upside down and few countries look to us for leadership during this time.
The “logo” map of the U.S. mainland at the top, and the map showing the full extent of U.S. territories in 1940 to scale. Both Alaska and Hawaii stretch almost coast to coast across the mainland.
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Northwestern University historian Daniel Immerwahr turned out to be among the great surprises of the year for me. The “Greater United States” was a term used by some at the turn of the 20th century to describe the states and territories of the U.S. Immerwahr is standing on the shoulders of many scholars who have focused on aspects of U.S. imperialism in the past. Yet he brings their work together in a narrative of impressive scope and depth, changing the way one thinks about the U.S. The history we’ve learned growing up is that America is a republic, born out of a desire to overthrow an empire. When someone talks about Americans as imperialistic, it raises our hackles. But as Immerwahr writes, “At various times, the inhabitants of the U.S. Empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured and experimented on. What they haven’t been, by and large, is seen.” As a lifelong student of history who learned new lessons from virtually every page of this remarkable 2019 work, I am here to say that How to Hide an Empire should be required reading for all Americans.
I read two books about aging well during the first few months of the pandemic. The first, Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Livesby Daniel J. Levitin, is written as an effort to change the status quo about the role older people play in daily life. Levitin examines what happens in the brain as we age and what are the keys to aging well. In 400 pages packed full of the latest science as well as stories from the lives of those who are demonstrating the benefits that can come from getting older, Levitin makes the case that aging is not inevitably a period of decline and loss and irrelevance. The other book in my rite of passage reading was 2002’s Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life by George E. Vaillant, M.D., based on the oldest, most thorough study of aging ever undertaken. Dr. Vaillant’s description of the key findings to emerge from the study include several thoughts that relate to successful aging in a time of turmoil “It is not the bad things that happen to us that doom us,” he notes, “it is the good people who happen to us at any age that facilitate enjoyable old age.”
Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do by MacArthur Foundation Fellow Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt, is a look at all the ways we make biased judgements without realizing that we’re even doing so. We are wired for bias, Eberhardt writes, but it is not something we exhibit and act on all the time. Instead, it is conditioned, so we begin to battle bias by understanding the conditions — especially speed and ambiguity — under which bias is likely to come alive.
The hopeful message of this book is that “we all have the capacity to make change — within ourselves, in the world, and in our relationship to that world.”
Barbara Brown Taylor’s latest book, Holy Envy; Finding God in the Faith of Others, turns to the questions, worries, and concerns that arise in most of us when we encounter “difference” and “others.” As an Episcopal priest, her focus is on spiritual riches. But we can all look at how our minds and worldview are expanded when we are open to the wonder that is all around us. Taylor’s encouragement to not only think deeply about our beliefs, but to look to others outside our tribe and traditions for the many truths they tell, extends to areas far beyond the spiritual. I recommend this book because we are at a moment in history where so many people are having their “truth” upended.
Edward Achorn’s 2020 work Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln is a fascinating book that looks at March 3rd and 4th, 1865 and the cast of characters — including Walt Whitman, Clara Barton, Frederick Douglass, and John Wilkes Booth — who gathered in Washington as Lincoln began his second term. Achorn illuminates all the capitol’s “mud, sewage, and saloons, its prostitutes, spies, reporters, social-climbing spouses and power-hungry politicians” and then showcases the activities of these two days “as a microcosm of all the opposing forces that had driven the country apart.” With a journalist’s eye and a storyteller’s skill, Achorn captures the frenzy, the turmoil, the excitement, and the despair of that time in a remarkable work.
I picked up Patti Smith’s Devotion because, in my push to write well, I often look to what others have to say on the subject. Smith’s slender volume is part of Yale’s Why I Write series. But as I note in my review, this three-part book — consisting of a look at Smith’s creative process, a shallow and creepy short story, and a final segment written from Camus’ villa — has a great deal of what one reviewer described as “overblown language, artistic reverence, and pseudo-revelatory style.” I do use the post to send readers in what I consider better directions to answer questions about why and how to write, including Paul Graham, John McPhee, and Annie Dillard.
Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey into the Heart of America is the story of a five-year journey across the country, most of it taken at low altitude in a propeller airplane. Along the way, journalists James and Deborah Fallows saw small and mid-sized towns that had faced economic hardship, political crises, and job losses. They also saw “the emerging pattern of American reinvention.” One of the first places they stopped in each town to gather local information and to gauge the character of the community was the public library, a fact I build upon in my post about the book. Since the book was published in 2018, I came away thinking that much of what they found would require some type of 2020 reality check. Thankfully, their Our Towns website has stories that deal with this most challenging of years, produced with the same straightforward, non-judgmental approach that does not gloss over the issues but speaks to the energy and renewal possible across the country.
How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X.Kendi is usually found right at the top of the list of recommended works to read in order to understand the systemic racism in our country and how best to respond. Kendi has written a work that challenges assumptions and rationalizations we all make to assure ourselves and others that we are “not racist.” What could be wrong with not being a racist? Kendi makes the argument right up front that there is “no neutrality in the racism struggle.” After 2020, I believe we all have to acknowledge that perspective as we consider how best to fight the scourge of white supremacy. Highly recommended.
