I don’t have any idea how many folks out there are reading my new novel Streets of Nashville. While I’m certain that it’s not as high a number as I would like it to be, I’m grateful for everybody who is tackling the story and reaching out to say so via email or texts or social media.
One response that I haven’t expected is how quickly some folks have read it. Here are some words from the reachers out mentioned above:
“I am the slowest reader and I read to page 300 [in a single day, I’m guessing — out of 331 pages]. That says a lot.”
“Read it all day yesterday and finished up this morning. FABULOUS! It kept me captivated and i couldn’t put the damn thing down! Great work!”
“Get yourself a copy for the weekend, I promise you won’t regret.I read it in one day!” [Facebook post]
“Got your book . . . (Streets of Nashville) and couldn’t put it down until I finished it. I enjoyed the story but I also like your writing style. I’m looking forward to the next book.”
Not everybody’s an Evelyn Wood speed reader (I know I’m not — and who gets that reference anyway?), and that’s more than okay:
“I’m a thriller/mystery reader and your book has all the right stuff, Michael.”
“This is a solid, well-crafted thriller set in Nashville in 1989. Songwriters, murder, revenge, sexuality: it’s got a lot going on, and it does it all well.”
“I’ve been making myself read only 2–3 chapters a week. I’m on chapter 49. I raced through Gabriel’s Songbook in a couple of days and then had nothing to look forward to when I was done. This one is a Hitchcock-like mystery…going slow keeps me in suspense. I’m anxious to find out how it ends but I know I’ll be sorry (in a good way) when I learn how everything unfolds. It’s a great read.”
Then there’s the reader who sent me this:
I’ve been saving Streets of Nashville for when I finished the other books I was reading and could bring to it a clear mind – so I planned to spend this week in the mountains, including taking my time with the book, but then, oh well, I stayed up all night and read the whole thing.
My oh my what a wonderful novel! There are so many things I loved about it – of course 1980’s Nashville, the gorgeous descriptions of weather and the sky, the mature exploration of whether or not an Appalachian man can go home again, the intelligent and nuanced reintegration of the Self, the grappling with evil and shame and love, and on and on while still being a page turner.
If you’ve read it, I hope you enjoyed it. If you’re reading it, I hope you’re enjoying it. If you have access to Goodreads or Amazon, I hope you’ll consider giving it a rating, maybe even a few words of review.
“Voters knew he believed in nothing, which meant he could conceivably do anything, making him the perfect candidate upon whom to pin their wildest dreams. . . . The problem with running as the candidate of people’s dreams is that, eventually, they wake up.” — Yair Rosenberg
Here’s another political collection of memes of note. . . .
An appeal to mercy for demonized groups challenges the narratives that demonize them.
When you worship power, things like mercy, empathy, and compassion will begin to sound like a compromise or a weakness, or even worse, they will sound like sins. When you worship power, the structures and people who maintain that power must prioritize authority, not mercy, forgiveness, or compassion. When you worship power, the more ruthless you are towards those you’ve already chosen to see as your ‘enemies,’ the more righteous you become. When you worship power, you see power as synonymous with the truth, and the truth should never be questioned or criticized. The worship of power has no room for mercy. This worship of power is why authoritarianism has become so appealing to far too many Christians. This worship of power is why the appeal to mercy is treated like a threat.
. . . [Y]ou will see certain politicians and pastors alike being supported by many Christians for high positions of power, no matter their crimes or abuses towards others, because as long as they are willing to use their power in order to protect and enforce what they believe to be “Christian values,” their moral character doesn’t matter. Securing and maintaining power is all that matters in this belief system.
. . . [O]ne of the most blatant forms of Christian hypocrisy in our time right now is Christians holding all the ordinary people we share this country with accountable to the most rigid moral standards while simultaneously holding their preferred politicians accountable to no standards at all. The greater the power one has, the less they will be held accountable to any moral standard. That’s what worshiping power looks like.
. . . Evangelical Christian leader Russell Moore said that multiple pastors had told him disturbing stories about their congregants being upset when they read from the ” Sermon on the Mount” in which Jesus espoused the principles of forgiveness and mercy that are central to Christian doctrine. “Multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount – [and] to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?” Moore added: “And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ, the response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.”
. . . [N]owhere in the gospel accounts is Jesus seen checking someone’s legal status before welcoming them. Nowhere in the gospel accounts is Jesus seen making sure someone has a job before he “hands out” food to them. Nowhere in the gospel accounts is Jesus seen making sure someone was straight so could make sure he wasn’t “tolerating sin” by spending time with them.
