Category Archives: Music

Down River: In Search of David Ackles

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I’ve been traveling
Gone a long, long time
Don’t know what I’ll find
Scared of what I’d find
I just can’t
Just can’t walk down this road

— “Road to Cairo” (Track 1 of David Ackles’ first record)

May I write you from time to time
A picture postcard from the five and dime?
Nothing fancy, just a simple line:
‘I miss you.’

— “Postcards” (Last track of Ackles’ last record)

David Ackles was one of the most gifted and original songwriters of the last century, but relatively few know his work today. Coming of age when the American songbook was being reshaped by the fresh subject matter and unusual song structures of artists ranging from Randy Newman and Brian Wilson to Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro, Ackles didn’t really fit the accustomed categories. Some said “folk,” some said “pop.”  One critic called his music “religiously-oriented Jazz.” A British reviewer thought “he looks like a gentler, smoother Bob Dylan, with a piano instead of a guitar, … but his smoky voice and sad, bitter songs of life and love belong to the longer tradition of French chanson.” The Chicago Tribune praised Ackles’ repertoire as “Edgar Lee Masters poems set to music … by Charles Ives.” And the Village Voice was equally dazzled:

“I heard everything from Jelly Roll Morton to Kurt Weill and Charles Ives in his piano—polytonalities, freaky counterpoint, multi-rhythms and all sorts of other ‘technical’ things that make his music fascinating … He writes the kind of stuff … that owes more to the poetry of Brecht than to the usual pop influences.” [i]

Ackles’ eponymous first album in 1968 made a strong impression on rising British artists Elton John, Bernie Taupin, Phil Collins and Elvis Costello. In the U.S., Elektra Records, the hippest label in L.A. (Love, The Doors, Tim Buckley), signed him up, promoting him heavily despite disappointing early sales. As music historian Mark Brend notes, “[Elektra executives Jac Holzman and David Anderle] saw something special in Ackles and his strange songs. Songs of originality and daring, and yet songs, too, that you could have just about imagined then as hits. Songs that almost were hits, in some cases.” [ii]

The photograph for Ackles’ third album cover was taken by Michael Ross at the English country house on the Thames where David retreated to arrange the songs in a peaceful setting, far from the pressures of Los Angeles.

Released on the Fourth of July in 1972, Ackles’ next album, American Gothic, produced by Bernie Taupin and meticulously arranged by the composer, received ecstatic reviews:

“I never really thought that anyone could ever come along and make another album that would be as important—and for the same reasons that Sgt. Pepper was … but someone has. His name is David Ackles, and the album (his third) is called American Gothic.” [iii]

 “With American Gothic David Ackles has pulled together the best elements of American pop music—jazz, ‘serious composers,’ the musical theater and film music, and combined them with exquisite taste … The best album of the year? Undoubtedly. The best of the decade? Probably.” [iv]

In the London Sunday Times, Derek Jewell noticed a pantheon of influences in Ackles’ album: Gershwin, Ellington, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Leonard Bernstein, Elvis Presley, Burl Ives, Aaron Copland, and Benjamin Britten:

“It’s a masterpiece. Its achievement is comparable with Sgt. Pepper … Never has popular music sounded more dramatic … The beauty, surprise and sheer perfection of his songs will confound you.” [v]

But when sales of American Gothic proved tepid, Elektra dropped their brilliant protégé. Proclaimed a genius early in 1972, by year’s end he was “trailing around inappropriate small venues, playing out-of-tune pianos to dwindling audiences, wondering if he’d ever make another record.” [vi] In 1973, he managed, on a pittance from Columbia Records, to make one more album: Five & Dime—“a smaller, warmer, even happier record” than its predecessors. [vii] It quickly disappeared, and Columbia dropped him in early 1974. David Ackles vanished from the public eye, and never made another recording.

Why did such brilliance not have the impact it deserved? Should Ackles’ failure to “make it” as a pop icon be the principal theme of a life that was in so many ways full of grace? And what is it about his music that demands our attention and respect today? In Down River: In Search of David Ackles (London: Jawbone Press, 2025), writer/musician Mark Brend explores these questions in depth. And if you want a detailed account of the sessions that produced each album, Brend’s research, including interviews with the musicians, is fascinating and thorough.

