(Originally published April 19, 2009)
2009, Age 36. “Balm In Gilead,” by Sweet Honey In The Rock, from the album Sacred Ground.
I went to a funeral earlier this week of a friend – more of an acquaintance really, someone I had worked with professionally for a number of years that I really admired and respected. It seems I’ve been doing that a lot more lately, which I guess is what happens. The strange thing is that I seem less capable of dealing with death as the years go by, and that afternoon found me nursing a beer and seeking the comfort of my iPod. The songs I want to hear when someone has died, or when I am thinking about death, are an unusual mix of the uplifting and the outright morbid.
Do you know that scene in High Fidelity where Dick and Barry discuss their top five songs about death? The list they generate is both amusing and profound: “Leader of the Pack,” “Dead Man’s Curve,” “One Step Beyond,” “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” etc. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie and I always wish I was having that conversation with them. In spite of its association with The Big Chill (as Dick notes), “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” by The Rolling Stones is one of my favorite rock songs about dying. I love the incongruous boys’ choir intro and weird narrative and the unusual imagery (I’ve tried figuring out “in her glass was a bleeding man” since first hearing the song). “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” is another favorite and perhaps the only song by Gordon Lightfoot that I have ever really appreciated. I love they way the melody ascends at the end of each verse and the lyrics are old-fashioned and heartrending all at once: “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?” Good stuff.
It will come as no surprise to anyone that the first pop song that made me think about death was by The Beatles. It wasn’t “She Said She Said,” however; it was “In My Life.” Much more profound than the typical paean to undying love, Lennon and McCartney set up their pledge with a verse about the nature of change and decay:
I get pensive just typing the words today, because they are so true. You know the song is somehow about death before it is even mentioned, because what is death but a very great change? Still, the next bit seems a little unexpected:
When I was very young and heard this song, I used to mentally tick off the dead that I knew personally. The list was short then and easy to remember. It takes me longer now, longer than the two minutes and twenty-eight seconds it takes The Beatles to finish singing.
“Fire and Rain” was one my favorites in college. All of the urban legends surrounding James Taylor and the meaning of the lyrics made it intriguing. I especially remember listening to it in the days following September 11 and finding it strangely appropriate: “Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.” But my favorite lyric in the song has to be:
Geoffrey O’Brien’s book Sonata for Jukebox revealed the true meaning of the words and the identity of the song’s “Suzanne.” She was a friend of O’Brien (and Taylor) who suffered for years from depression and spent time in a mental institution. She committed suicide and the song is partially James Taylor’s reflection on that. (The “flying machines” in the title are a reference to the break-up of J.T.’s first band “The Flying Machine,” not, as we all speculated, a reference to an actual plane crash.) The truth is more poignant to me now that I am older than the legends were when I was 19. I don’t listen to much James Taylor these days and I think it’s a little weird that I can hear such a dark song in the grocery store. Still, it’s a nice song.
Of course, “Fire and Rain” seems like a Disney tune compared to the darkness of “Death Letter” by Son House. The scope of that song amazes me every time I hear it. The sheer range of emotions surrounding the death of a loved one – nonchalance, powerful grief, real fear – make me shake a little. It starts so simply with a repeated bottle-neck slide figure that seems to grow more ominous as the song builds. House’s voice, one of the rawest in the blues, begins casually:
From there, it just gets creepy.
“You know I didn’t feel so bad till the sun went down,” House sings, and one begins to wonder if he misses his unnamed woman or if there is something perhaps more sinister at work. “It’s hard to love someone [who] don’t love you,” he continues and it’s difficult to tell who’s who in this scenario. Is he saying she didn’t love him? Didn’t he say he didn’t know he loved her until she was dead? And then you start wondering how she died anyway . . . The last verse (in the recorded version I have anyway) is the one that gives me the chills:
I listened to this one with students in my music history class a dozen times and we discussed it repeatedly. The students were convinced the narrator had murdered the woman, hence his indifference at seeing her dead body. He knows he’ll see her on judgment day because she’ll stand as his accuser. He begins to regret the deed, at first, because he realizes he loves her; then, because he hears her voice whispering his name once the sun goes down. And when she whispers it, it’s not “so nice.”
After I told them that Son House had spent 15 years in prison for killing a man, any further doubts about the song’s mysterious meaning were removed.
