Revisiting old journals from my Mars Hill College and Nashville lives.

These are from December, 1977, near the end of my first semester as a flute major at Mars Hill College. For those who don’t know, the “jury” I keep worrying about is like a final exam in applied music study — flute, in my case.

Captain’s Log: 120.677

It’s 8:00 AM and snowing. It really looks good. I told Phil on Saturday that it was gonna snow today. I hope to pass all of my tests and go to the ballgame tonight. At the ballgame I hope to see Madison beat Reynolds and Leesa. . . .

Phil Shuford lived across from me in Spilman Hall. And, of course, I didn’t hope to see Madison beat Leesa.

Captain’s Log: Supplimental

Today has ended rather boring, but well. I made 84 on my Math 110 test so I’m out of there with an 87.

It continued snowing and freezing the rest of the day so the games were called (I didn’t get to see Leesa). We all sat around tonight listening to music then watching “Houston, We’ve Got a Problem.”

I’m not correcting spelling or punctuation. Yes, I know it’s supplemental.

Captain’s Log: Stardate 120.777

I ain’t doing nothing but waiting and worrying about my jury on Friday. I’m usually not one to sweat but this is so important it seems dangerous not to worry. But I think I’ll stop worrying and just practice all day tomorrow and do my best. Tomorrow night is the Christmas Pageant dress rehearsal and then the pageant is Friday and Saturday.

Captain’s Log: Stardate 120.877

Today was a good’un, I really enjoyed it. Tomorrow I’ve got my jury at 10:10, work at 11:00, C&M audition at 2:00, take Phil to Asheville, Band, and finally the pageant. It will be pretty busy but I think I can handle it; after jury I know I can.

Tonight we had a rehearsal in the courthouse for the pageant. I made a new friend in Ellen Jenkins. She is a ’75 graduate of MHC and is now teaching voice here. She’s doing some solos for the choir.

Captain’s Log: Stardate 120.977

I am so relieved to have “jury” over with. I played this morning and my lip was so dry I could hardly control it. I could have played better, but I did well enough to pass so I’m not that worried. Tonight we did our first of two pageants and it went of real well, I’m really enjoying working with that bunch.

I’ve got plans for next semester; I’m gonna work on that flute ’til it starts being second nature to play.

I’ve got rehearsals all day tomorrow and the second pageant tomorrow night I’ll really be glad to get out of here.

Captain’s Compiled Log: Stardates 121.077 – 121.177

Saturday was a day to be slack. I didn’t enjoy as much slack as I had hoped though. I got up at 8:00 to get ready for flute choir at 9:30 and band at 10:30. We had youth group practice at 5:00 and then the pageant that night; a pretty musical day!

Today was about the same except all the practice became performing. This morning, in front of the four combined Walnut churches, our youth group received and gave some fantastic blessings from the mighty Lord through us. The cantata came off beautifully. Then this afternoon we had instrument concert in which I participated in the flute choir and concert band; it came off well this afternoon. I think Mom and Dad were very proud of me and that makes me feel good ’cause I’m a product of their lives together.

Captain’s Log: Stardate 121.277

It’s been an easy day here toward the end of the semester. I slept late, took Yogi to the bus station, and worked at the bookstore. I think I may have made some advances with Anita tonight. She’s a really nice girl and deserved the $5.00 I gave her for Christmas. Right now I’m sitting and watching Dallas beat San Fran and I hope they hold on. I guess I’ll get down to business and write a couple of critiques.

Yogi [?] was Phil Shuford’s roommate; I think the Anita mentioned is Anita Miller, who was my piano accompanist for solo flute lessons and performances (and $5 was a lot for a college student in 1977).

As is apparent above, I was, at first, fairly diligent in my journaling. This didn’t continue. The entry below is from December 9, 1980, and it’s one of my catch-up journal visits. My last confession prior to this was February 26 of that year. At that time, February, I was in the midst of my first sojourn to Nashville, studying as a music business major at Belmont College (Spring 1980).

Captain’s Log: Stardate 120.980

Time has not wasted itself on me. I has zoomed by, only waving as it passed, laughing. It is December on Earth and I am back in my own bed. An update follows.