Ackles’ American debut was in 1968 at Canterbury House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, an intimate club venue which was part of the Episcopal Church’s campus ministry. He was appreciated in that university setting not only for the quality and intellect of his songs, but also for their spiritual themes of struggle, search and the workings of grace. Ackles was a committed Christian who looked honestly and compassionately at the brokenness of the world, and even his bleakest songs had cracks to let the light through.  

When David returned to Canterbury House in February 1970, I myself was one of the campus ministers, fresh out of seminary, collecting the $2 tickets at the door and pouring free coffee and cider for the audience. David’s performance made a deep impression on me, and seven months later he kindly agreed to sing a couple of his songs at my ordination to the priesthood in Los Angeles. [viii]

David Ackles singing for the author’s ordination at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills,
September 17, 1970 (Photo by Marilyn Robertson).

A month before my ordination, David had been the opening act for Elton John’s first performance in America, which I have written about in A Night at the Troubadour: Discovering David Ackles (and Elton John). His musical future seemed so bright on that magical summer evening in a club packed with the elite of West Coast music.

But David’s uniqueness would prove too challenging for a wider public. As Brend observes, “The further Ackles went on his journey, the harder it became to relate him to anyone else and fit him into what was happening.” [ix]

His music was often too complex to be catchy, and the breadth of his themes taxed the attention of many. Although he wrote some gorgeous love songs, he was more storyteller than balladeer, and many of his tales were replete with regret and loss. But as the New York Times noted after seeing him at Greenwich Village’s The Bitter End in 1969, “His habit of singing these [sad] songs through the smile of a very intense cherub is quite effective.” [x]  

Some of his songs verge on the apocalyptic—a mining disaster (“Aberfan”), political turbulence (“Ballad of the Ship of State”), environmental disaster (“Oh, California!”), and society’s descent into collective madness (“Inmates of the Institution”). Brend describes the latter as a chaos of “lurching tempo changes, discords, scurrying piano, declamatory singing, mirthlessly jaunty melodic choruses, abrupt stops,” with arranger Fred Myrow leading the charge “like Bernard Herrmann conducting a Las Vegas showband in a nightmare.” [xi]

Cover for Ackles’ first album. The noirish design was by William S. Harvey, who had created an equally brooding cover for The Doors’ first album. Photo by Joel Brodsky.

“Why did Ackles, who was by most accounts optimistic and cheerful, populate his albums with sorrowful tales of the lost and the lonely? People on the slide, ex-cons, drug addicts, drifters and divorcees, confused spiritual seekers, mourners. There’s no easy answer to that.”

— Mark Brend [xii]

One of Ackles’ most harrowing songs is on his first album. “His Name Is Andrew” recites a pilgrim’s progress from a happily innocent faith into the dark night of the soul, where the solemn chant of the vocal and the funereal pulsations of the accompaniment take us into the pit of despairing unfaith, where Andrew’s only choice is “to wait alone for this life to end.” But Ackles does not leave us there. Grace returns with the album’s final song, “Be My Friend.”

Sometimes you wake up feeling nothing but fear.
Sometimes you wonder why God put you here.
Then all at once, there comes a word—
What was that you heard?
Why someone said, from Gilead:
“Be my friend.”

This all makes David’s albums sound like hard work, and in the sense that they tend to engage the hardest things and the biggest questions, that is true. But there is also considerable wit, playfulness and warmth in his repertoire. You never doubt that he is on the side of life. And the sheer beauty of the musical arrangements delivers grace even amid the bleakest lyrics. Ackles’s recordings, in my experience, are endlessly engaging. Most reviewers of his albums—and many listeners since—have spoken of living with an Ackles album for weeks, playing it over and over. [xiii]

Publicity still for Elektra Records.

With Mark Brend’s marvelous book as a guide, you may find yourself doing the same. You can find the four albums online, or even score an original LP in a used vinyl bin. Start perhaps with “Down River” (David Ackles). After you wipe away your tears, work your way up to “Montana Song” (American Gothic), a 10-minute “elegaic widescreen tone poem” (Brend). As Bernie Taupin has said of it, “You’d have to be dead inside not to be moved.” [xiv]

David was one of the most joyful and gracious people I’ve ever met, and he didn’t harbor bitterness about his musical career. “I don’t believe anything more could have been done to make me a commercial success,” he said in 1998, a year before he died of cancer at 62. “It just wasn’t in the cards.” [xv]  His friend Douglas Graham, a screenwriter who had managed folksinger Odetta in the Sixties, summed it up as well as any:

“He wasn’t in it for stardom. He was in it for music … He probably could have compromised and gone a more popular route. But maybe not, because his music was authentic and anything else would have been inauthentic.” [xvi]  

I began this post with lyrics from the first and last songs of David’s recording career. Like every pilgrim into the unknown, the singer sets out with fear and trepidation in a disconnect from everything familiar. But in his last words, delivered from wherever he has ended up, he reaches back with a tender desire for reconnection: “May I write? … I miss you.”

