Who’s Gabriel Tanner, you ask? He’s the central figure of my first novel Gabriel’s Songbook.
The paperback cover from 2017
Yes, he’s fictional, but I know him pretty well. He’s a lot like me in some ways–all right, many ways. But in other ways I won’t go into here, he’s not. In addition to Gabriel’s Songbook, he’s featured in “A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel” from 2021’s A Twilight Reel: Stories. And you’ll probably not be surprised to learn that he’s a background character (but never “on stage”) in my new manuscript novel “Streets of Nashville,” as well as one of the featured narrators in my work-in-progress “Avalon Moon.” So, he’s been a busy guy.
I have a file that I keep on my fictional town of Runion and its people. The file includes dates all the way back to 1818. The note on Gabriel Tanner, whose first name seems to mean, in Hebrew, “devoted to God” or “hero of God,” was born to Kirk and Maggie James Tanner on March 8, 1959. He has a brother named Butler, a cousin named Carter “Cutter” Clements, and a wife named Eliza Garrison Tanner, to whom he has been married twice.
How did I pick March 8, 1959, as his birthdate? The 1959 comes from my interest in having him be roughly the same age I am, and I was born on November 25, 1958. More particularly, I picked March 8 because it was on that day in 1983 (I think) that I recorded “Thunder and Lightning” in Nashville. I was in Bullet Recording on Music Square West (17th Avenue South) with my producer Earl Richards and an amazing group of studio musicians. For several days, we’d been tracking songs for my second (unreleased) album, to be titled Waiting for the Night.
March 8 (a Tuesday in 1983) was the last day of laying down basic tracks for the album, and we had maybe two or three hours of studio and musician time remaining. So Earl asked if I had anything more that I wanted to record. “Well,” I said. “I have this new one that we could try.” (I said something like that. This was forty years ago today, you know, and I was twenty-four years old.) I played the song through once for the musicians, and they were ready to record. I doubt that it took more than a couple of takes to capture the track.
Oh, man, it was gonna be a hit! So said all who played on it and heard it. But it was not to be, as the album never saw the light of day.
Several years later, the “Cody Band” version of “Thunder and Lightning” made it on an Asheville, NC, radio station’s River Rock album and became a local–even regional–hit, making the list of top five requests of the day (alongside Prince, Madonna, and others) for several weeks in a row and subsequently picking up over one thousand plays between January and August.
The song was–and still is–terrifically important to me, so you can understand how its original recording date of March 8 would be assigned the birthdate of Gabriel Tanner.
If you’re reading this and you’ve ever worked with Leesa or sat in her chair, you know she will not do hair without music. Recently, we had to purchase a new MP3 player for her salon. I loaded it with some songs I had on hand, MP3s of favorites we’d purchased over the past few years. Along with those, I dumped whole jump drive of my songs on the new player, which she seems very happy about.
You know if you’ve seen me since – I don’t know – 2012, I have very little in the way of hair left on my head, and we’ve even begun buzzing that down to the scalp, just short of shaving it. Anyway, maintaining this requires that I sit down in her styling chair every 10-14 days. The last time I was there, a song came on that I had more or less forgotten. It’s called “Angel.”
I wrote the song in 1987 with Mark Chesshir, one of the lead guitarists in the band we typically called The Cody Band. Many of the songs recorded at Mark’s home studio over the years, especially those songs that don’t appear on either Cody Retrospective or Homecoming, Mark and I performed ourselves, playing all the parts or bringing in musical friends when needed or desired. I think “The Light in Your Eyes” and “I Must Have Dreamed” are good examples of this practice.
“Angel” includes the full band, I think. Mark Chesshir and Gene Ford on guitars, either Danny O’Lannerghty or Mark Burchfield on bass (can’t remember which), and Steve Grossman on drums. My guess is that Mark also played keys. I’m not sure why the song doesn’t appear on either of the albums mentioned above. If I’m remembering right, it was a powerful piece when we played it live.
I would feel the way I feel tonight forever if I could. My eyes are clear, my heart is strong, and love feels like it should. Still, the dawn cannot be held back, and this night will have an end. But as long as you stay, I know I’ll feel this way again.
O Angel, I know the sound of your wings. O Angel, I’m always listening for that whisper in the night.
