I’ve lived in the United States of America for sixty-five years. I’ve been teaching American literature for the last twenty-seven of those.
My American lit surveys–particularly the sophomore-level general education version–begin with indigenous creation stories and trickster tales before moving to the letters of Cristoforo Colombo, i.e., Christopher Columbus. From there, it’s on to the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas and the American Puritans (including those we typically style as “Pilgrims”). My students and I then read from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, usually winding up the semester with poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
Having gone through some portion of these writings–in both undergraduate and graduate courses–every semester, I have come to believe that the one consistent American experience is that of decay, in all its not-so-varied noun and verb meanings:
to decline in health, strength, or vigor
to fall into ruin
to decline from a sound or prosperous condition
rot
gradual decline in strength, soundness, or prosperity or in degree of excellence or perfection
destruction, death; Merriam-Webster identifies this meaning as “obsolete,” but I think we have a good shot at bringing it back
The United States of America has decayed to the extent that it’s no longer even half of what it thinks itself to be. And if the USA is supposed to be–as it thinks it is–God’s gift to the world, it is now a cheap knock-off of the nation initially imagined, of the nation it might have been if it’d been able to live up to its own ideals and fend off the inevitable decay.
As Emily Dickinson wrote,
I reason, we could die– The best Vitality Cannot excel Decay, But, what of that?
A few years ago (never mind how many), Leesa and I drove to DC to spend a couple of days in the city and take in a Keb’ Mo’ concert while there. Leesa has developed a friendship with Kevin—we get to call him Kevin—over the years (and I’m part of it by proxy), so as is usual for us, we got to go backstage after the show to say hello. As we stood outside his dressing room, Kevin introduced us to his co-star for the evening, who was none other than Taj Mahal. But another less recognizable face was there that evening, and Kevin introduced us to him as well. (Leesa likes to say Kevin introduced us as if we were just as famous as anybody else, which is his generous nature.) That other face belonged to David Brooks, who is a conservative political and cultural commentator whose writing appears often in the New York Times.
Having met Mr. Brooks in that way, I tend to notice his writing when it crosses my field of vision. This past week I saw his name on the NYT Sunday Opinion page. His beautiful essay, which I hope you will read via the link, is titled “How to Stay Sane in Brutalizing Times.” The essay walks us through some “tragic” (in a good way) dispositions of sensibility and mentality, and Brooks summarizes his purpose like this:
I’m trying to describe a dual sensibility—becoming a person who learns humility and prudence from the Athenian tradition, but also audacity, emotional openness and care from the Jerusalem tradition.
His use of the adjective tragic doesn’t seem intended to relate exactly to its meaning in the catastrophes of ancient Greek dramatic tragedy, in which some great hero is ultimately destroyed—or at least brought low—by some fatal flaw such as pride. No, Brooks uses tragic in a less bombastic, less catastrophic sense. What he suggests here is that we look at the world and ourselves in realistic and humble ways, that we live prudently and not arrogantly, that we keep ourselves open to the good and the bad that will come our way and not close ourselves off as being above or beyond the reach of our need and that of others, of relationship, of our humanity in common with all.
One key idea Brooks offers is that our tendency to separate, our increasing tendency to rage, our tendency to dehumanize—desensitize us to the world in which we live. And in our desensitized state, we lose track of the wondrous beauty in nature and in each other. When we could be expanding, growing individually and communally, we are instead contracting into tight balls of rage, anger, and—the root of these—fear.
Such a state of being wadded up tight leaves us unable reach out to others, to feel with and for them, to feel sorry for ourselves for the right reasons such as the joy and fellowship and discovery we’re missing. This also is present in Brooks’s essay, probably nowhere more so than this paragraph:
. . . most people — maybe more than you think — are peace- and love-seeking creatures who are sometimes caught in bad situations. The most practical thing you can do, even in hard times, is to lead with curiosity, lead with respect, work hard to understand the people you might be taught to detest.
This passage, especially its phrase “lead with curiosity,” made me decide to focus this 3rd Saturday Song Story on “Sense of Wonder,” a song I wrote with Mark Chesshir sometime back in the late 1980s. I don’t remember the exact division of labor, but my guess is that Mark wrote most of the music while I wrote most of the words.