As [a] powerful woman of God once said, “Jesus was not killed by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion – which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the will of God and are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God’s will from their own.” (Rev. Dr. Barbara Brown Taylor)
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy.” (Jesus)
Rev. Cremer invites us to (re)visit John 3:16-17 (not just the 16th verse) and Romans 1:29-32.
In the days of I Samuel 8, the people demanded a king. Samuel took his distress over this to God, who told him that the people weren’t rejecting his leadership but instead were rejecting God—”forsaking me and serving other gods.” In the face of the people’s rejection of faith in God, Samuel was instructed to be sure the people knew what they were asking, to be sure they understood the choice they were making.
So Samuel told the people what God said:
“This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. 12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. 16 Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle[c] and donkeys he will take for his own use. 17 He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. 18 When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” (1 Samuel 8: 11-18)
And still they rejected God in favor of a king’s so-called leadership.
I’m not suggesting that previous administrations have been godlike in any way. But except for the 45th administration, the ones I’ve know haven’t been as mean and ignorant as this 47th will be. Except for the 45th, none have so greedily sought to be king. We look for our Samuel to the people, our David to Saul, our Nathan to David, our John the Baptist to Herod.
Every year between Christmas and Epiphany (January 6), I read James Joyce’s “The Dead,” widely regarded as one of the best short stories ever written in English and the final story in the classic collection Dubliners. The setting is the “Misses Morkan’s annual dance” and dinner party. The hostesses are elderly Miss Kate and Miss Julia Morkan and their niece Mary Jane. The main character is Gabriel Conroy, Julia and Kate’s nephew, whose mother was their late sister.
The party breaks up late, and Gabriel and his wife Gretta make their way through cold and snow to a Dublin hotel for the night. But before they leave the Morkan house, Joyce creates a beautiful scene in which Gretta is standing on the first landing of the stairs, where she is listening so somebody up above playing the piano and a man singing. Gabriel stands at the foot of the stairs looking up at his wife:
He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. DISTANT MUSIC he would call the picture if he were a painter.
Later, in their hotel room lit only by streetlights, he asks her about the song she heard, and she tells him it was “The Lass of Aughrim.” When he asks why the song made her cry, she tells him the story from her girlhood, when she was loved by a boy named Michael Furey, who used to sing that song to her. When Gabriel breaks out in peevish anger – just before, he was lusting to get her into bed – and says something cutting about her wanting to visit her native region to rekindle her young love of this Furey boy. That’s when she tells him that Michael Furey is dead. Joyce writes, “Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks.” He becomes even more flustered when he learns that the boy died of a lung condition and overexposure to the weather when he visited her on a cold and rainy night out of a desire to see her one last time before she left for school.
Gretta cries herself to sleep and leaves Gabriel standing by the window and looking out on the night. He feels tenderly for her having spent all their years together, even their most intimate moments, with this secret “locked in her heart.” He feels sad for himself and for her as he realizes that he perhaps has never loved anybody – not even Gretta: “He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love.”
Joyce’s great story “The Dead” ends, appropriately, with what I consider to be one of the most beautiful paragraphs ever written in English:
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely in the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
I find this so moving that a few years ago, when I was somewhere – Gatlinburg maybe – on a writing weekend away, I attempted to capture some hint of the emotions this conclusion of “The Dead” inspires in me. Below is what I came up with.
Michael Furey Is Dead
She stands on the stair and listens to the waltz floating down from above, Her face half hidden in shadow half in light. The ghost of a sad smile trembles on lips freshly colored with care, And I tremble at the sight and I wonder what she might be thinking.
She doesn’t know that I saw her as we walk side by side on the street, Both acting just like we didn’t feel what we felt. My tongue tripping over her mystery, hers trying to cover it up. Then I ask her if she’s well, Then I beg for her to tell what she’s feeling.
Oo Oo Oo—Michael Furey is dead—Oo Oo Oo
Deep in the days of a cold and wet autumn, they took waltzing walks in the wood. A delicate boy and a handsome young woman they were. She was an orphan with her aunt until winter, when she’d pack up and go back to school. And he worked in the mines, and he coughed all the time they were dancing.
[Waltz-rhythm interlude]
The weather turned black before she was to leave, the rain fell without taking a breath. Her dark-haired boy waited wet and alone ’neath the trees. She’d been back to school for only one week when the letter arrived from her aunt. And it brought her to her knees with its news of Michael Furey’s passing.