When you hear me say, “I love you,” don’t feel trapped and run away. Sometimes when I look at you, I can find nothing else to say. I remember the nights that I have spent chasing ghosts and dreams. But you’re real to the touch, You don’t know how much that means.
O Angel, I know the sound of your wings. O Angel, I’m always listening for that whisper in the night.
I’ve seen so many broken hearts getting washed away at night. Come and carry me above that tide.
O Angel, I know the sound of your wings. O Angel, I’m always listening for that whisper in the night.
The voice and pacing of Learning to Swim really worked for me. The novel begins with a brilliant splash of action and then settles into something of an uneasy domestic narrative. It’s uneasy due to the suspense of looming tensions: crime-related (the bad guys are still out there, so the child isn’t safe), pseudo-familial (the child Paul, what he’s been through, Troy’s immediate attachment), sexual and romantic (with Philippe Dumond, with Detective Alan Jameson, with Thomas “Tommy” the history professor). These suspenseful elements effectively keep the story afloat for a good while until Troy’s nervy, somewhat clumsy amateur investigation begins to ratchet up the tensions that lead to a startling climax that subtly mirrors the beginning.
. . . for my contribution to politicizing Christmas.
People exist in this world who believe that certain other people have been waging a war on Christmas. People exist in this world who believed — and maybe still believe — that the 2016 election of Donald Trump was a win for Christmas in this (nonexistent, in my opinion) war.
Consider these 2022 Christmas “tweets” (still a stupid thing to think of as a meaningful pronouncement). Really think about them, setting aside our tendency to valorize our own or demonize the other.
Now honestly, which seems most in keeping with the Christmas spirit? Which the most respectful of the season and its origins? Can the Christmas spirit, given its source in Christ, be shared through sarcasm and bitterness?
I recently completed my annual reading of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, first published on 19 December 1843, one hundred seventy-nine years ago. In “Stave Three: The Second of the Three Spirits,” telling the story of Scrooge’s time with the Ghost of Christmas Present, Scrooge connects Christmas with Sundays (“‘seventh day'”), when the shops are closed and thereby the poor are deprived of a meal. Speaking for himself and the whole family of Christmases past, the Ghost of Christmas Present says,
“There are some upon this earth of yours, . . . who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived.”
What the Ghost of Christmas Present suggests here is that there are those who claim Christ/Christianity/Christmas whose lives and deeds in this world are carried on as if Christ/Christianity/Christmas are names only, dead things that “‘never lived.'”
And now I’ll stray off into a couple of related asides. . . .
Almost one hundred years after Dickens, Joseph Campbell wrote a passage in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces that, from the moment I read it, put me in mind of Donald Trump and his “kith and kin”:
The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world—no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself, the giant of self-achieved independence is the world’s messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions.
Christians are Easter people, not Christmas people (and certainly not 4th-of-July people). For Christians, Christmas has no meaning without Easter.
Now, here’s a very recent bit of aggressive ignorance from one of Trump’s kith and kin. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert dismissed the Cross and the sacrifice upon which true Christianity is based, suggesting that Jesus wouldn’t have had to die if he’d had enough AR-15s “to keep his government from killing him.” Yes, she really said that.
I used to love hearing my cousin Darwin Reeves sing a 20th-century hymn titled “Ten Thousand Angels,” written in 1958 by Ray Overholt. The chorus goes, in part, like this:
He could have called ten thousand angels To destroy the world and set Him free. He could have called ten thousand angels, But He died alone, for you and me.
An important verse of the song goes like this:
To the howling mob He yielded; He did not for mercy cry. The cross of shame He took alone. And when He cried, “It’s finished,” He gave Himself to die; Salvation’s wondrous plan was done.
This is based on Matthew 26:53, in which Jesus says as he is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemene, “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?”
But according to Boebert, Jesus should have been like Neo and asked for “guns, lots of guns”:
I hope that true Christians — not Xians — will call out Boebert (and her kith and kin) for such crass abuse of their faith and such overt kissing of the gun lobby’s “butt.”
I had some other stuff, but I think I’ll save it for my next 4th Tuesday Political post.
In the meantime, Merry Christmas to all — and all means all, y’all — and a healthy and happy New Year!