Isn’t that the same narrative arc we find in the Bible, stretching from the Expulsion from Eden to the “world made new”? At the end of the road, we are gathered back into to divine community around the Tree of Life. Or as David put it so hopefully in “Family Band” (American Gothic):

And I will cherish the faith in the songs we knew then,
Till we all sing together,
Till we all sing together,
Till we sing them together again.

William S. Harvey’s more upbeat cover for the second album, Subway to the Country. Photo by Frank Bez.

[i] Reviews quoted in Mark Brend, Down River: In Search of David Ackles (London: Jawbone Press, 2025). Page numbers refer to Brend’s text: “jazz” (Albuquerque Journal, Oct. 3, 1968), p. 54; “French chanson” (Croydon Advertiser, Oct. 10, 1968), p. 62; “Edgar Lee Masters” (Chicago Tribune, Feb. 15, 1970), p. 93; “Jelly Roll Morton (Village Voice, Jan. 8, 1970), p. 93.

[ii] Ibid., 35.

[iii] Chris Van Ness (Los Angeles Free Press, May 19, 1972), quoted in Brend, p. 138.

[iv] John Weisman (Detroit Free Press, June 25, 1972). q. in Brend, p. 139.

[v] Derek Jewell (Sunday Times, June 18, 1972). q. in Brend, p. 141.

[vi] Brend, 147.

[vii] Brend, 167.

[viii] The songs performed that night at All Saints, Beverly Hills, “Be My Friend” and “Family Band,” were the same ones that would be be chosen from his recorded works for his requiem 29 years later at All Saints, Pasadena. All saints indeed!

[ix] Brend, 34.

[x] Mike Jahn (New York Times, Dec. 16, 1969), q. in Brend, p. 77.

[xi] Brend, 84. Myrow, who arranged and conducted the recordings for Ackles’s second album, was a respected composer (classical, world, and film music) whom David knew from the University of Southern California. I had the pleasure of working with Myrow as my music director for “L.A. Night,” an evening of music, spectacle and inspiration for 5000 Episcopalians at the church’s General Convention of 1985.

[xii] Brend, 67.

[xiii] The current band of Ackles devotees may be relatively small, but his fans—myself among them—are quite passionate about his work. On the Facebook page, David Ackles, the forgotten legend, people share images of old reviews, posters, master tape boxes from Elektra and other artifacts with the excitement of archaeologists discovering a rare manuscript fragment from a vanished world.

[xiv] Brend, 132.

[xv] Brend, 150. From his interview with David Ackles in 1998.

[xvi] Brend, 171. From his 2022 interview with Graham. Speaking of Odetta, she was at my table on that legendary night with Ackles and John at the Troubadour. Perhaps Graham was with her.

Christmas Carols: Shining Through the Gloom

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Adoration of the Christ Child, Gerrit van Honthorst (1619-20)

There within a stable, the baby drew a breath:
There began a life that put an end to death.

— Bob Franke, “Straw Against the Chill”[i]

In the dark days of 1943, Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane wrote the most melancholy Christmas song I know, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” It made its debut in the 1944 film, Meet Me in St. Louis, when Judy Garland sang it to cheer up her little sister. Their father had taken a job in New York, and the world they knew was about to end. The fact that it was Christmas—their last Christmas in St. Louis—only intensified their sense of loss. As the sisters gaze down from an upstairs window at the family of moonlit snow figures in the front yard, Garland, her moistened eyes seen in gorgeous Technicolor close-ups, delivers the song.