Oo Oo Oo—Michael Furey is dead—Oo Oo Oo
I stand by the window and listen as her sobs subside into sleep And look for the ghost of the boy who died for love of my wife. The stars hang in heaven like the caught breath of snow or like sparkling rain in dark hair. And I tremble at the sight, and I wonder what she might be dreaming. And I tremble deep inside, and I’m afraid of what she might be dreaming.
Oo Oo Oo—Michael Furey is dead—Oo Oo Oo
I played this song live a few times soon after I wrote it, but I’ve never recorded it. I need to do some simple recording soon so that I don’t lose it. If I get the chance to record one last album, I’ll maybe close it with “Michael Furey Is Dead.”
SPECTRAL GEOFF: Did you know that giraffes are, like, 30 times more likely than people to get struck by lightning?
ME: Makes sense, I guess. They’re generally closer to the source. They always told us not to stand under a tree in a thunderstorm. Maybe the same should be said about giraffes—as in don’t stand under ’em.
SG: And did you know that with this Inauguration, Donald Trump has the unprecedented opportunity to become the two worst presidents in U.S. history?
M: I hadn’t thought of it that way. Quite an achievement if he can pull it off.
SG: And did you also know that a chicken once lived 18 months without a head?
According to Mountford Writing, a blurb is “the effusive (and sometimes elusive) praise you see on book jackets — ‘Brilliant debut…’ — enticing readers to pick up a novel or memoir and take it home.” And according to Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer’s Fiction Courses newsletter, blurbs fall into the category of “love ’em, hate ’em, gotta have ’em.”
I don’t know if blurbs sell books or not, but I’ve been fortunate to land some prize ones for Streets of Nashville. This seems a good place — and time — to share what they are saying about the novel (“they” being fellow authors). See below in alphabetical order.
Michael Amos Cody does a fantastic job creating interesting and empathetic characters, especially his protagonist Ezra, a budding songwriter whose perilous odyssey through the streets of Nashville is much more than grist for the mill—it’s also a heart-rending exploration of music, violence, and the power of friendship. STREETS OF NASHVILLE is an intelligent, heart-felt novel with plenty of authenticity to make it sing. Cody is a talented new voice in Southern fiction whose stories will appear on bookshelves for many years to come.
From the opening chapter of STREETS OF NASHVILLE, Michael Amos Cody’s prose is packed with enough stopping power to send the bullets flying off the page. Dialogue and storytelling ring together like the chords of a song . . . and what a chilling song it is.
In STREETS OF NASHVILLE, aspiring songwriter Ezra MacRae is on the brink of success after years of struggle—until he becomes a witness to a brutal triple homicide on Music Row. Though the masked killer spares Ezra, he doesn’t leave him in peace, haunting and threatening him at every turn. As Ezra balances his dreams of writing songs with a dangerous cat-and-mouse game, the mystery deepens, pulling him back to his North Carolina mountain roots. With rich detail and gritty suspense, Michael Amos Cody delivers a haunting tribute to the resilience needed to survive—and thrive—in the heart of Music City, solidifying him as one of the region’s most compelling voices—a talent I’ve admired since I read his debut novel, GABRIEL’S SONGBOOK.
An elegantly written, mysterious and electric crime novel. Michael Amos Cody’s experience as a Nashville songwriter and encyclopedic knowledge of country music bring STREETS OF NASHVILLE to life.
Kirkus Reviews “has been an industry-trusted source for honest and accessible reviews since 1933 and has helped countless authors build credibility in the publishing realm ever since.” Kirkus says:
An aspiring songwriter in the late 1980s finds himself at the center of a string of Nashville murders in Cody’s thriller.
Ezra MacRae is originally from small-town Runion, North Carolina, and moved to Nashville to be a professional writer of country songs. In the small hours of Easter morning in 1989, however, he finds himself a witness to a shooting on Nashville’s famous Music Row. To his surprise, the killer leaves him unharmed; later, however, the murderer develops a preoccupation with Ezra, harassing him with phone calls and other behavior that escalates to outright stalking. The shooter, Hugo Rodgers, is a former record promoter with a violent and traumatic past. Ezra spends the next week trying to aid local police and protect Benny Jack, an unhoused street singer who caught a stray bullet during the shooting. With the police hot on his tail, Hugo lures Ezra back to Runion for a final confrontation. An epilogue provides a cliffhanger that allows for a continuation of the story. Overall, this is a fast-paced, sometimes coarse, thriller about how desires can become twisted when repressed. The decision to include Hugo’s point of view is a bold but successful move that builds rather than lessens tension. Cody establishes an earthy, authentic sense of place through his prose; there’s an authentic Southern flair to the settings and characters that can feel homey or seedy, depending on the scene. The narrative is interspersed with lyrics to songs Ezra is writing, bringing an elevated lyricism to the page. . . . Ezra is a likable protagonist, as well—sensitive, ambitious, and down to earth, with enough hidden depth to make readers want to spend time with him. Rodgers, meanwhile, is the perfect foil—a despicable killer who becomes even more chilling as his violence spirals out of control.