I worked at Opryland for about six weeks but after a senseless day when I almost froze to death I quit. I found another job with TRIUNE MUSIC / TRIANGLE RECORDS, working in the mail room. The people there were great and I loved it while it lasted. However, after school was out all I wanted was to come home so as I usually do, I followed my heart right back to Carolina. Taylor joined the Navy so I didn’t really leave anything behind. At home I started work for Mike Tweed in his sports store . . . Joey and Charlene broke up . . . I started school at UNC-A . . . I met and began going out with Hannah Anderson . . . To regress back to the summer I had a gospel group for a time but we broke up . . . I saw Dallas Holm in concert at Opryland on July 4 . . . Back to the time table, I played Vivaldi’s Concerto in D major “Il Cardellino” at John Johnson’s long awaited wedding on Nov. 1 . . . I sang for 600 people at an awards banquet and received a standing ovation [see picture & article below] . . . I turned 22 . . . I broke up with Hannah at about the same time Dec. 8 as John Lennon was being murdered in NYC.

This all brings us to today where there’s little to report. Maybe tomorrow . . .

I sang a Larry Gatlin song as my audition to be a performer at Opryland, but halfway through a booming voice interrupted me with a second or third “Thank you.” They were looking for performers, which has never really been my thing. Anyway, I ended up working the flume (log) ride for a few weeks, until they made us work all of a cold, rainy day in March (with almost nobody in the park). As I was driving home that night, it was still raining and I was worn out. Just as the light at the corner of Edgehill and 17th Avenues turned green and I touched the gas, a jogger ran right across the intersection in front of me. I think it was Willie Nelson.

I lived in a single room (bathroom and kitchen shared with three others) in a house on 17th Avenue South. One was a pothead, whose name I don’t remember. Bob, maybe. Another was an Alabama guitar player whose name I can’t forget — Clovis Hitson. The third was the fellow mentioned above as headed for the Navy — Taylor Binkley.

As for UNCA in the fall of 1980, I made it through half a semester as an English major before I quit to work at Tweed’s sports store, to stay up late writing songs, to begin playing lounges and restaurant around the area. (I didn’t return to school until January 1991.)

John Lennon was murdered on December 8, the day before my entry, and the Sunday following, the 14th, might have been the last time I had much of anything to do with the church I (mostly) grew up in. That Sunday morning the redneck preacher got up and blasted Lennon for being an atheist (“Imagine there’s no heaven”) and a Communist (“Imagine there’s no countries”). I hope that I thought, Imagine there’s no ignorant preachers. . . . Still makes me sad and angry.

To be continued in Part Two.

So, I started this post on Wednesday, December 4, 2019, but then — needing to head out to meet Sam for beer, wings, and conversation — decided to put it aside for a “Throwback Thursday” visit to my old diaries. I know it’s now actually the 5th, but I’m going to stick with these entries I found for December 4s in 1977 and 1981.

December 4, 1977, near the end of my first semester as a flute major at Mars Hill College . . .

Captain’s Log: Stardate 120.477

I haven’t felt this tired in I don’t [know] how long. I haven’t really done anything so I guess it must be the dread of exams coming. I was down practicing flute and nearly fell asleep in the middle of a scale.

I spent the whole day singing. Led singing this morning in SS and church, then at 2:30 we started practice for the pageant and practiced til we left at 5 o’clock to come out to Walnut and practice another hour-and-a-half.

I didn’t take Leesa out tonight. I decided it would be best to study tonight and tomorrow night and see her Tuesday at the ballgame. I wonder why she suddenly decided to get in touch with me, on her own, after so long, but it don’t bother me none. Yet, I think it does bother Mom and I’m not sure why. I guess I need to find out. . . .

December 4, 1981, when I was living at home in Walnut, writing songs and working at Mike Tweed’s sport store in west Asheville.

Captain’s Log Stardate 8112.04

Since I got up this morning it has been snowing but the ground’s too warm and it’s not laying at all. All day long I’ve just listened to the radio. I talked to Ron a couple of times but it was just BSing. Once I called him because I heard a song Sonny Limbo, a friend of Ron’s, produced. It’s on the charts and called “Key Largo” and it’s pretty good. The evening is take up with TV, reading, and writing. I did a little work on “Friday Night Serenade.” . . .