“Death Letter” fits fairly well in the tradition of Southern Gothic song-writing where the murder of a loved one or their unquiet grave is a prominent feature. Southerners both black and white have written more than their fair share of macabre music and the traditions extend into the old worlds of West Africa and the British Isles. There are all the Child Ballads of the “Barbara Allen” variety, where true love leads to a broken-hearted death. There are all those unfortunate young ladies named “Pretty Polly” or “Omie Wise” or a dozen other quaint names who find that spurning a lover’s advances may lead to a shallow grave. There are all of those songs about hellhounds and the devil by Robert Johnson, et al, just reminding us that a painful, unpleasant death may not be the worst of it for some of us. There are the ghostly “Unquiet Graves,” etc., where the dead speak to comfort a loved one or accuse the murderer. There are plenty of songs about dead children and dead mothers; deaths from sickness, fire, childbirth, flood, war . . . the list goes on. Then there are the almost endless religious treatments of death from the joyous (“I’ll Fly Away”) to the bone-chilling Calvinist variety (“O Death”). There are those who find this fascination with death in southern music repugnant, but I am not one of them. Maybe it’s some type of catharsis; I don’t know. My personal favorite in the genre might be “What Did the Deep Sea Say?”
Of course, macabre music is hardly a purely southern phenomenon. Billie Holiday’s “Gloomy Sunday” has, for years, been the subject of urban legend and has even been called a “haunted song.” The song, which was written by a Hungarian pianist and originally sung in Magyar, is about lost love and the contemplation of suicide. There were supposedly dozens if not hundreds of suicides inspired by the song, some after only one hearing. Most of those stories are completely unsubstantiated, though the composer, Rezső Seress, did commit suicide in 1968. I find the melody not particularly gloomy at all and the lyric actually a little banal, especially compared to “Strange Fruit,” Holiday’s gruesome and grisly indictment of southerners’ indifference to lynching. No surprise that one didn’t make the Hit Parade.
These days though, I find myself in need of something more. I find that my faith is sometimes shaken in ways I didn’t expect when I was younger. I’m not so brave about dying as I was when I was younger, which is why I suppose they send young men to do all the killing and dying that needs to be done. My friend Cori, now 20, was 19 when she had a near-fatal car wreck. Her insouciant attitude about her extraordinary survival is inspiring, but I must confess that it is something I don’t share. I still get a little sick thinking about the phone call I got telling me she had been in an accident. I am truly thankful to God that she lived. At the time I remember hoping that I wouldn’t be mentally ticking her name off the next time I heard “In My Life.”
So this week, on that afternoon after the funeral, I was looking for comfort. Music does that, too, doesn’t it? Its hymns, mostly, that help. I don’t know what people do for comfort if all they have are pop songs. I mean, they definitely serve a function, sometimes even helping express all the complex emotions one feels looking at death. But there is something in those old hymns especially; words written by long-forgotten authors who have since joined the choir invisible themselves . . . those are the ones I want to wrap myself in like a blanket of sound. I want to hear them sung by heavy, powerful voices, those voices that sound like they believe those words they are singing. Songs like “Amazing Grace” of course, and “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and “Abide With Me”:
Sometimes, though, you hear a song you’ve known for years like it was the first time. When that happens, the words and melody flood your mind and soul and seem to speak to you in some timeless way, like the Ancient of Days. So I found myself listening repeatedly that afternoon to “(There Is A) Balm In Gilead,” sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock. I’ve known the hymn for years, but it came to me fresh and potent and almost overwhelming. All female voices, mature and rich in timbre, singing a cappella in free tempo . . . it sounds more camp-meeting than funereal, yet death is in it, too.
I pushed the play button on that song three or four times that afternoon and I’ve come back several times since. Maybe it’s that I’ve felt more wounded and sin-sick these days. Maybe it’s just that I find myself going to more funerals than I used to. Maybe it’s that I need an answer to Gordon Lightfoot and James Taylor and Son House. After all, death is never far away.
2009, Age 36. “Balm In Gilead,” by Sweet Honey In The Rock, from the album Sacred Ground.
I went to a funeral earlier this week of a friend – more of an acquaintance really, someone I had worked with professionally for a number of years that I really admired and respected. It seems I’ve been doing that a lot more lately, which I guess is what happens. The strange thing is that I seem less capable of dealing with death as the years go by, and that afternoon found me nursing a beer and seeking the comfort of my iPod. The songs I want to hear when someone has died, or when I am thinking about death, are an unusual mix of the uplifting and the outright morbid.
Do you know that scene in High Fidelity where Dick and Barry discuss their top five songs about death? The list they generate is both amusing and profound: “Leader of the Pack,” “Dead Man’s Curve,” “One Step Beyond,” “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” etc. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie and I always wish I was having that conversation with them. In spite of its association with The Big Chill (as Dick notes), “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” by The Rolling Stones is one of my favorite rock songs about dying. I love the incongruous boys’ choir intro and weird narrative and the unusual imagery (I’ve tried figuring out “in her glass was a bleeding man” since first hearing the song). “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” is another favorite and perhaps the only song by Gordon Lightfoot that I have ever really appreciated. I love they way the melody ascends at the end of each verse and the lyrics are old-fashioned and heartrending all at once: “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?” Good stuff.