Here’s the first verse, sung over an appropriately B-minor chord progression:
A rose, unnoticed, blooms and dies to bloom again— So many such gifts return to Sender unopened. Calendar days fly off the wall in whirling wind, And still the journal lays, blank pages from beginning to end.
Somewhere along my journey to becoming an English professor, I learned that the journal “lies” instead of “lays,” but setting that aside, I like the image of a natural world—embodied in the rose—full of amazing events that fail to amaze us because—busy and distracted—we pay so little attention. I also like the images of the flying calendar days I remember seeing in old TV shows and movies and the journal pages flipping through in the same whirlwind.
Next comes the second section of the first verse:
The treadmill world is small— No place for standing tall— Where the heart is a sleeping giant To be feared and kept tied up.
I’m particularly fond of the image of the heart as like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Do we fear our hearts and the acts of feeling, caring, and courage they are all capable of leading us into?
The chorus will grow as the song continues. This first chorus is short: “Racing the rain and chased by the thunder, / Hold on to a sense of wonder.” We threw in the “oh-way-oh” to mimic the moaning voices of those working through enslavement and imprisonment.
Here’s the two halves of the second verse:
The spark of childhood put away with childish things Leaves the good life tasteless and in need of some leavening. Look to the magic of youth— The no-holds-barred search for truth. The heart is a sleeping giant. Take a chance and wake it up.
Do we take 1 Corinthians 13:11-12 a little too literally? A capacity for joy — a sense of wonder — enriches our lives no matter how old we become. Both positive and negative examples of this are all around us in the people we share family and community with.* One of the ways in which an energetic, youthful sense of wonder can be realized — perhaps the main way — is to “take a chance” and wake up our hearts, unbind them, and let them rise.
The second chorus is longer:
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — walking the world and stalked by the hunger— Oh-way-oh — senses dull from the attack they’re under— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
I like these lines. Even more so than back yonder in the 1980s, our senses are constantly under attack, pummeled by media of all kinds and the excessive drama that all of it seems to wield in ever more dangerous ways. Our senses are drowning in information and misinformation “supposed to fire [our] imagination” when it in fact robs us of imagination, one of the main gifts that should be original in each of us.
And yet the rose continues its amazing cycle of life, which is the idea behind the song’s short bridge:
It is not for things to wonder at that we lack In this catch-as-catch-can struggle with the hourglass.**
We must raise our gaze from our navels (or anybody else’s navel) and take in the world — move through the world — with a sense of wonder.
A rose, unnoticed, blooms and dies to bloom again— So many such gifts return to Sender unopened. Calendar days fly off the wall in whirling wind, And still the journal lays, blank pages from beginning to end. The treadmill world is small— No place for standing tall— Where the heart is a sleeping giant To be feared and kept tied up.
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
The spark of childhood put away with childish things Leaves the good life tasteless and in need of some leavening. Look to the magic of youth— The no-holds-barred search for truth. The heart is a sleeping giant. Take a chance and wake it up.
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — walking the world and stalked by the hunger— Oh-way-oh — senses dull from the attack they’re under— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
It is not for things to wonder at that we lack In this catch-as-catch-can struggle with the hourglass.
[The Mark Chesshir lead guitar break!]
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — walking the world and stalked by the hunger— Oh-way-oh — senses dull from the attack they’re under— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
*I read something recently that said the old grammatical rule of not ending a sentence with a preposition is on its way out, going the way of the injunction against the split infinitive. I’m giving it a try, but I’m not comfortable with either change.
**Here the phrase “catch-as-catch-can” joins with the second verse’s phrase “no-holds-barred” to reveal my long-held obsession with wrestling as the most apt metaphor for our relationships with the world, with each other, with our faith, with God.
The last day Leesa and I felt pretty good was Christmas Eve. She fixed her amazing Christmas Eve meal for two this year: cheese biscuits, scrambled eggs and sausage, two kinds of gravy (savory brown and semi-sweet dark chocolate). After nightfall, we went downtown in Johnson City and walked through the Christmas trees in the parks—Founders and King Commons. The last stop of the day was Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church, where we provided music for the 9:00 PM Christmas Eve Candlelight Service.
We came down with flu on Christmas Day. We’d finished family things a couple of days before, so quiet time at home together was just fine, as long as we didn’t feel too bad. For my part, I’ve been much worse with flu at various points in the past. Our thinking is that having gotten our flu shots this year kept this infection from being as brutal as it might have been. Anyway, the week between Christmas and New Year’s was a lot of ups and downs—feeling good one minute, running a low-grade elevated temperature the next. Leesa would feel bad, and I would feel good; Leesa would feel good, and I would feel bad.