I’ll try to make Throwback Thursday a regular thing here, although it’ll probably be more regular-ish. And next week, December 12, I’ll try to find entries from the correct date!

In the late 1980s, I was still living in Nashville. By some means, probably through my manager Dixie Gamble, I received a script for an upcoming film titled Next of Kin, with a cast headed by Patrick Swayze and Liam Neeson and including Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Ben Stiller, Adam Baldwin, and others. The production team was seeking songs for an interesting story of three Gates brothers from the coal culture in eastern Kentucky. Briar (Neeson) is eldest, Truman (Swayze) is in the middle, and Gerald (Paxton) is youngest.

Briar works in the coal business, but Truman has moved to Chicago, where he’s a police detective whose beat covers the city’s hillbilly slums, where lots of southern Appalachian immigrants, particularly Kentucky folk, live. These two brothers are fighting over Gerald’s future. Will he stay home and work the mines, or will he leave the mountains behind for a different life beneath the big city’s sea of light?

As the movie begins, Gerald is in Chicago, but he’s planning to stay there only to earn enough money to put a down payment on his own coal truck. Unfortunately, the work Gerald gets in is a business run by a Chicago mob family, so the poor boy isn’t long for this world. When his honesty gets him killed, Truman wants to find the killer(s) through the legal channels, but Briar becomes impatient and leaves Kentucky for Chicago, where he plans to bring down the hammer of hillbilly justice.

SPOILER ALERT: Briar dies at the hands of the same mob, and Truman throws away all efforts to go by the book, turns in his badge, beckons agents of justice (i.e., revenge) from the hills (including a bow-and-arrow marksman and a feller with a school bus full of snakes), and battles the mob in a vast Chicago cemetery.

I wrote “Homecoming” for the end of the film, after the cemetery scene, when Truman, the only brother to survive Chicago, is taking his wife Jessie (Hunt) home to eastern Kentucky. The script described a scene in which the camera’s point of view is in the vehicle with Truman and Jessie, then the visual pulls back through the rear window to reveal that they’re driving Briar’s old pickup truck with Briar’s coffin in the bed. The visual then pulls further back and rises upwards to reveal the pickup to be on a two-lane highway with the outlines of the Appalachian Mountains rising into the sky ahead of them.

That’s the scene for which I wrote “Homecoming“:

If I die
In this place so far from home
And I never make my living
From my native soil again,
Don’t leave me where these strangers
Will walk across my bones.
Take me back and lay me with my next of kin. . . .

© Window on the West (ASCAP

At one point I heard that “Homecoming” was one of eight songs in the running for the end of the film, and I remember being very excited about it. But the song didn’t make the final cut. When Next of Kin came out in 1988, I learned that they’d changed the ending. Instead of the lovely scene which inspired “Homecoming,” Truman simply goes back to his captain’s office and gets his badge and his job back. Then he goes outside, where he and Jessie get in their car or walk down the street or something equally unmemorable. Not that I would have minded having “Homecoming” playing through that or any scene!

By the way, the end-title song was “Brothers,” written by Larry Gatlin and performed by him and Patrick Swayze, or “Brother to Brother” by Greg Allman.

While it’s regretful that “Homecoming,” the song is quite possibly my favorite among the songs I’ve written, so I don’t regret the experience at all.

Here’s a video that I put together for a class for a faculty technology class at ETSU and made it about my home of Walnut, North Carolina.

From the Washington Post:

The world’s top economists just made the case for why we still need English majors

English majors are down 25.5 percent since the Great Recession, just as world’s top economists say we need more ‘storytellers’

Shiller, who is famous for predicting the dot-com crash and coming up with the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, is spending a lot of time looking at old newspaper clippings to understand what stories and terms went viral and how they influenced people to buy things — or stop buying things.

When asked if he’s essentially arguing for more English and history majors, Shiller said, “I think so,” adding: “Compartmentalization of intellectual life is bad.”

Shiller isn’t alone in wishing that there were more storytellers (and story analyzers) around. Every August, some of the world’s top economists gather in Jackson Hole, Wyo., to discuss how the economy is doing and how they should tweak their models. On the final day of events this year, Philip Lowe, head of Australia’s central bank, urged his colleagues to spend a little less time on numbers and more time on being good storytellers.