The film’s director, Vincente Minnelli (who would marry Garland the next year), thought the original lyrics too depressing, so he told the writers to make some changes. The line, “It may be your last / Next year we may all be living in the past,” became “Let your heart be light / Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.” But that did little to stop the tears of homesick soldiers viewing the film in distant war zones. In 1957, Frank Sinatra requested another change when he included the song on his holiday album, A Jolly Christmas. He asked Hugh Martin if he could “jolly up” the lyrics a bit more. Thus “until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow,” became “hang a shining star upon the highest bough.” Even so, the tune’s slow pace and moody melody have continued to suffuse the song with the seasonal melancholy which for some is the shadow side of Christmas cheer. If you’re feeling alone, sad, lost, anxious, or afraid, it’s hard to share in the holiday spirit. When your personal world—or our public world—lies in darkness, how do you “let your heart be light?”

A few centuries ago, Turlough O’Carolan, the blind harper and last of the Irish bards, was sitting in a tavern with his friend, the poet Charles McCabe, who said, “Your music, sir, is grand and lovely stuff; but it’s too light-hearted. This is a dark time we live in, Mr. Carolan, and our songs should reflect that.” The harper replied, “Tell me something, McCabe. Tell me this: Which do you think is harder—to make dark songs in the darkness, or to make brilliant ones that shine through the gloom?” [ii] 

Some of the instruments from our caroling party.

For the last half-century, I have gathered instrumentalists, singers and friends to lighten up the long night with carols and wassails from seven centuries and a dozen countries. “The Praise of Christmas” sums up the spirit of these evenings:

This time of the yeare
Is spent in good cheare;
Kind neighbors together meet
To sit by the fire
With friendly desire
Each other in love to greet;
Old grudges, forgot,
Are put in the pot,
All sorrowes aside they lay;
The old and the yong
Doth carol their song
To drive the cold winter away.

The old tune is appropriately vigorous, and the lyric by Thomas d’Urfey (1653-1723) is from his aptly titled songbook, Pills to Purge Melancholy. We do sing our share of quiet songs (“Hush! Hush! See how the child is sleeping.”), as well as wistful and mysterious carols in minor keys and medieval modes. But the predominant note is one of joy and wonder. As William Morris declared in his Victorian carol, “Masters in This Hall,”

Christmas is come in
And no folk should be sad.

Of course, no one should, but many are. Even in the best of times, there’s going to be some sadness in the room. As Henry Nouwen said, “No one escapes being wounded.” So we don’t sing our carols expecting present reality to be suddenly freed from every sorrow. But singing touches and heals the mind and heart, offering relief and comfort to “those who sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death” (Luke 1:79). As Robert Burton insisted in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), music is “the sovereign remedy against despair and melancholy … a “tonick to the saddened soul.” And W.E.B. DuBois, writing in the last century about “The Sorrow Songs” of African-American spirituals, said that “they grope toward some unseen power and sigh for rest in the End.” In other words, even laments can be agents of hope. As DuBois put it,

“Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence.” [iii]

Compared with the emotional and social realism of black spirituals, what can we say about Christmas carols? Do they have a similar healing power? Or is their bright spirit in denial of the “two thousand years of wrong” which have followed the miraculous “midnight clear” in Bethlehem? Can we who dwell in the shadow of death still sing about joy and peace with whole-hearted conviction? As the Psalmist wondered, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” And yet, we sing. We sing because carols gladden the heart and bring us together. And we sing because carols are eschatological anticipations of God’s unfolding future. They don’t put an end to our troubles, but they give us a foretaste of glory, reminding us that we belong not to what is dying, but to what is being born.

Gabriel’s message does away
Satan’s curse and Satan’s sway;
Out of darkness brings our Day:
So behold,
All the gates of heav’n unfold.

“O radiant dawn, bright splendor of the light eternal.” (8th century ‘O Antiphon’ for December 21).

In my Los Angeles days, I’d rise at 4 a.m. at the Winter Solstice, toward the end of the longest night, and drive to a peak above the ocean in the Santa Monica Mountains, where I could see the newborn sun rise over desert peaks 100 miles to the east. But in the Northwest where I live now, a winter sunrise can be a rare sight. This December’s relentless stretch of rain and thick clouds seemed to doom my chances. Still, I awoke at sunrise out of habit, and when I glimpsed the Douglas firs on a hilltop ablaze with fiery light. I jumped in my car and raced to the edge of the island to see the gloom on the run. It was the perfect Advent sign: The people who have lived in darkness, and in the shadow of death (umbra mortis, as the 8th-century O antiphons put it), have seen a great light.