By Thursday and Friday, I thought I was steadily feeling pretty good, but Saturday brought a turn for the worse. Sometime deep in the night—Saturday the 30th into Sunday the 31st—I checked the opening time of my doctor’s walk-in clinic (7:00 AM). A little after 6:30, I woke Leesa and told her I was going to get checked out. Since I’d already had the flu for the week it usually lasts, not much could be done about that. What Dr. Stoots discovered was a touch of pneumonia, for which she prescribed a couple of antibiotics. Leesa and I were to leave that day—Sunday, New Year’s Eve—for a week in Charleston, so I asked if I could travel. Dr Stoots said I could; I just shouldn’t be much around other folks if I was running a fever. (Apparently, a temperature must be 100+ to qualify as “fever”; mine never got higher than 99.8, but that was during the week before our trip.)
Leesa and I believed that Charleston—the Holy City—was a far better place to recuperate than the house we’d been cooped up in all week, so we left a little after noon on New Year’s Eve. By 6:30 or so, we arrived at our personal Charleston entry point: Five Loaves Cafe in Summerville (see link below).
That’s my delicious flounder at the bottom of the picture.
The healing began.
I got in my 10K steps (minimum) every day. On Thursday the 4th, I got over 20K steps.
Here are some places the Holy City offered for healing:
St. Philip’s (the church seen from our room), Church Street on New Year’s Day
The sixty-somethings awaiting their New Year’s Day meal at Fleet Landing
On the Battery with friends Renee and Mike Kidwell
Battery renovation seems almost complete
Almost completely healed on the way out of town at Millers All Day (tie-dyes by Lane Cody)
Raleigh and Lacy were with us as well, but I somehow didn’t get any pictures of them or all of us together. In spite of the lack of corroborating visual evidence, we had a hell of a good time with them.
Charleston—Holy City—see you again in a couple of months.
Here’s a (partial?) list of what I read last year:
Midnight Lullaby by James D. F. Hannah **** (way too many typos, but still a good story/character)
Foster by Claire Keegan *****
Sinister Graves by Marcie R. Rendon *****
Better the Blood by Michael Bennett *****
My Sister’s Grave by Robert Dugoni ****
The Hunt by Kelly J. Ford ****
The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster *****
Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown *****
The Nightmare Man by J. H. Markert *** (didn’t really like the characters; too many monsters at the end)
Code of the Hills by Chris Offutt *****
Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott ****
None Without Sin by Michael Bradley ****
The Ranger by Ace Atkins *****
All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby *** (disappointing after Razorblade Tears; wonderful human truths from the author, but the fiction/mystery needed better editor; I’m aware this is a minority opinion–about the book, not the author)
The Good Ones by Polly Stewart ****
Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner ****
Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger ****
The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias ****
Pickard County Atlas by Chris Harding Thornton *****
Scorched Grace by Margo Douaihy *****
A Visit from the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan ****
Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red by Harry Kemelman *****
Ozark Dogs by Eli Cranor ****
The Grass Dancer by Susan Power *****
Real Bad Things by Kelly J. Ford ****
Killin’ Time in San Diego, the Bouchercon Anthology 2023 ****
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Goff *****
Black Card by Chris L. Terry *****
Bobby March Will Live Forever by Alan Parks *****
Even as We Breathe by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle ****
Shutter by Ramona Emerson ****
Where We Belong by Madeline Sayet ****
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko *****
Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden *****
Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty ****
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens ****
There might be others. But that seems like enough.
I guess I could say that I’ve read my new novel Streets of Nashville several times through the year.
[Much of what is below was originally posted on September 6, 2023, but kind of a lot has happened since then! So, here’s the year-end edition.]
I did a lot of writing in 2023.
In January, I signed up for an online class on writing grit lit led by writer Sheldon Lee Compton. Three of us worked with Sheldon for a couple of weeks (maybe more). In the process, we wrote four pieces of what turned out to be flash fiction, each with a different focus; on one, for example, we were to create the piece (narrative, character, etc.) using mostly dialogue.