On September 1, 1989, we didn’t have a wedding rehearsal. We opted, instead, for a cookout with our friends and family, which we held in the yard at the Reeves/Cody homeplace in Walnut. I won’t try to name everybody who was there, but we had a goodly crowd made up of folks from North Carolina, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan — maybe other places as well. We celebrated until past dark, at which point Leesa went home and I retired to my bedroom to finish our wedding song, which had its debut at just after 11:00 the next morning, Saturday the 2nd of September.

Phil Madeira, friend and music man from Nashville, played piano, and Leesa walked in to “Someone to Watch Over Me.” My uncle Cloice Plemmons later said that those old church walls had probably never heard the like. Then I played “Soul Mates,” the song completed less than twelve hours before. One funny problem that came up during the ceremony — a problem that a rehearsal might have fixed — was that when my uncle Mack, who officiated, asked for the rings, our older son Lane (just turned thirteen at the time) dropped four into Mack’s open palm. He stared at them for a moment, then said, “Usually at this point in the ceremony I have two rings, but now I have four. I don’t know what to do.” Everybody laughed. Leesa told him that three of the rings were hers and one was mine.

It was a great morning, followed by a great afternoon reception on Glory Ridge. Good memories of good folks and a good time. As I would later write in a wedding song for Lane,

This love has got people in it. Some are here and some are gone.

This love has got people in it. Some have stayed and some moved on.

“This Love” from the album Wonderful Life

All who’ve stayed here with us are loved. All who’ve moved on and gone are loved and missed.

Soul Mates

We have wandered across the years and miles
in search of a clear direction,
while some tangled memories maintained
a mysterious connection
to a corner of our hearts,
whether together or apart,
where love has waited patiently
from the first day of our history.
 
Soul mates,
sold out to fate—
what happens from now on
was planned before the dawn of time.
Soul mates,
so worth the wait—
each the other’s gift from heaven
like hand to glove or rhythm to rhyme.
 
Every true heart has the dream of flying
without fear of falling.
We stand on this ledge in answer
to love’s higher calling.
Gold to blue to gray
to black with night and rain—
it’s always the same big sky,
and every inch is ours to fly.
 
Soul mates,
sold out to fate—
what happens from now on
was planned before the dawn of time.
Soul mates,
so worth the wait—
each the other’s gift from heaven
like hand to glove or rhythm to rhyme.
 
When real life seems to steal the dream,
don’t let it break your heart,
though these bodies tight to this earth cling.
We can still lean back in laughter,
we can still take to the sky,
’cause these hearts have earned their wings.

I grew up in a room full of guns. The bedroom I shared with my brother in the Reeves/Cody homeplace in Walnut, North Carolina, had in it a ceramic pistol ashtray–for change and such pocket stuff:

One of the drawers in brother’s dresser held a BB pistol along the same design as the one on the ashtray. And above the twin bed in his corner, two racks held six rifles and shotguns. Often over the years when a situation called for describing the differences between him and me, I would use this description of his side of the room, contrasting it with my side, which was dominated–and characterized–by a blacklight environmental peace poster.

These days, I don’t know what my brother’s feelings are in regards to gun control, but I trusted him with his guns then and I trust him with them now. I would hope that he supports sensible measures to restrict access to guns — particularly assault rifles, which are essentially weapons of individual mass destruction — to those who are qualified to use them correctly and wisely.

And I don’t know what his feelings are about the National Rifle Association (NRA). For all I know, he’s a card-carrying member since whenever–if ever–the organization focused on what it believed to be sensible support of the 2nd Amendment. Back in the time of Charlton Heston maybe. But it’s clear to me that such support is no longer anything more than the public mask for the NRA. What it has become, I believe, beneath its mask, is little more than the puppet lobbying organization for gun manufacturers, who want no restrictions on access, not according to supposed support of 2nd Amendment rights, I believe, but according to their profits.