The thing that not a lot of people realize when it comes to Christmas music or the Christmas specials that used to come on TV is that, unless they’re “live” recordings or events, they aren’t actually recorded at Christmas time. Christmas music, for example, that is going to be available in October so that radio and retail have it in time for the holiday season, will probably have been recorded several months earlier–possibly late spring or during the summer.
The front picture is of me as I looked when I wrote “Christmastime.” The performance is by me now, thirty-four years later.
As I recall . . .
It was in the spring of 1988, and I was writing songs for Ave Canora, a small publishing venture that was part of the music empire of Nashville/Broadway singing star Gary Morris. Word ran through the offices of Gary Morris Music that he would be recording a Christmas album in the near future. I’d never written a Christmas song before, but I really wanted to have a song on that album.
So, in April 1988, in the midst of that year’s Easter season, I sat down to write “Christmastime.” My main musical influences were only two: almost 30 years of hymns and carols in my little mountain church and community in Walnut, North Carolina, and Johnny Mathis’s album Merry Christmas, the Christmas album of all Christmas albums as far as I’m concerned, released in October 1958, less than two months before I was born. I was writing a lot of songs in the key of E at the time, and so, E it was for “Christmastime.”
Here’s an early recording of “Christmastime” from the home studio of my friend Mark Chesshir. It’s possible that this is the demo that I turned in to Ave Canora and the version that Gary heard.
Verse #1 is all about light, which is one of my true loves in the Christmas season. Leesa and I don’t decorate the exterior of our house, but I love the lights of Christmas. Light designs and displays–from simple to complex–are the only thing I enjoy about the extended Christmas season the Xian world developed due to the demands of capitalism.
See the world In a different light At Christmastime. See it shine In the children’s eyes At Christmastime. Let the season sparkle in me Like the moon on virgin snow Fallen some long-ago Christmastime.
We have light appearing in “shine” and “sparkle,” and we have “light” in its different connotation of understanding–to see the world in a different light. Many of us give the world a little more grace at Christmastime. Or maybe we express a little bit of righteous anger at the commercialism that isn’t as much in our faces as at other times of the year. With “virgin,” the lyric includes just a taste, an essence, a foreshadowing, of the Christian story of the birth of Jesus. And the “snow” is classic in terms of memory and desire, for me, as I’m always “dreaming of a white Christmas.”
Verse #2 is about memory. The older I get, the more precious and haunting memory becomes, perhaps especially in the context of Christmas. So much of the celebration and so many of the people I’ve celebrated with are yearly lost and fade into memory.
Window pane– Watching a parade Through frosty lines. Memories– Bittersweet and homemade– Cross my mind. Family and friends at the door– With the laughter and the kisses pour Love and good wishes for Christmastime.
This verse is made up of images from memory. These memories, however, are only implied. They’re left vague and general so that the listener (reader) can plug in their specific memories and memory images. I doubt if I thought that at the time I was writing this lyric, but it’s the way I understand it now.
Verse #3 returns to the Christmas story a bit more directly than the intimation of “virgin” in the first verse. We have a star and a child, a call for peace and stillness, a sounds of celebrating bells and singing people and angels.
Distant star, I am not alone With you in sight. In my heart, There’s a little child Alive tonight. So, let the world lie peaceful and still While the bells ring and people sing And angel wings are whispering, “It’s Christmastime.”
I hope that I got chills, that I maybe even cried, when I completed this last verse. It’s all there, I think, all that Christmas has been to me–all that I struggle to have it still be to me. The star that guided the wise men guides me to the child that is still alive in me. The moon on virgin snow exists as part of a world lying peaceful and still. The parade, the laughter, kisses, and good wishes are echoed in the ringing bells and the singing people. And at the end, the lyric returns one last time to the original Christmas story of angels–the “heavenly host”–appearing to the shepherds.
See the world In a different light At Christmastime. See it shine In the children’s eyes At Christmastime. Let the season sparkle in me Like the moon on virgin snow Fallen some long-ago Christmastime.
Window pane– Watching a parade Through frosty lines. Memories– Bittersweet and homemade– Cross my mind. Family and friends at the door– With the laughter and the kisses pour Love and good wishes for Christmastime.
