Thinking of the Past

I was young once. I know it sounds odd to say it, but it’s easy to forget when you’re fifty-seven and have grandchildren. Maybe we were all young once, I don’t know. Some of you are still young, not even thirty. It’s a mystery. I have children older than that. I’m not suggesting I’m old—far from it. But I’m sitting at home, taking care of my uncle while Nita helps our daughter-in-law with Salem, their one-and-a-half year-old, because she’s (mom) about two hours away from delivering the second, (Grahson—a few of you will smile at that) and is tired, and needs a break. So I’m watching some CMT special with Faith Hill because she can sing and picks mostly good songs and is easy to look at. And while I watch, I am taken back to that time when I was young and knew things I have slowly forgotten, or perhaps I didn’t know enough.
When I was seventeen and eighteen, in Glen Burnie Maryland, going to school while dad snuck away to the Pentagon every day to do secret stuff for the Air Force, I fell in with a couple folkies; Rick and Kay. Rick was a good friend, although I’m not sure why—Dever calls the phenomenon of friendship “filling gaps”, and I suppose Rick and I filled some gaps for one another—and he had been singing with Kay for about a year, and her last name was Funk, so you can see right away that fate was playing a Royal Flush, and I was helpless. They were into very old, traditional folk music. Rick played a fine twelve-string guitar and harmonica, and had a rough, gravelly voice somewhere between George Thoroughgood and Bob Dylan, (and if you know who all these musicians are I will be talking about, you either had rockin’ parents or you are, like me, no longer young.) Kay on the other hand, had a voice like an angel, a true soprano, great control and a whole lota soul. I started hanging out with them and pretty soon I was singing along while they practiced, putting on harmonies (I knew the songs) and then playing a little guitar as an accent for Rick, and one day they came to me and said “we’ve talked it over and we want you to join us and be a trio.”
Well, sure, I said, that’d be fine. So I did. We began to rearrange the songs to fit another voice, and I began to gently push them into a more contemporary direction, while not forsaking the heart of folk music. We started playing Peter Paul and Mary, The Kingston Trio, Donovan, Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, Buffy St. Marie, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Leonard Cohen, all those greats—even a little Tom Waits. I tricked ‘em into doing a version of Ghost Riders in the Sky because my dad had turned me on to The Sons of the Pioneers, and they are still one of my all time favorites. We even messed around with writing original material. We worked hard and got pretty good and started getting gigs. Not paying gigs of course, but we worked steady, and eventually a little money came our way. We played the coffee house circuit between Baltimore and Washington DC, when there was such a thing as a coffee house circuit. And we got a following, which consisted of our friends at school and then even strangers were tagging along, following us around, (and by strangers, I mean extremely odd people from parts unknown, and, more than likely, unknowable).
I miss it sometimes, and I want to tell you why—which is the point of this silly little diversion. (As an aside, we once were kicked off the Governors Mansion lawn in Annapolis, by the Gov himself, Spiro Agnew. He was in a bathrobe and a cigar and used language I’d never heard before. We had a gig that night at a place called the Toadstool and were practicing on what we thought was the greensward of a park).
Here’s the thing. While I’m watching Faith, the close-ups, her interaction with the guys and gals in the band, I’m suddenly back there with Rick and Kay, singing Well, Well, Well, and Polly Von, Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and Tom Dooley, The Story of Isaac, and Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night, among many others. I’m remembering what it felt like, and it felt good. We went through several names for our little group, all horrible and pretentious, but we always called the music we made “The Great Song”, and vowed that would be the name of our first album. I can see that same feeling in Faith’s eyes and the faces of her band and singers—because everyone shares in the magic that is live music. I cannot describe what that feeling is like, but when we were on and in the groove, it was amazing, timeless, intense beyond feeling, and extremely contagious. It fed on itself, and grew, until we were smiling at each other—or nobody—without knowing we were, our faces no doubt contorted, but not in pain—we were transformed by genuine ecstasy. When you hit that unexpected note perfectly and get that response from the audience, and you’re shivering because the chords on the guitars mingling with the three voices, all belting out their own parts makes a moment, an instant, which only lasts as long as the melody demands and is gone, but in that instant, you discover it’s possible to find eternity, and visions are seen, invisible voices are heard, and you are, as C.S. Lewis puts it, “surprised by joy”. Practicing was sometimes the same; transcendent, taking us beyond what we could possibly do. We became more than the sum of whatever talent each of us brought to the sound. And we made each other better. Kay and I had some kind of bizarre, annoying gift for harmony. We came up with the same one so often that we worked hard at trying to invent new, strange, and compelling harmony and counterpoint. And then we’d still end up singing the same one! It got to the point where we had to come up with each harmony together, then go one to the next one, again, together, and so forth. I guess we were good enough to have been given a record contract—at least if we’d kept going with it, but my family moved back to Albuquerque at the end of that two years.
We sang a few songs for Kay’s voice teacher in Baltimore one Saturday. He taught at the Peabody Conservatory, and offered me a scholarship right then and there, but I was so naive, I barely knew what a scholarship was and had never even heard of Peabody.
I’ll never forget those two years. And I’ll never forget how it felt to be inside that moment, inside the Great Song. Most people don’t ever get to experience it. There are similar moments in other areas of life—I’ve felt something like it playing basketball from time to time, when we all got into the “zone” and lost ourselves to the motion and seamless team-mind, and while playing with my kids certainly. All night talks with good friends, moments of real, intimate communication between God and me, that kind of thing. But music is different. Not better, but more, visceral, more . . . something. I have no regrets about it ending—I would never have met Nita if I’d stayed back east, and she is the ultimate transcendent experience. Wouldn’t change a thing. But sometimes I miss it a little, and wonder how Rick and Kay are getting along and if the Great Song still exists out there somewhere, like it does for Faith and her band. In the scriptures there’s a verse about using our God-given talents or we will lose them. I can’t sing anymore—I’ve lost a third of my range, most of my wind, and the control I used to have—and I only play the guitar once or twice a year, living proof of that warning. Over the years other things took the place of the music; bereft of Rick and Kay, and the Great Song, I sort of grew up—it was an accident, I swear!—turned to raising a family, school, and work while it slipped through my fingers. I tried, but I’ve never found it again.