Did it matter that by the end of the day the sun had vanished and rain was pouring down? Not at all. I had received the gift of light as an eloquent sign: Don’t forget what you have seen. Remember hope.

Sunrise after the year’s longest night (Puget Sound, Washington).

Dear reader, I wish you a most blessed and merry Christmas. Let your heart be light!

[i] Bob Franke’s “Straw Against the Chill” (Telephone Pole Music) is a beautiful contemporary carol. I recently posted a tribute to Bob’s legacy. You can listen to the song here:https://youtu.be/N-VXxACc4U4?si=Xn2O1qZgr01O5ckr

[ii] I heard this story in the California Revels CD, Christmas in an Irish Castle (2001).

[iii] The Nouwen, Burton, and DuBois quotes are from Kay Redfield Jamison’s powerful and moving book, Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). It is a fascinatingly documented and beautifully written treatise on the spiritual and imaginative dimensions of healing body and soul.

Songs That Seek Your Heart and Find It: Remembering Bob Franke

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Cover of Bob Franke’s fifth album, 1991 (Photo: Susan Wilson)

And when all the stars and sentimental songs dissolved to day,
There was nothing left to sing about but hard love.

— Bob Franke, “Hard Love”

Yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

— Burial Office, Episcopal Book of Common Prayer

“Bob Franke! Ten years ago, one of his songs literally saved my life.” That’s what a theology professor told me back in the nineties, when I was catching a ride with her to Salem from the Massachusetts coast. She taught at Harvard Divinity School and had offered to drop me at a friend’s house on her way to work. “What’s your friend’s name?” she asked. I told her, and I have never forgotten her heartfelt response. But I was not surprised by it. Bob’s songs have been a source of comfort and healing for many of us over the years.

I first met Bob in 1969, when he was a student and aspiring singer-songwriter at the University of Michigan, and I was a Cambridge seminarian visiting Ann Arbor during spring break. Bob was part of an impromptu band I helped put together for the Easter liturgy at Canterbury House, the Episcopal campus ministry coffeehouse renowned not only for its folk concerts (Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Richie Havens were on the bill that year), but also for its wonderfully creative alternative worship. On Easter morning, about 150 students and faculty descended into the gloomy basement “tomb,” until a clown in white face appeared to announce that “Christ is risen!” As the congregation exited the tomb into the light-filled hall above, our band played the opening hymn—“Mr. Tambourine Man.” Nothing like resurrection to make a “jingle-jangle morning.”

Bob Franke (seated on floor), Jim Friedrich, Ed Reynolds at Canterbury House
Easter Sunday, 1969

Canterbury House was also the first place Bob sang his own songs on stage. In the previous year, the headline act—the unpredictable Ramblin’ Jack Elliott—had wandered away between sets to get ice cream in Detroit, 45 miles away. During his long absence, someone asked Bob to fill in until Jack returned. And a star was born.

Bob was a faithful friend of God, an Episcopalian by tradition. He attended my seminary in Massachusetts for a year, but it soon became clear that, in his words, “a guitar fit better around my neck than a clerical collar.” But his songs, and the way he would speak about them in concert, became a unique ministry of illumination, comfort and blessing which touched so many lives. Bob himself put it this way:

“Whenever I sing, I’m trying to create in my listeners an awareness of the beauty and sacredness of their own lives, both individually and together, as a community. A woman came up to me recently and said that my story and my song put her relationship with her dad in a new light, gave her insight into her dad’s love for her. That’s all I need to take home from a show.”

Some of his work engages biblical topics, such as his Nativity carol, “Straw Against the Chill,” or “We’re Walking in the Wilderness.” Some lyrics incorporate Scriptural references (“new streams in the desert, new hope for the poor”). But most of his songs, whatever the topic, touch on fundamentally religious questions: yearning, journey, justice, death, loss, mercy, gratitude, love.

But it was always more than the songs with Bob, whose own authenticity, depth, humility and warmth made every concert an event of the heart. As music programmer Alan Korolenko describes the Bob Franke experience:

“No matter the size of the audience, you’re going to get an intimate evening with Bob. He just pulls everybody in, which is the key. You’ll meet other artists, and they’re not the same as their work. That’s not the case with Bob. He appeals to folk fans and general audiences, because he knows how to create a full, emotional journey, and how to share that journey. By the end, you’ve laughed and thought and cared; you’ve gotten to know the guy. He’s a class act.”