I titled my dialogue piece “Abyssinian Night.” Mystery Tribune picked it up for its online daily fiction archive back in April or May, I think. You can read it here if you’re interested. The story had at least one reader! My X (not ex-) writer-friend Casey Stegman wrote this and linked the story: “Another story this year that I enjoyed the hell out of is this one from @DrMacOde (published by the always amazing @MysteryTribune).” Remember Casey’s name!
One of our other assignments for that workshop was particularly focused on setting. I wrote a piece I titled “Holy City Buskers,” which was accepted for online publication by The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. The story went live there in early December. You can read it here if you’re interested.
I wrote two other pieces from Sheldon’s grit lit workshop – “Bell-Eye” and “Penny and the Beast.” I submitted both a couple of times to no success before deciding not to send them out anymore. Instead, I’ll keep them for myself and make them available here when this site is revised (hopefully in the first part of 2024).
In late August, I completed what I think was my first more-or-less traditional short story since the publication of A Twilight Reel. For the longest time it went untitled, and I referred to it as “Something Unspeakable,” a working title taken from what was – again for the longest time – its opening phrase: “Something unspeakable now lives in our woods. . . .” Eventually, as the character and voice of the story developed, I adopted the title “Payne Mountain,” for the place where the majority of the story is set, a mountain above Runion named after the family living there as the story begins. With help from writing friends Tonja Matney Reynolds, Pat Hudson, and Chris McGinley, I refined the voice and finally finished the story, now out on submission at a handful of places. Here’s the first paragraph as a bit of a teaser:
That evening, half a century ago now, just after supper when we had moved out to the veranda to worship the last light, something unspeakable asserted an ear-shattering claim on our fifty acres of forested mountainside. What we heard began as a forlorn howl, such as some creature might make if it returned to its den to find the place and its little ones destroyed, a howl that escalated into a scream of rage. Its echoes spread invisible fire through the woods and sent us scrambling for our front door, imaginations terrorized.
from “Payne Mountain” by Michael Amos Cody
I spent the last quarter of 2022 and most of 2023 in the “querying” stage. (For those who don’t know, “querying” is the hopeful, humbling, humiliating, hopeful again act of writing to literary agents and publishers/editors to ask if they are interested in representing/publishing my work. The vast majority of these queries either go unanswered or answered briefly with a note that might be summarized in four words: “not-interested-good-luck.” But that’s the way it is for 99.9% of us who engage in this writing business. (For an example of this process, you might want to check out the September 5 episode of Writer’s Bone podcast with National Book Award winner Tess Gunty.)
I completed the first draft of this new novel, Streets of Nashville, late in the summer of 2022, aided by a week-long residency in Laurel Cabin at Wildacres in the North Carolina mountains. In the excitement of new creation, I prematurely submitted the novel to a few agents and publishers who (rightly?) rejected it. Since then, through the semesters of Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 and on into the summer, I revised the novel a dozen times, guided by helpful comments from a few friends, particularly my colleague Michael Briggs.
Here are the two main paragraphs of the query letter:
It’s 1989, and Nashville feels like a city on the knife edge of uncertainty. Violent crime escalates, even on hallowed Music Row. The city’s streets fill with strangers. Its music industry faces the death of traditional practices as the digital age looms. The anxiety of change cracks the façades of “Music City, U.S.A.” and “Athens of the South,” revealing an unacknowledged darkness.
In the early hours of Easter Sunday morning, gunfire echoes along 17th Avenue South when four people are shot. Tenderfoot songwriter Ezra MacRae—out on the town to celebrate the first good fortune he has had with his songs—witnesses the shooting, but the masked gunman spares him. But why? While Nashville Metro PD’s investigation progresses, the killer develops an obsession with Ezra—calling him, following him, haunting his dreams, but not eliminating him. Ezra tries to carry on with his songwriting, maintain his day job cleaning pools, and assist in the investigation as he can. When the seemingly methodical mind behind the Easter killings begins to unravel, the violence—including the threat to Ezra—escalates in Nashville and moves toward a final confrontation in an isolated farmhouse near Ezra’s hometown of Runion, in the North Carolina mountains.
Major Update: Here’s a surprising saga of success rising out of failure. As mentioned above, in the excited flush of new creation, I submitted what amounted to a first or second draft of Streets of Nashville to a few agents and publishers. One of the latter was Madville Publishing.
Original Madville submission was sent in the second or third week in September 2022.