Distant star, I am not alone With you in sight. In my heart, There’s a little child Alive tonight. So, let the world lie peaceful and still While the bells ring and people sing And angel wings are whispering, “It’s Christmastime.”
Many thanks to everybody who, over the years, has said that it’s not really Christmas until they’ve heard “Christmastime”!
“Merry Christmas to all!”
Here’s some more stuff:
I’ll go ahead and say it (with some regret and bitterness, and with apologies for the latter): I have a crass commercial desire that many singers had recorded “Christmastime” so that I could have a nice little royalty bonus every year . . . and so could Leesa when I’m gone . . . and so could Lane and Raleigh when Leesa’s gone. . . .
When I first moved to Johnson City, people used to say, “Hey, I heard ‘Christmastime’ in K-Mart today!” I even heard it there a time or two myself. But, you know, K-Mart’s not around anymore. (There’s the bitterness again, and again, I apologize.)
Jimmy Patterson was a fellow I met years ago when Leesa, Raleigh, and I attended Cherokee United Methodist Church. He loved “Christmastime.” I heard it told that the first time I played it at Cherokee, Jimmy was standing with our pastor David Woody, and in his excitement over what he was hearing, Jimmy took Pastor Woody’s hand and squeezed it. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that “Christmastime” meant so much to Jimmy that his wife Bonnie asked me to play it at his funeral / celebration of life . . . in the summertime, as I recall.
One last thing: Gary Morris released two different versions of his album Every Christmas.
I don’t remember exactly why this was the case, but here’s my story about it. He already had the original Every Christmas album recorded and turned in to Warner Brothers Records by the time I submitted “Christmastime.” That’s the cover on the left, released in 1988. The last song–track 10 on that one–was Gary’s version of “Carol of the Bells.” Then at some point soon afterwards, no later than Christmas 1990, they repackaged and rereleased the album–new cover (on the right) and “Christmastime” replaced “Carol of the Bells.” In practical terms, just as far as publishing goes, Gary’s company would receive what was called mechanical royalties for “Christmastime” that he wouldn’t receive for “Carol of the Bells.” I doubt that was the driving force behind the change, but it was a side effect. Now, on Gary’s website, the album on the left is for sale instead of the later “blue” version. Interestingly, the side effect here is that whoever gets the money for sales of that “poinsettia” version does not have to pay mechanical royalties to me because “Christmastime” isn’t on that version. Given this, I think it’s worth noticing that Spotify, iTunes, and other platforms sell only the “poinsettia” version, so . . . no Christmas royalties for me!
O the bells ring and people sing and angel wings are whispering, “It’s Christmastime”!
I enjoyed my writing life this year. Although the majority of my productivity has taken place, in confidence, between the right side of my brain and an array of hard and virtual drives, I got somethings out into the world.
Leesa says when she sees the blue screen she knows what’s happening.
A number of blog posts. I set up a monthly schedule that’s I’ve more or less kept to. First Wednesdays are for writing/reading posts (like this one). Second Mondays are for whatever I feel like writing about. Third Saturdays are song stories. Fourth Tuesdays are supposed to be posts about politics, but I haven’t been very successful with these, as everything I think of seems to be darker and of meaner spirit than I want to be.
Short stories. I published one short story this year. “Jamboree” appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of my favorite online periodical Still: The Journal (#38). The good folks at Still included it among the journal’s Best of the Net nominations. The only other bit of news worth reporting about new stories is that I finally made some good progress toward finishing–but still not finishing–a story that I’ve been holding onto for years. It has been in progress and untitled for a good while, but I’m thinking now that it will be named something like “Payne Mountain.”
Gabriel’s Songbook (Pisgah Press 2017) is now five years old. Some folks have read it recently and really liked it, which makes me quite happy. I’ve done a number of podcast appearances to talk about A Twilight Reel, but Gabriel hasn’t gotten that kind of love. Until now. Back in September, Christy Alexander Hallberg interviewed me for her terrific podcast Rock Is Lit, which profiles “rock novels.” The episode “dropped” on December 8, and I’m really happy with it. The conversation about the novel was both good and fun, and I was really pleased with the follow-up discussion that Christy had with Frye Gaillard and Peter Cooper, the latter of whom walked on suddenly two days before, on December 6, from an accidental and traumatic head injury sustained a few days before.