In the folk world, Bob’s songwriting has long been held in high esteem. Peter, Paul and Mary, David Wilcox, John McCutcheon, Sally Rogers, Martin Simpson, Lui Collins, Garnet Rogers, June Tabor and countless others have all recorded from his songbook. Claudia Schmidt has a beautiful version of “Hard Love,” one of the most truthful and hard-earned songs ever written on the subject.

Yes, it’s hard love, but it’s love all the same
Not the stuff of fantasy, but more than just a game
And the only kind of miracle that’s worthy of the name
For the love that heals our lives is mostly hard love

Bob’s melodies have a way of drawing you into a place of receptivity, where his words, so precise, truthful and unafraid, whisper their truth to your heart.

For the Lord’s cross might redeem us, but our own just wastes our time. (“Hard Love”)

There’s a hole in the middle of the prettiest life,
so the lawyers and the prophets say … (“For Real”)

But there are ears to hear me in my softest voice,
There are hands to hold and point the way … (“A Healing in This Night”)

Over the years, Bob’s songs have been woven like bright threads into the fabric of my own life. When my grandmother died three months short of a hundred, my folk-singing sister Marilyn wasn’t sure what to perform at her funeral. Then one of Bob’s songs arrived by chance (or grace) in the mail. A friend had just come across “Alleluia, the Great Storm is Over,” and thought Marilyn would like it. It proved the perfect choice, heaven-sent, to sing our dear Nana home.

Sweetness in the air, and justice on the wind,
laughter in the house where the mourners had been.
The deaf shall have music, the blind have new eyes,
the standards of death taken down by surprise.

In a very low-def 2010 video of Bob and friends singing the song in a Massachusetts coffeehouse, you can hear the audience jumping in with the chorus before Bob even sings a word. His lyrics were so deeply planted in their hearts, they could not keep silent.

Bob wrote a cantata on Christ’s Passion, performing it with musician friends every Good Friday at his home parish, St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Marblehead, Massachusetts. One of those songs, “Roll Away the Waters,” a rousing celebration of the Exodus, became a regular part of the storytelling portion of my creative Easter Vigils over the years. Here is Bob’s version.

And when we hear again the Annunciation story in Advent, it’s time for Bob’s “Say Yes,” an artfully succinct summary of spirituality’s essence: receptivity and consent. Here’s a version I did during the pandemic for one of my church’s worship streams:

The author performs Bob Franke’s “Say Yes.”

And whenever I need serious picking up, I’ll play “A Healing in This Night.” Here’s a fine version by Annie Patterson and Peter Blood:

“I always think of Bob as if Jefferson and Thoreau had picked up acoustic guitars and gotten into songwriting. There are touches of Mark Twain and Buddy Holly in there, too.” — Tom Paxton

Bob’s songs, and his spirit, are deeply rooted in American tradition—musically, culturally, politically. He sang on radio shows like Prairie Home Companion and A Mountain Stage, and traveled down many roads to perform in festivals, coffeehouses, churches and living rooms. His songs are imbued with the questions, dreams, struggles and shadows of American life. Even the hardest times are seen with a measure of possibility and redemption.

But in recent years he and his wife Joan saw the country they loved disintegrating into madness and rage. Feeling that the United States was becoming unsafe, and mindful of those who waited too long to exit Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Bob and Joan emigrated to Guatemala in September. They were barely into their second month in a new land when Bob was hit by a speeding motorcycle while crossing a road. Yesterday, October 16, a few days after surgery to repair the damage, he died in hospital of a heart attack. He was 78.

What can you do with your days but work and hope,
Let your dreams bind your work to your play.
What can you do with each moment of your life
But love till you’ve loved it away?

When the news of Bob’s death reached me around midnight, it hit hard. I lit a candle before an icon of the Theotokos, and picked up my guitar: “Thanksgiving Eve,” of course, “Alleluia, the Great Storm is Over,” and “A Healing in This Night.” I imagined people far and wide were doing the same—joining our voices with the whole company of heaven, as we say at mass.

Give rest, O Christ, to your servant
with your saints,
where sorrow and pain are no more,
neither sighing,
but life everlasting.