While I agree with those who argue that background checks and licensing and buy-back programs will not prevent weapons from getting into hands that ought not wield them, I have a simple counterargument: every little bit helps. If our elected representatives want to label this a mental health issue, that’s fine. It is. The NRA and its paid and elected mouthpieces want to claim that if guns are criminalized then only criminals will have guns. Okay, that seems simple-mindedly obvious. I don’t believe, however, that restricting gun access will generate more criminals than we already have. Most individuals whose mental health isn’t stable enough to allow them to purchase weapons legally–given that sensible restrictions were in place–also don’t have the nefarious connections to get around the law to obtain guns illegally. Limiting access to guns might stop only one in ten of the USA’s many thousands of incidents of gun violence, I know. But if we had almost 40,000 shootings last year (2018) in our country, then wouldn’t stopping about 4,000 of those be worth it?

And now for some music.

Here’s a little video I shot for my song “Complaints.” It’s about the anxiety of modern life and of growing older. And it’s about where solace–if not answers–can be found. I put FOX News on in the background, because I personally hold the network responsible for much of our backward and wrong thinking and the fear that is in power these days. (I think it’s the president’s main source of his own thinking, which is just as well, given the low level thinking and thinkers he surrounds himself with and rightly ignores.) The second verse includes these lines:

I fuss and fret about the Great Unknown.
I spend these dangerous days afraid and alone,
And I’m worried – O Lord, I’m worried.
Where is the next monster with a gun?
Where will I hide? Where will I run?
Where will I land if I’m blown to kingdom come?

Just at the moment when I’m singing these words, look at the television, which is showing images from a California shooting. I didn’t plan it or time it. The coincidence between the lyric and the image was random . . . and haunting . . . and fortuitous.

On the 11th of August, I finished a new song titled “This Is not All.” It was a long time in the works. Even though I had probably 90% of the words and music written in 2015, I could never close the book on it. I had four verses and a chorus, but it never felt finished. It needed a bridge. Not long after the first drafting, I came up with the music for a bridge, then couldn’t find the words for it. So, I thought maybe it could be an instrumental break of some sort. But no, still not finished.

Of course, I didn’t work constantly on the song and its bridge over those four years, but every time I thought of the song and how much I liked it, I thought about the need for a bridge. The verses seemed complete, but here’s the question that nagged me: If this — whatever this is — is not all, then what is all? Phrases came to mind: “All you need is love”; “love is all that matters”; “God is love.” The words that flowed from these ideas into the bridge are simple, ending with echoing phrases: “love’s the root and height of all / The root and height of each.” The first lines of the bridge — “The means of control / Are more than out of our hands / They’re far beyond our reach” — connect to the chorus ideas that “Out there is more than we can own / More than we can protect” and “Out there is more than can be known / Always more than we expect.”

This Is not All
 
Not all the wonder along the trail
Is to be found in woods and sky
Look closer
It’s in the tiny frog hid in the clover
And that creature in the dust with a hundred legs or more
It’s in how I find my way home
And that flower I never noticed by the door
 
Not all the wonder along the way
Is waiting somewhere far ahead
Look closer
A little boy runs in cape and mask
Another stands shirtless in a barnyard banging a drum
A little girl learns to cartwheel
Another stands by the road and sticks out her thumb
 
This is not all, no, this is not all
Out there is more than we can own
More than we can protect
This is not all, no, this is not all
Out there is more than can be known
Always more than we expect
This is not all
 
Not all the evil in the world
Is in the terrorist and thief
Look closer
It’s in the thousand faces of ignorance
Political and corporate and religious
It’s in the hate and hunger
In the trumped-up fights that pit them against us
 
This is not all, no, this is not all. . . .
 
The means of control
Are more than out of our hands
They’re far beyond our reach
But we can love
And love’s the root and height of all
The root and height of each
 
Not all the goodness in the world
Is found within the church and child
Look closer
It’s in the unshackled hearts that lift us
High above the right or wrong or Right or Left
My friend’s warm hand in mine
And true emotion honestly expressed
 
This is not all, no, this is not all
Out there is more than we can own
More than we can protect
This is not all, no, this is not all
Out there is more than can be known
Always more than we expect
This is not all. . . .

Although the chorus remained the same from the song’s beginning, the verses have undergone some slight revisions, mostly in the phrasing rather than in the content or organization.