Frederick Douglass
As I finished reading the monumental 2018 biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, the first on Douglass in a quarter century, I came away humbled, enlightened, and inspired. By Douglass’s life and work, certainly. But also by Blight’s efforts to capture, in very human form, the essence of his most extraordinary subject.
While he tries to balance the narrative of Douglass’s life with “analyses of his evolving mind,” Blight writes of how he returns to that narrative, because…
“It is Douglass’s story, though, that lasts and gives and instructs. There is no greater voice of America’s terrible transformation from slavery to freedom than Douglass’s. For all who wish to escape from outward or inward captivity, they would do well to feel the pulses of this life, and to read the words of this voice. And then go act in the world.”
Blight is not afraid to bring Douglass’s prophetic voice into today’s world as he analyzes his words and evolving mind. As he was drawing closer to death in 1893 and 1894, Douglass found his old voice and, as Blight phrases it, “preached an old creed.”
“Men talk of the Negro problem. There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their Constitution.”
And so the question from the prophet remains today: are we willing to change in order to live up to the ideals of the constitution? Douglass is a 19th century prophet, but like most great prophets, his words still ring true in the 21st century, if we’ll only listen.
Historic Cities: Issues in Urban Conservation is co-edited by my friend Jeff Cody at the Getty Conservation Institute. Published in 2019, this masterly survey brings together 67 different articles and groups them into eight sections covering topics such as the shared nature of the historic city, significant values, sustainability, and managing the historic city.
This is a richly illustrated book with a range of writings sure to interest both practitioners and the curious layperson who cares about past efforts and current concerns and work to maintain historic cities and their buildings that, as noted by architect Marwa Al-Sabouni, hold the “values — the aesthetic values, the moral values — of the place.”
As the turmoil of Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the country was playing out in the news, I was reading Nancy MacLean’s 2017 book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. This award-winning and well-researched intellectual history of the radical right demonstrates that Trump is just a noisy distraction in a sixty-year effort to undermine America’s democracy. And while he did not succeed at getting “his” Supreme Court to throw out millions of valid votes, the work to make the people who cast those 81.2 million votes against Donald Trump irrelevant in future elections continues apace.
MacLean’s well written narrative tells the story of James McGill Buchanan, a Tennessee boy who went to my alma mater and then used his considerable intellect to earn his doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago. Buchanan came to the University of Virginia in the midst of the state’s turmoil over the massive resistance to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling on school desegregation. He arrived to set up an economics policy center that would, in MacLean’s words, develop the intellectual underpinning for an ideological “stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and the national levels, back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation.” This is…
“…the utterly chilling story of the ideological origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance.”
It may scare you, but it should, which is why it is highly recommended.
So what’s on the bookshelf for 2021? I am getting ready to begin Purposeful Retirement, then I have Pete Buttigieg’s Trust up next, followed by the first volume of President Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land. I’m reading the last two as part of the work to restore some of my faith in our government as we transfer to new leadership. I’m reading the first one well…because I’m semi-retired and learning how to “do something different” from what I’ve done over the past four decades.
No matter your career status or state-of-mind as this most challenging of years comes to an end, my advice is to keep on reading!
More to come…
DJB
*Chief Justice Roberts really does not believe that we are a post-racial society. If you read the last book in my list, you’ll see that his work is part of a 60-year-old stealth plan to keep people from voting based on those old American issues of power, money, and race.
I recently asked a friend and one of my regular Saturday Soundtrack readers what music he was listening to these days. He replied, “I sure am missing the annual Celtic Christmas concert by Linn Barnes and Allison Hampton” at Dumbarton United Methodist Church. Tell me more, I said, and soon I was online, listening to delightful duets between the Celtic harp of Linn Barnes and the guitar or lute played by Allison Hampton. Perfect music for the season, as heard in the classic In the Bleak Midwinter.
Linn Barnes and Allison Hampton have played for thirty-five years as part of the acclaimed Dumbarton Concert series, where their annual Christmas program, A Celtic Christmas was described by The Washington Post as “a Washington institution.” In 2015 they released a compilation of the same name comprised of favorite tunes recorded from 1995 to 2011 and performed annually at the Christmas concerts. Here’s a lovely version of the Sussex Carol.
The duo have played at stages across the country and in Europe, appearing in 1988, 1990, and 1996 at the prestigious Inter-Celtic Festival in Lorient, Brittany, France. They have made frequent appearances on both Washington and national radio and television. For something outside the holiday realm, I enjoyed their version of the medley Fraher’s Jig and Garret Barry’s Jig. The interplay of the harp and Descant lute is arresting and lovely. From the same recording session comes I Lost My Love with Hampton on the Terz guitar, a small 19th century instrument tuned a minor third higher than a regular guitar (i.e., the same tuning as if you put a capo at the third fret of a normal guitar).
Barnes and Hamilton have also played in larger groups, as heard in this recording of Madame Maxwell by The Celtic Consort.
I’ll end this exploration with the beautiful mix of Celtic and Renaissance music from Spain in Espanoleta, which is included in their Galicia CD as well as on A Celtic Christmas.
Enjoy!
More to come…
DJB
Correction: An earlier version of this post had the Dumbarton Concert series as being held at Dumbarton Oaks. My apologies for the error.
MORE TO COME... 