At the beginning of 2022, I had a work-in-progress (WiP) about a Nashville songwriter named Ezra MacRae. I’m not sure how many words I had on it at that time. I’m thinking around 20K. I’m also not sure when I attached the working title, but I’m calling it Streets of Nashville until somebody with power tells me to call it something different.
Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I had that title before I submitted some pages of it for workshopping at Hindman Settlement School’s Appalachian Writers Workshop in July 2021. Most of my classmates in the workshop fell in love with a character Benny Jack, who was in a dire situation at the end of the section they read, which ended at what is now page 41 of the novel. Somebody suggested #SaveBennyJack, and the workshop folk carried on with that. [An interesting tidbit: much of the meeting-Benny-Jack section was written for Gabriel’s Songbook but got cut for reasons I won’t go into here. Suffice to say, Benny Jack exists much more comfortably–and much more effectively–within Streets of Nashville.]
By May 2022, I had somewhere between 20K and 30K words. On the 25th of the month, I was in Durham for my granddaughter’s graduation from high school, and the night before the ceremony, I was sitting in our AirBnB watching Wiley Cash interview one of my heroes, James Lee Burke, about Every Cloak Rolled in Blood, his 40th novel. Cash asked how Burke is so productive. Burke said he wakes up every morning–that’s every morning of the year except maybe Christmas–with a scene or two in mind. Then he writes at least 750 words on the scene(s), and by the end of a year, roughly, he has a novel. I decided I’d try that method for the following few weeks, and it worked for me. By the time I left on July 4 for my writing residency at Wildacres in the North Carolina mountains, I was approaching 70K words. Then, by the time I left Wildacres on July 10, I had completed a first draft of just over 90K words.
I’d proven to myself that I could write a book of fiction in less than twenty-five years! This was the amount of time that passed between first words and publication for both Gabriel’s Songbook and A Twilight Reel.
Between mid-July and now (approaching mid-December) I’ve made four more passes through the novel, the current draft of which is at 102K words.
All along, I’d been focused on trying to tell a good story. I’d thought it might be a mystery, but then I realized I didn’t know how to write a mystery. So, I just stuck with the good story idea. After the first draft was finished, I learned from Google that I had been writing a suspense novel:
suspense: the main character may become aware of danger only gradually. In a mystery, the reader is exposed to the same information as the detective, but in a suspense story, the reader is aware of things unknown to the protagonist. The reader sees the bad guy plant the bomb, and then suffers the suspense of wondering when or if it will explode.
Just for fun, here’s what my writing screen looks like when I’m working. This is the opening paragraph of section VII.
I started writing fiction in the early 1990s, using the old WordPerfect/DOS. I got used to the look replicated above. By the time my university offices began switching me to Word, I found I didn’t like writing in black letters on a white background. So, I figured out how to get my blue screen with my white or gray letters, and I was on my way.
I’ve sent Streets of Nashville to a couple of agents and a couple of publishers, but I think I’m going to put off going further with that process until after the first of the year. But a couple of folks have it in hand right now who could just blow me away if they said yes to representation and/or publication.
Avalon Moon
In the meantime, I have no time to sit on my nonexistent laurels, so, while I begin sending Streets of Nashville out into the world, I’m over 25K words into the next novel, which I’m calling Avalon Moon. I like where it’s going, and those who’ve read some of what I have seem to like where it’s going, too. I’m trying something different this time out, with a handful of different points of view, one of which is my old friend Gabriel Tanner. Like A Twilight Reel, this one hangs pretty close to Runion. The story will include wolves, a river island, preproduction work for an adaptation of a Ron Rash novel, a mysterious document over two hundred years old, and many of the Runion folks I’ve worked with before.
This week in ENGL 2110: American Literature to 1865 we’re reading some short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who is, in most moments, my favorite author–certainly my favorite author on the nineteenth century. I won’t get into comparisons here–between Hawthorne and Poe or Irving or Melville or Twain, etc. I find Hawthorne’s quiet (mostly) obsession with history (Puritan history in particular) and his subtly haunted mind resonates with me more than Poe’s terror, Melville’s virtuosity and bombast, or Twain’s picaresque humor. Poe ties me to a chair, my eyes held open by toothpicks, and blathers inescapable madness in my ear (almost exclusively in first-person voice), Hawthorne generally stands aloof from the story with me, calmly pointing out the story–its characters and actions.