After it was sent, I continued to learn more about my story and continued revising. Sometime in November or December, I received important feedback from my colleague Michael Briggs regarding one of most important and difficult relationships in the novel. I began to revise accordingly over the winter holidays.
On January 23, 2023, I received two things from Madville: 1) a pass on the novel, but which time my response was “of course and rightly so” and 2) some useful comments from Madville’s fiction reviewer.
I accepted the rejection and continued forward with revisions that were making the novel better and better (in my opinion, at least)
In May, I submitted the novel to a publisher I had really high hopes for and strong interest in, but even as I submitted the MS, I knew it was much longer than the publisher was interested in; still, the publisher remained interested in reviewing my work, so while I waited, I started an intensive mid-summer revision to reduce the word count from 106,000 (I think the original Madville submission was 92-96K words) to somewhere in the mid- to upper-80K range.
I think some miscommunication occurred between this desired publisher and me. When I wrote to say I was working on reducing the word count, the publisher—who still hadn’t rejected the novel—thought I was going to send the revision when completed. At the same time, I thought I was in the still-waiting-to-learn-if-you’re-interested stage. By the time this miscommunication got sorted and I sent the shortened manuscript in late September 2023, the publisher wasn’t going to be able to get to it until January, so I settled in to wait.
On October 12, my wife and I were taking part—as crawling audience members—in a Johnson City poetry pub crawl. On the walk between our second and third stop, I received an email from Madville (now some nine months after the rejection of Streets of Nashville). The initial email said that some old queries were being gone through, and mine looked interesting. Had they ever requested the manuscript? It just so happened that the acquisitions reader was looking for reading material. Before I could reply, I received an email apologizing for the confusion after the realization that they had, in fact, already seen and passed on my novel.
I went ahead and responded with this: “Yes, your reader responded to my first draft, which I submitted way before it was ready. The novel has gone through many revisions—guided by your reader’s comments and those of other beta readers—since September ’22, which I think is when I originally submitted it.” Only that and nothing more.
Here’s the next email I received a couple of minutes later: “My reader says he’d read it again if you want to send it.”
Reader, I resubmitted the manuscript the following morning, October 13, 2023.
On Friday evening, November 3, I was playing the season finale gig at the Barnett Patio. At some point, my phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and glanced at it and saw that I’d received an email from Madville. Figuring it was a closer-but-still-no-cigar note, I put the phone back in my pocket and played for my people. As soon as the gig ended, I had to hop in the car and drive two hours south to Union, South Carolina, to participate next morning in the Upcountry Literary Festival held at USC Union. I’d forgotten about the Madville email until I was in the drive-thru line at a McDonald’s just south of Hendersonville, NC. I placed my order as I rolled forward, I opened the email and read it carefully a few times. By the time I reached the pick-up window, I knew Streets of Nashville had found a home.
I have signed the contract. The completed manuscript is due to Madville by July 1, 2024, and Streets will hit the streets in early 2025.
During the year as I was revising Streets of Nashville, I spent significant time drafting a new novel with the working title Avalon Moon. This first draft currently stands at roughly 77,000 words (271 pages in typescript), and I think that I’m 5,000 words or thereabouts from typing THE END (which I actually never do). Back in the spring of 2023, I submitted the first fifty pages to a competition called the Claymore Award, which is associated with Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. In July, I learned that Avalon Moon had been selected as a Finalist for the Claymore in the category of Southern Gothic (it’s actually more Appalachian Gothic). While my submission wasn’t the ultimate winner in that category, I consider its achievement of Finalist status to be affirmation of the novel’s potential
I started the ball rolling with an Asheville company called The Talking Book to record an audiobook of my first novel Gabriel’s Songbook. Time and quiet recording space have been hard to come by, but I hope I’ll be able to do some—if not all—of the recording by the end of January 2024.
Another new thing I’ve done here at the very end of the year is write a couple of short stories specifically for proposed anthologies. The first—completed and submitted by the end of October—was for possible inclusion in the Bouchercon 2024anthology. The second—completed and submitted by the end of December—was for possible inclusion in an anthology based on the lyrics of Texas songwriter Robert Earl Keen. I really enjoyed writing these stories and have fingers and toes crossed for the success of each and both!
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 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 “Christmas Time” 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 ‘Christmas Time’ 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”!