A bold thriller, set in the music world, that leaves the door open for a possible sequel.
Cody’s STREETS OF NASHVILLE is a lyrical love letter to the musicians who built the city as well as a powerful exploration of friendship and brutality. With his authentic, empathetic voice, Cody is a welcome addition to Southern crime fiction. I look forward to more Ezra MacRae stories to come!
Ezra MacRae is on the precipice of accomplishing a long sought dream when he witnesses a gruesome murder and becomes the target of a psychopath who will make your skin crawl. Cody’s insight into the songwriting world and late ’80s Nashville brings a richness to this story of ambition and greed.STREETS OF NASHVILLE glows with authenticity and heart.
At once an absorbing crime story and an insider’s love letter to a bygone place and time, STREETS OF NASHVILLE grabs ahold of the reader and doesn’t let go. Michael Amos Cody has written a murder ballad to make the bards of Music Row envious.
What a rollicking narrative! Here in Michael Amos Cody’s novel is not only a page-turning murder mystery but also a love song to Nashville’s not-so-distant past, a time raw with possibility. While the setting grounds the narrative, the characters—especially our man Ezra—are riveting. With attention only a musician could mark so brilliantly, Cody has put flesh on characters by turns creatively stricken, comfort-yearning, seedy, and dangerous. STREETS OF NASHVILLE is not just powerful. In all the best ways, it is provocative, a wily rounder of a novel.
Thanks to all these terrific writers and new friends! Thanks as well to Madville Publishing and Kim Davis!
My blogging schedule calls for some monthly writing on writing every first Wednesday. I missed it by a couple of days. . . .
So, here’s some brief news about what’s going on in my writing life.
Gabriel’s Songbook audiobook “cover”—photo by Ed Huskey; original design by Andy Reed and Michael Cody; audiobook adaptation by Jamie Reeves
When the Spring 2024 semester ended, I spent a couple of weeks in May driving over the mountain to Asheville, where I wound up at The Talking Book studio to record my own narration of Gabriel’s Songbook. Dave Burr was the engineer, and I had a great time working with and getting to know him. The audiobook is now out in the world. It’s available on a number of platforms—Libro.fm, Spotify, and others. It should appear soon on Audible.
I’m no actor. I’m no voice actor either. But I don’t cringe when listening to the finished version, which makes me think that it’s all right. Give it a listen!
Bouchercon 2024! According to the website, “Bouchercon® is the annual world mystery convention where every year readers, writers, publishers, editors, agents, booksellers and other lovers of crime fiction gather for a 4-day weekend of education, entertainment, and fun!” This is my first time to attend this convention, which meets at the end of this month (August 28 – September 1) in Nashville.
Cover of the Bouchercon Anthology 2024
Every year Bouchercon puts out a call for traditional crime short stories related to the conference’s host city. Having lived in Nashville through my twenties, I thought I’d give it a shot. I’d recently been working on a novel called Streets of Nashville (see below), which features a main character named Ezra MacRae. In the novel, Ezra is about five years into his attempt to establish a viable career as a songwriter, so I thought I would write a short story that explores Ezra’s backstory a little. My submission to the Bouchercon anthology was “I Could Be the One.” It tells of Ezra’s first days/months/year in Nashville as he tries to find his footing on Music Row. I looked through my song catalog and landed on an old piece of mine—”I Could Be the One,” of course. (Read more about the song here.)
The story was accepted and will be included in the Bouchercon anthology for the Nashville conference! I look at this as a fine feather in my cap. The anthology will debut at the conference and afterwards be available wherever books are sold. I still love Nashville, even more than thirty years gone from it, so I’m looking forward to reading the other stories in the anthology as well.
I wrote “I Could Be the One” in October 2023. As soon as I finished it, I jumped on another anthology opportunity.
I spent November 2023 writing “Carolina,” based on Texas songwriter Robert Earl Keen’s song of the same name. It’s a bit of a murder ballad and includes suggestions of a man perhaps murdering his lover while sleepwalking. Whether he’s sleepwalking or not, he finds her (after she’s left him) and then wakes up later to find her dead.