In “The Custom-House” sketch that opens Hawthorne’s most famous work, his short novel The Scarlet Letter (1850), you’ll find the bit that I really want to present here. It’s a passage of a couple of longish paragraphs about the imagination and writing haunting stories. These ideas came to mind recently when I was sitting around a fire with friends and the moon was out.
Hawthorne writes about the blend of ethereal, spiritual light of the moon and the physical, visceral light of the fire.
Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly,—making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility,—is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the bookcase; the picture on the wall;—all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child’s shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse;—whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here, without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.
The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove further from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.
The above contrasting and blending of moonlight and firelight works not only in the realm of the imagination but also in our understanding of ourselves. “We are spirits in the material world,” as the Police song goes. We might think of the moonlight–in the text and in the photograph–as our souls or, if you don’t believe in the eternal soul, our ineffable selves and the fire as our humanness, our flesh and blood.
In Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” he captures the same idea succinctly in Faith Brown’s pink ribbons. In this image, the soul is, perhaps, white and associated with purity, heaven (and angels), cleanliness, peacefulness. The red portion of the pink ribbons can have positive and negative connotations: flesh and blood, passion (good and bad); the red of blood can be violence or it can be healthy and redemptive. So, Faith’s pink ribbons reveal her to be all of these things, which is what humans are.
I can picture Nathaniel Hawthorne sitting in that empty chair to the left of these photos, staring alternately into the fire and then into the moonlit distance, and thinking such thoughts. . . .
In 1845, American writer Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) published a piece titled “Fourth of July” in the New York Daily Tribune. Fuller follows–probably not consciously–the trajectory of Thomas Jefferson’s thinking when he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia (1782), “From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill. . . . [T]he people . . . will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money. . . .” Fuller writes:
Those who have obtained their selfish objects will not take especial pleasure in thinking of them to-day, while to unbiased minds must come sad thoughts of National Honor soiled in the eyes of other nations, of a great inheritance, risked, if not forfeited.
While Fuller admires the values with which the United States of America began in the late 18th century, she recognizes that the presence of slavery in the land, the nation’s genocidal acts of Indian removal, the looming Mexican-American War, and other situations betray and mock those values.
. . . the noble sentiment which she [the U.S.A.] expressed in her early youth is tarnished; she has shown that righteousness is not her chief desire, and her name is no longer a watchword for the highest hopes to the rest of the world. She knows this, but takes it very easily; she feels that she is growing richer and more powerful, and that seems to suffice her.
What Fuller recognizes is that many–even most–who cry “Freedom” are really not interested in freedom as a right for all. Instead, their definition of freedom is selfish. They want freedom to do what benefits them, what makes them feel good, what feeds their arrogance. They cry “Freedom,” but what they really want–without thought of consequences even to themselves–is to win elections and beat the other side. Once that’s done, it’s enough. They have no policy platform to try and move forward.
Fuller again.
For what is Independence if it do not lead to Freedom?–Freedom from fraud and meanness, from selfishness, from public opinion so far as it does not consent with the still small voice of one’s better self?
I don’t think many of us remain able to hear that “still small voice.” Our lives are too noisy with what passes for news, too cluttered with our pointless, meandering desires. Our brains are muddled. We have become mean, and we revel in our meanness. We’re bullies. We’re following Xians–that is, Christians without Christ–to the altar of our Baal.
It used to be–in the Civil War, in the Great Depression, in the Civil Rights Movement–that factions within the U.S. could bicker and fight without threatening the nation itself. The idea of the United States of America was transcendent, stretched above our mean pettiness and selfishness. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. The idea of the U.S.A.–“who we are, what we’ll do, and what we won’t,” as Springsteen sings in “Long Walk Home”–seems no longer transcendent, no longer cohesive enough to remain untouchable above the fray.
Even if our better selves prevail today (and I understand that many will have a different understanding of what that might mean), I don’t think it will matter in the long run. We have, I’m afraid, grown too ignorant and lazy to recover. The devaluing of our minds and of education in general is too far gone to be turned around–mostly because we’re now too lazy-minded to do so.