It will come as no surprise to anyone that the first pop song that made me think about death was by The Beatles. It wasn’t “She Said She Said,” however; it was “In My Life.” Much more profound than the typical paean to undying love, Lennon and McCartney set up their pledge with a verse about the nature of change and decay:
“There are places I remember
All my life, though some
have changed.
Some forever, not for better,
Some have gone and some
remain.”
I get pensive just typing the words today, because they are so true. You know the song is somehow about death before it is even mentioned, because what is death but a very great change? Still, the next bit seems a little unexpected:
“All these places have their moments,The mention of the dead seems jarring, especially from a voice so young. The reminder that even in the midst of love and youth, death is never far away, keeps the lyric from meandering into the saccharine dullness of most teenage love songs.
With lovers and friends I still can recall,
Some are dead and some are living,
In my life I’ve loved them all.”
When I was very young and heard this song, I used to mentally tick off the dead that I knew personally. The list was short then and easy to remember. It takes me longer now, longer than the two minutes and twenty-eight seconds it takes The Beatles to finish singing.
“Fire and Rain” was one my favorites in college. All of the urban legends surrounding James Taylor and the meaning of the lyrics made it intriguing. I especially remember listening to it in the days following September 11 and finding it strangely appropriate: “Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.” But my favorite lyric in the song has to be:
“Won’t you look down upon me Jesus?The way he pleads . . . it does seem to be a prayer. The more death I know as I get older, the more certain I am that I will feel exactly this way one day. Hopefully not too soon.
You’ve got to help me make a stand,
You’ve just got to see me through another day.
My body’s aching and my time is at hand –
And I won’t make it any other way.”
Geoffrey O’Brien’s book Sonata for Jukebox revealed the true meaning of the words and the identity of the song’s “Suzanne.” She was a friend of O’Brien (and Taylor) who suffered for years from depression and spent time in a mental institution. She committed suicide and the song is partially James Taylor’s reflection on that. (The “flying machines” in the title are a reference to the break-up of J.T.’s first band “The Flying Machine,” not, as we all speculated, a reference to an actual plane crash.) The truth is more poignant to me now that I am older than the legends were when I was 19. I don’t listen to much James Taylor these days and I think it’s a little weird that I can hear such a dark song in the grocery store. Still, it’s a nice song.
Of course, “Fire and Rain” seems like a Disney tune compared to the darkness of “Death Letter” by Son House. The scope of that song amazes me every time I hear it. The sheer range of emotions surrounding the death of a loved one – nonchalance, powerful grief, real fear – make me shake a little. It starts so simply with a repeated bottle-neck slide figure that seems to grow more ominous as the song builds. House’s voice, one of the rawest in the blues, begins casually:
“I got a letter this morning, how do you reckon it read?It may be one of the most brilliant opening lyrics of all time. The imagery throughout the first stanzas is more powerful in its understatement, from seeing his dead lover on the “cooling board;” to the 10,000 people standing around the gravesite; till the moment the singer says he didn’t know he loved her “till they began to let her down.” He mentions judgment day twice, once promising her he’ll see her then.
It said, ‘Hurry, the gal you love is dead.’”
From there, it just gets creepy.
“You know I didn’t feel so bad till the sun went down,” House sings, and one begins to wonder if he misses his unnamed woman or if there is something perhaps more sinister at work. “It’s hard to love someone [who] don’t love you,” he continues and it’s difficult to tell who’s who in this scenario. Is he saying she didn’t love him? Didn’t he say he didn’t know he loved her until she was dead? And then you start wondering how she died anyway . . . The last verse (in the recorded version I have anyway) is the one that gives me the chills:
“Oh – hush! I thought I heard her call my name!His voice is urgent in its delivery and foregoing the normal repetition of the lyrics, he moans “mmmmm . . . ” to the end of the song.
It wasn’t so loud, so nice and plain.
Yeah . . . ”
I listened to this one with students in my music history class a dozen times and we discussed it repeatedly. The students were convinced the narrator had murdered the woman, hence his indifference at seeing her dead body. He knows he’ll see her on judgment day because she’ll stand as his accuser. He begins to regret the deed, at first, because he realizes he loves her; then, because he hears her voice whispering his name once the sun goes down. And when she whispers it, it’s not “so nice.”
After I told them that Son House had spent 15 years in prison for killing a man, any further doubts about the song’s mysterious meaning were removed.