So, images for the first verse: I spotted the tiny frog in the yard outside the front door of my son Lane, who lives in Durham, North Carolina; the many-legged creature in the dust was crossing a trail I hiked near Gatlinburg; the flower by the door references an image in Emily Dickinson’s “This was a Poet”:

This was a Poet –
It is That
Distills amazing sense
From Ordinary Meanings –
And Attar so immense

From the familiar species
That perished by the Door –
We wonder it was not Ourselves
Arrested it – before – . . .

Dickinson’s poem 446 (Franklin numbering)

I think the overall idea for this verse, which led to the overall direction of the song, came to me on another hike up toward the fire tower above Unicoi. I ran out of time and didn’t make it to the top, but I got far enough for the sense of this song to find me there.

And images for the second verse. The little boy in the cape and mask is my son Raleigh as he was at anytime between learning to walk and, let’s say, ten years old. The boy with the drum I saw alongside I-64 in southern Indiana. But he wasn’t playing a marching snare, as might be imagined by the line I wrote; instead, he was sitting at a full kit set up between a barn and a farmhouse. In the distance, a storm approached across the cornfields behind him. (This remembered image always brings to mind the band Rush, for some reason.) The girls in the verse are born of imagination and contrast and might have something of my granddaughters in them.

Verses three and four are what they are. The evil and the good. The last line in verse three for a long time referenced “the endless fights that pit them against us.” But since I wrote the line in 2015, a lot has happened, and although I cringe at invoking the hobgoblin of the Tweeter in Chief, the false but pervasive construction us-against-them in this so-called democracy has certainly become trumped up. (To “trump something up” is to “invent a false accusation or excuse” or, in this case, the fights that we have over race and nationality and immigration and religion, the fights between the wealthy and the poor and the Left and Right and on and on and on and on. I also think it appropriate in this context to consider “trumped up” synonymous with fucked up.)

That verse four tries to define and celebrate some things that are good suggests, I hope, that to end on a positive note is to have faith that goodness exists and can ultimately prevail. This is not game-show, rah-rah-yay-yay feeling goodness but a goodness that is rich and deeply felt. It’s the love and friendship between us, and it’s transcendent Truth. Yet even as all-encompassing as these things are, they still are not all. As Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13:13, “Now faith, hope, and love remain—these three things—and the greatest of these is love.”

This — whatever this you are (or I am) in at the moment — is not all.

P.S. When the opportunity comes along, I’ll record this song — just my guitar and me — and post it. And, by the way, the scripture reference is spoken as “First Corinthians” and not “One Corinthians.” (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

In the wake of the 249th and 250th mass shooting events of 2019 in the United States of America, I’ve been hearing references to the “dark corners of the internet” where extremists — particularly white supremacists — gather to share their evil misunderstandings of life on Earth and cheer each other on in their shared neuroses and brutal insanity and twisted sins.

This, of course, put me in mind of “Dark Corners,” a song I wrote back in the 1980s before the internet made these evil spaces so widely available.

Dark Corners

You can know your heart—
you can know your mind—
know yourself as wise and kind,
and still be shocked by the things you find
          in dark corners.
 
You can know your husband—
you can know your wife—
know somebody for all your life,
and still never know the things they hide
          in dark corners . . .
 
. . . where the rattling bones
mark the danger zones—
dark corners—
we’ve all got ’em.
 
You can know your neighbor—
you can know your street—
know the cop who guards your beat,
and still be frightened of things you meet
          on dark corners.
 
You can know the state—
you can know the church—
know how it all is supposed to work,
but even our leaders have things that lurk
          in dark corners . . .
 
. . . where the rattling bones
mark the danger zones—
dark corners—
we’ve all got ’em.
 
Behind some genteel Southern manners
there’s a monster on the move.
And its kind runs rampant around the world—
fearing only love and truth they hide
          in dark corners . . .
 
. . . where the rattling bones
mark the danger zones—
dark corners—
we’ve all got ’em.
 

Words by Michael Cody
Music by Michael Cody, Mark H. Chesshir, Gene Ford, Steve Grossman
Publishers: Window on the West / SCL Music / Aslan’s Den

This remains true, I think, but I didn’t realize at that time how dark and dangerous those dark corners could really be.

Although the glass doesn’t allow the picture to come through clearly, I still find this image haunting . . .