Yesterday, I posted a poem and a few comments about my dad on the 26th anniversary of his walking on from this life. A cousin responded with thanks for Dad’s service. I appreciate that. I really do. But I question whether Dad would even recognize this country–that eats up its poor, that elevates its celebrities to gods, that begrudges and generally rejects every request for fair treatment from the denigrated and powerless–as the country he served.
The Idiocracy looms ahead. I give us twenty-five years. Fifty tops.
A poem for my dad, who walked on from this life to what’s next twenty-six years ago today.
The Veteran’s Cemetery, Early November
Early November, when his autumn work was done, he left us standing stupid and staring at the blue-brown of the coming Appalachian winter.
He left behind the shrinking garden, harvested, the expanding lawn, mowed its final time. He left behind the handy man who could fix anything,
took leave of the newly retired postal worker who never went postal, and abandoned his role as little patriarch, begetter of two sons.
He abdicated head-of-household status, in the house that was never his, left the loved wife of forty-two years and her overbearing weakness—
That night he shed this life like Wednesday’s dirty clothes and would have been surprised by all who braved early snows to watch him lie down in a proud soldier’s grave.
I still think of him often, almost daily. He was a quiet and principled man, and I have tried to emulate him in as many ways as possible. Although I’m sure I caused him to shake his head and wonder, Who is this kid?, he was steadfastly there with what I now understand was his expression of love and support.
I have often wanted him back here, to ask his advice on this or that, to see his expression of joy at watching my sons grow, to sit quietly on the porch with him as evening comes on. But even if he had been able to live the longer life he might have had, he would probably be gone anyway by now. And in most ways these days, I’m glad that he’s where he is, far beyond the reach of the ignorant and arrogant and belligerent madness that has taken over and erased the ideological stance to which he adhered in his lifetime, glad that he’s far beyond the horrific sight of the country he served with such pride on the verge of going down in flames.
One-take, two-chord version recorded in the office on Saturday, October 29, 2022
On September 16, 2022, a beautiful late-summer night on the cusp of autumn in east Tennessee, I played and sang for friends—new and old—and family on the Barnett Patio, perhaps my favorite music venue ever. I named the show “Chronology II,” and the setlist consisted of songs I’d written from 1989 to the present. (“Chronology I” took place in late May 2022 and included songs from 1975 to 1989.)
Sam’s ad for the show
“So Much Depends” turned out to be a favorite song that September evening, which both surprised and pleased me. It’s a recent song, probably written in 2017, and only Leesa and a handful of others had ever heard it. The writing of the song began with a musical challenge, which I ultimately failed, and ended up with a lyric challenge to our better angels and our best selves, which we can’t afford to fail.
Let me first get this out of the way. Many who know our twentieth-century American poetry are familiar with William Carlos Williams and his imagistic, no-ideas-but-in-things poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” and its well-known first line “so much depends.”
I’m pleased to have the connection made between my songs and Williams’s famous poem. But I have to confess that I didn’t make the connection at first. My opening and repeated use of the phrase—maybe similar to the poet’s use of it—speaks to my urgent sense of how important it is that we be our best human selves in this moment in the history of our world.
The musical challenge was to try and write an interesting and listenable song using just two chords. Not to imply that this hasn’t been done before. It has—and brilliantly. Here’s just a sample of my favorites: “Born in the U.S.A.” (Springsteen); “Eleanor Rigby” & “Paperback Writer” (Beatles); “Horse with No Name” (America); “Dreams” (Fleetwood Mac); “Copperhead Road” (Steve Earle). Many more great and not-so-great two-chord songs are out there. No, the thing was that yours truly had never written such a thing. And I still haven’t. I could probably play “So Much Depends” with a two-chord setting, but for now it has a couple of others thrown in.
To the lyric. Through this first verse—and throughout the song—understand “so much depends” as pointing to how vitally important, I believe, are the things that follow the phrase.
So much depends upon where you’re from and who raised you up— If you can live up to your raising or if you can rise above it. So much depends upon whom you believe in and who believes in you. So much depends upon whom you love and maybe more on who loves you.
(By the way, I’ve wrestled with who/whom usage in this song. For now, I write “whom” and I sing “who.”)