This scenario immediately made me think of my work with the writings of Charles Brockden Brown, who wrote a couple of pieces in the late 18th / early 19th centuries about sleepwalking and murder. The first is his novel Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799). In 1805, Brown published a piece of short fiction titled “Somnambulism. A Fragment.” In this story, a young man named Althorpe fearfully obsesses over the safety of his beloved on a nighttime trip she is beginning with her father. Althorpe walks in his sleep and finds her in the night and murders her, bringing his obsessive fears to life—without knowing it.
In the song, the ill-fated girl is named Lily. I kept the name for my story and made her the centerpiece of a conflict between two men: the violent Al Thorpe and Asheville PD detective Eddie Huntly. This story was so much fun to write!
“Carolina” will appear in Madville Publishing‘s Wild Wind: Poems and Stories Inspired by the Songs of Robert Earl Keen. The book is scheduled for release on November 19 and will be available wherever books are sold.
Streets of Nashville is my second novel (third book of fiction). On April 15, 2025, Madville Publishing will release the novel into the wild world (whatever form that takes after the November election)! From the above, you can gather that its main character is a songwriter named Ezra MacRae, five years into his attempt to establish a viable career on Nashville’s Music Row. I won’t say much more about it right now. Madville’s editor and I are working with the final proofs of the text, so I should soon have an advance reading opportunity available for pre-release reviews. In the meantime, you can read the query letter that I sent to Madville, which led to acceptance and the start of the publishing process. (Thanks to the great Alex Kenna for providing this query letter space!)
This is a secret cover reveal! I’ll do a more public one on my socials as soon as the text of the book is finalized. For now, we’ll see if anybody actually reads this blog. And if anybody does, they’re the first to lay eyes on this cover.
Back in 2014, Leesa and I traveled with a group of friends to Vimperk, a small town in the southwestern portion of the Czech Republic (aka Czechia). A bunch of us lived for a week in a hostel on Vimperk’s beautiful cobblestone square. At least that’s where we slept. During the day, we were on the run, offering a softball camp for youth and English camp for adults. In the evenings, we did a good bit of sightseeing.
In the middle of that week, I played a concert for the town. We found advertisements for this event scattered around Vimperk when we arrived.
It was a terrific experience all around.
In 2015, Leesa and I decided—for a number of reasons—not to go back, but we really missed the place and the people and turned our eyes toward 2016. Meantime, I began to think about a song for Vimperk.
One of the surprising things about that 2014 trip came in the form of good sleep. I’m a white-noise sleeper. I keep a fan running beside the bed every night, not for the breeze but for the steady sound of it. Not only would the hostel where we slept be without a steady hum to lull me to sleep, but also there were bells. Bells, bells, bells all through the night. The clock tower in the square rings its bells every fifteen minutes—one bell for the quarter hour, two for the half, three for a quarter ’til, four for the hour with these last followed by the deeper, louder bell tolling the hour itself. I couldn’t very well pack a fan for the trip, so I bought some melatonin and hoped for the best.
But it wasn’t long before something—the Old-World ambiance; tiredness from travel and engaging with the Czechs (young and not so young); running to take in the sights; something—lulled me to sleep and gave me a good night’s rest every night. Sure, I was to some degree roused from sleep every quarter hour, but rather than being annoyed at the interruption or unable to get back to sleep, I felt a distinct sense of peace and comfort from lying down to rising up.
During 2015, when I both wanted to write a song for Vimperk and knew, at the same time, I couldn’t go back that year, the image of those bells became the spark that lit my way into the lyric.
The bells of Vimperk ring the quarter hour through the night. Hear their voices on the air! And the bells of Vimperk sing that everything’s all right—sleep tight. All is well down in the square . . . and quite like a prayer.
That’s where the song started.
I’m not going to write much here about what went into the two verses. Suffice to say that they contrast the two worlds as I thought about them at that moment. The first verse is set somewhere like Johnson City or Asheville or Nashville, the second in Vimperk. You should be able to figure out my feelings about these contrasting cultural experiences.
This is a noisy world that clamors for my short attention— Talking heads that blather on and on and on. The streets are filled with sirens—some real and some legendary— From the setting to the rising of the sun. Come Friday night the bars are loud and crowded with the lonely, Seeking some attention or some means of escape. I leave my car downtown and take a taxi home, Where stone awake my mind drifts half a world away.
The bells of Vimperk . . .