“Death Letter” fits fairly well in the tradition of Southern Gothic song-writing where the murder of a loved one or their unquiet grave is a prominent feature. Southerners both black and white have written more than their fair share of macabre music and the traditions extend into the old worlds of West Africa and the British Isles. There are all the Child Ballads of the “Barbara Allen” variety, where true love leads to a broken-hearted death. There are all those unfortunate young ladies named “Pretty Polly” or “Omie Wise” or a dozen other quaint names who find that spurning a lover’s advances may lead to a shallow grave. There are all of those songs about hellhounds and the devil by Robert Johnson, et al, just reminding us that a painful, unpleasant death may not be the worst of it for some of us. There are the ghostly “Unquiet Graves,” etc., where the dead speak to comfort a loved one or accuse the murderer. There are plenty of songs about dead children and dead mothers; deaths from sickness, fire, childbirth, flood, war . . . the list goes on. Then there are the almost endless religious treatments of death from the joyous (“I’ll Fly Away”) to the bone-chilling Calvinist variety (“O Death”). There are those who find this fascination with death in southern music repugnant, but I am not one of them. Maybe it’s some type of catharsis; I don’t know. My personal favorite in the genre might be “What Did the Deep Sea Say?”
Of course, macabre music is hardly a purely southern phenomenon. Billie Holiday’s “Gloomy Sunday” has, for years, been the subject of urban legend and has even been called a “haunted song.” The song, which was written by a Hungarian pianist and originally sung in Magyar, is about lost love and the contemplation of suicide. There were supposedly dozens if not hundreds of suicides inspired by the song, some after only one hearing. Most of those stories are completely unsubstantiated, though the composer, Rezső Seress, did commit suicide in 1968. I find the melody not particularly gloomy at all and the lyric actually a little banal, especially compared to “Strange Fruit,” Holiday’s gruesome and grisly indictment of southerners’ indifference to lynching. No surprise that one didn’t make the Hit Parade.
These days though, I find myself in need of something more. I find that my faith is sometimes shaken in ways I didn’t expect when I was younger. I’m not so brave about dying as I was when I was younger, which is why I suppose they send young men to do all the killing and dying that needs to be done. My friend Cori, now 20, was 19 when she had a near-fatal car wreck. Her insouciant attitude about her extraordinary survival is inspiring, but I must confess that it is something I don’t share. I still get a little sick thinking about the phone call I got telling me she had been in an accident. I am truly thankful to God that she lived. At the time I remember hoping that I wouldn’t be mentally ticking her name off the next time I heard “In My Life.”
So this week, on that afternoon after the funeral, I was looking for comfort. Music does that, too, doesn’t it? Its hymns, mostly, that help. I don’t know what people do for comfort if all they have are pop songs. I mean, they definitely serve a function, sometimes even helping express all the complex emotions one feels looking at death. But there is something in those old hymns especially; words written by long-forgotten authors who have since joined the choir invisible themselves . . . those are the ones I want to wrap myself in like a blanket of sound. I want to hear them sung by heavy, powerful voices, those voices that sound like they believe those words they are singing. Songs like “Amazing Grace” of course, and “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and “Abide With Me”:
“When other helpers fail and comforts flee,Or Horatio Spafford’s achingly beautiful “It Is Well,” written after the drowning deaths of his wife and daughters, that begins:
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.”
“When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,An image that could seem overused and tediously Victorian is instead rendered eloquently and dignified further with Philip Bliss’ near-perfect melody.
When sorrows like sea billows roll . . .”
Sometimes, though, you hear a song you’ve known for years like it was the first time. When that happens, the words and melody flood your mind and soul and seem to speak to you in some timeless way, like the Ancient of Days. So I found myself listening repeatedly that afternoon to “(There Is A) Balm In Gilead,” sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock. I’ve known the hymn for years, but it came to me fresh and potent and almost overwhelming. All female voices, mature and rich in timbre, singing a cappella in free tempo . . . it sounds more camp-meeting than funereal, yet death is in it, too.
“There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole,The voices blend in harmony that is more vibrant than sweet. They rise and fall in gospel melismas at key words in the phrase. The verses make no mention of Death by name, though his co-stars, Sin and Sickness make cameo appearances. The soloist and the quintet in turns forbid the listener from disconsolate grieving. “Do not mourn as those without hope . . . there is help for the dejected and the sinner such as yourself.”
There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.
Sometimes I feel discouraged,
And I think my work’s in vain,
But then the Holy Spirit,
Revives my soul again.
There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole,
There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.”
I pushed the play button on that song three or four times that afternoon and I’ve come back several times since. Maybe it’s that I’ve felt more wounded and sin-sick these days. Maybe it’s just that I find myself going to more funerals than I used to. Maybe it’s that I need an answer to Gordon Lightfoot and James Taylor and Son House. After all, death is never far away.
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