Some of us have been “raised” by good people in good places and good situations. But all variations of this statement are possible: raised by bad people in good places and situations; raised by good people in bad places and situations; raised by bad people in good places and bad situations. These range across a spectrum—maybe more than one spectrum—and are not distinct and static categories. I could write page after page teasing out subtleties.
What becomes important to us is that we can either live up to good raising, being true to the varied gifts we’ve been given, or rise above bad raising rather than fall—or play—victim to the bad. How well we’re able to do one or the other depends a great deal on what we believe about ourselves and the visible and invisible worlds around us. And as the last line says, the love we share and receive—deserved or undeserved—is likely to be the tide that raises us and the ties that bind us.
Here’s the second verse:
So much depends upon your education and how you value your own mind. So much depends upon your need for attention— whom you want to impress and why. So much depends upon believing in yourself and standing in your truth. So much depends upon not being afraid and not being a fool.
At so many levels, many of them at the most important levels of our learning to be human, we have devalued education—or maybe simply lost the understanding of its value. We have likewise lost a sense of the value of our own minds. The hopeful idea is that maybe our minds aren’t lost to us but are instead just distracted from themselves and their incredible value. This distraction takes many forms, and to be honest, it might begin with the failures of our education, especially that of the younger folks who have come up through a school system more interested in test scores and measurable outcomes than in educating students. Education is not a business. Education is not a competition. Education is not a tool for pseudo-conservative hacks to train mindless voters and mindless believers in American exceptionalism. Other distractions include, but are not limited to, 24-hours news, reality TV (one of the stupidest things on the planet, which has lifted some of the stupidest and underserving people to the heights of political and cultural power), fashion, the need to be in constant movement (like sharks), a desire for violence and blood (real and metaphorical), the doomed-to-fail sense that life is a perpetual party.
Did you ever know a person who—consciously or unconsciously—devalues herself (or himself) for somebody’s attention? This leads to nowhere good. (See the short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates.) And it leads there fast. I’m sure we are all familiar with examples of this. Many is the good person who has been dragged downward for the desire of another (or to be desired by another), while the reality is that the better outcome would be that the object of their desire should be raised up rather than bent towards.
The last two lines of the second stanza suggest the remedies to our negative inclinations lurking behind the stanza’s first two lines. So, we must believe in ourselves rather than the opposite. We must recognize and commit to our individual truths rather than the opposite. We must not be afraid to be ourselves. We must not play the fool for anybody.
So much depends upon the monsters in you and the mayhem that they make. So much depends upon the heroes in you and the stands they choose to take. So much depends upon how well you’re able to live in your own skin And on if you can hold on, let go, rise up again and again.
We all have interior monsters that we try to hide from ourselves and more strenuously try to hide from our world. Monsters are scary and dangerous, and so this makes sense. The destructive poles of this truth are, at one end, those who unleash their monsters and revel in the chaos of their mayhem and, at the opposite end, those who believe they have no monsters, which allows the monsters that are indeed there to have the run of the place. The behaviors at each end of the spectrum not only wreak the same destruction but also, ultimately, wreak this destruction in the same way.
All around us—as individuals, as a culture, as a church, as a nation, as a world of humans—we are in the process of a hard fail. I fear that this will be the ultimate and final failing. We must find our best selves and learn to live with these in the best ways we can. We have so much worth holding on to and so much we need to let go. Sometimes it’s hard to hold on, and sometimes it seems impossible to let go. But through the character of our better angels, we can survive the tug of war that is holding on and letting go, finding the strength—which is more often than not the courage found in faith and conviction and our common humanity—to “rise up again and again.”
On you, so much depends!
So Much Depends
So much depends upon where you’re from and who raised you up— If you can live up to your raising or if you can rise above it. So much depends upon whom you believe in and who believes in you. So much depends upon whom you love and maybe more on who loves you.
So much depends upon your education and how you value your own mind. So much depends upon your need for attention— whom you want to impress and why. So much depends upon believing in yourself and standing in your truth. So much depends upon not being afraid and not being a fool.
So much depends upon the monsters in you and the mayhem that they make. So much depends upon the heroes in you and the stands they choose to take. So much depends upon how well you’re able to live in your own skin And on if you can hold on, let go, rise up again and again.