So, that’s the first verse. Here’s the second.
Music echoes through the sunlit streets of cobblestone. It’s “Country Roads” by an accordion band. And the old men on the stage hold lovers in their laps and squeeze them, Making the music everyone can understand. Come Friday night the pub’s alive with flutes and fiddles and guitars That long past midnight fade to soft lullabies, Sung in harmonies that carry me home, Where warm and weary I lie down and close my eyes.
The bells of Vimperk . . .
I was told at the beginning of the 2014 trip that many Czechs love John Denver’s “Country Roads.” (Actually, I learned many years later that they prefer a Czech version from one of their own singers.) When we first arrived at the door of our hostel on the cobblestone square, a small festival of some sort festival was happening. On a stage beneath the clock tower, an accordion band was playing—can you believe it?—”Country Roads”!
To the bridge!
The world is older there, But it’s somehow younger, too. When the ground beneath my feet is shaken, I go there and find my faith renewed.
The bells of Vimperk . . .
The bridge of the song tries to feel its way to an idea I find difficult to express. Vimperk has been there in hills so much like our own for more than twice the lifetime of the U.S. In 2014, our final team meal was at a home on a hill above Vimperk. The house itself was as old as the US. Pictured below, the Black Gate on the hillside beneath the castle was built in 1479, which is a century and a half before the Puritan Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts Bay to establish Plymouth Plantation (1620).
I feel certain that the place’s feeling younger (while being so much older) has to do with a number of things. First, I’m sure those of us who love Vimperk and the people we know there tend to romanticize its Old-World beauty, the slower pace of a small town, the foreignness and yet familiarity of it, a kind of fairytale quality that radiates from its castle and cobblestones and surrounding forests. We don’t see the drugs, which are surely there. We don’t see much if any of the poverty, which is surely there. We don’t see much of its prejudices—against the Roma (so-called “Gypsies”), for example. We don’t see much of the ignorance and meanness and violence that are surely there as well—I mean, come on, they’re mostly igno-arrogant white people like us, aggressive and colonizing in both large (global) and small (local) ways.
What we do sometimes see, however, at least among most of those we come in contact with, is a way of relating to one another that often seems lost here. One quick example: in the softball camp setting, an atmosphere of caring for each other and cooperating with each other is evident. Rarely here in the U.S. would you see teens willing to play with the little kids without being made to do so. That happens all the time at camp without any teen tantrums. At lunch, you’ll find tables made of up teens who are sitting and eating with kids much younger than themselves.
So, anyway, Leesa and I returned to Vimperk in 2016, and I performed another concert and enjoyed the opportunity to play “The Bells of Vimperk” for our friends in Vimperk. Below is a phone video of that performance.
Performing “The Bells of Vimperk” for the first time in Vimperk on Tuesday, 12 July 2016
Recently I played a backyard concert at the Barnett Patio here in Johnson City, and my son Raleigh sat in on bass (along with my friend Jimmy on percussion). I don’t know if Raleigh had ever even heard “The Bells of Vimperk,” but at the end of the night, he said, “Deddy, that might be your best song.” I’ll take that!
This is a noisy world that clamors for my short attention— Talking heads that blather on and on and on. The streets are filled with sirens—some real and some legendary— From the setting to the rising of the sun. Come Friday night the bars are loud and crowded with the lonely, Seeking some attention or some means of escape. I leave my car downtown and take a taxi home, Where stone awake my mind drifts half a world away.
The bells of Vimperk ring the quarter hour through the night. Hear their voices on the air! And the bells of Vimperk sing that everything’s all right—sleep tight. All is well down in the square . . . and quite like a prayer.
Music echoes through the sunlit streets of cobblestone. It’s “Country Roads” by an accordion band. And the old men no the stage hold lovers in their laps and squeeze them, Making the music everyone can understand. Come Friday night the pub’s alive with flutes and fiddles and guitars That long past midnight fade to soft lullabies, Sung in harmonies that carry me home, Where warm and weary I lie down and close my eyes.
The bells of Vimperk ring the quarter hour through the night. Hear their voices on the air! And the bells of Vimperk sing that everything’s all right—sleep tight. All is well down in the square . . . and quite like a prayer.
The world is older there, But it’s somehow younger, too. When the ground beneath my feet is shaken, I go there and find my faith renewed.
The bells of Vimperk ring the quarter hour through the night. Hear their voices on the air! And the bells of Vimperk sing that everything’s all right—sleep tight. All is well down in the square . . . and quite like a prayer.