As for the song which saved that Harvard theologian’s life years ago, let Bob have the last word:

For more information on Bob Franke’s life and music: https://bobfranke.com

“When I begin the long work of rising”—A Tribute to David Fetcho

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David Fetcho.

“So my expectations are modest: that for some folks unknown to me, my music and poetry might open a window–maybe just a little bit–and allow them to get a glimpse of the secrets of their own heart as it tries to make sense of this world.”

— David Fetcho

I last saw David Fetcho at a funeral one year ago. I had flown to California to preach at the requiem for Stephen O’Leary, a fellow shape note singer. At the reception afterward, David and his wife Susan joined me in singing “Farthest Field,” a parable of resurrection and reunion beyond this mortal life.

I know one day I’ll leave my home
Here in the valley and climb up to that field so fair
And when I’m called and counted in
That final tally, I know that I will see you there.
Oh, walk with me and we will see the mystery revealed
When one day we wend our way up to the farthest field. 

The three of us had worked out the harmonies years before, and we loved to sing that song whenever we met up. When David and Susan dropped me at the Oakland airport that evening, we had no idea we had sung together for the last time. A few days later, the pandemic began to enclose us in our respective bubbles, two states apart. Then, a week ago, David had a massive stroke. He died yesterday afternoon. 

I first met David and Susan at the California Shape Note Convention in January 2000. They introduced themselves at the lunch break. After hearing my opening prayer that morning, they suspected we were kindred spirits. We quickly discovered a multitude of common bonds, including creative liturgy, filmmaking, music, theater and dance, theology, and radical Christianity. We met for a long conversation the next day, sharing our dreams of provoking a renaissance of wonder among God’s friends. Most of our grand collaborative hopes never materialized, but our periodic exchanges of ideas and passions always nourished our own ongoing projects. We were like an ancient trading culture. I’d show a film they hadn’t seen. They’d read me a poet I didn’t know. Whenever we met, we’d find ourselves taking notes, exchanging the names of works or artists to explore. And when we did manage a collaboration—a creative liturgy, a workshop, a video production—it was always a joy, with a surplus of invention and a minimum of ego. 

David Fetcho, late 1973.

Music was at the heart of David’s many creative gifts. He sang Gregorian chant as a Catholic choir boy, and mastered the accordion in the polka culture of his native Pittsburgh. Coming of age in the 1960s, he breathed the experimental air of the psychedelic San Francisco sound and the “new music” avant garde. His influences ranged from Meredith Monk and David Byrne to late medieval Ars Nova, contemporary world music, and American Sacred Harp singing. In 1970 he got access to a sophisticated Moog synthesizer left over from a Jefferson Airplane project, and began a lifelong exploration of electronic music. But his embrace of complex synthesized music never eclipsed his love of acoustic simplicity. He recently called the alto recorder his primary instrument.

For many years, David collaborated with Susan, an accomplished dancer and choreographer, to create 14 dance productions, touring in Australia, New Zealand, Bali, the U.S. and Canada. He also composed scores for various dance and theater companies, as well as film and television productions. But after decades as a collaborator, David made the courageous decision, at age 67, to produce his first solo work, using the name of his Slovak grandparents before it was Americanized: Fečo. The resulting song cycle, Watch It Sparkle, is a deep river of sounds and rhythms carrying his distinctive vocals and haunting lyrics through an immense cognitive terrain. 

David resisted terms like “experimental” or “avant-garde” for his new venture. He preferred to call it “medieval folk music for the 21st century.” It’s not easy or casual listening, but the listener who consents to the journey will be richly rewarded, perhaps even transformed. Critic Brian Leak encourages us to take the plunge: “As thematically dark as some of the songs are, there’s still a joyful complexity holding it all together.” And Layla Marino writes, “dsfečo’s first solo album has it all: complex song composition, beautiful, emotive melodies, just the right amount of dissonance and well-placed syncopation and vocals which drive home the point of all this strange music.” 

The final song of the cycle, “Just Another Good Day,” celebrates the eternal Now where we can, even in this life, rest in the stillness of Being, where transcendence and immanence meet in the arrested moment. It was the first thing I put on when I heard the news of David’s death. 

I want to go with you
to the other side of the light
where we’ll see
what the shadow reveals
will be such a relief …

time in its disguises 
won’t fool us anymore …

Days tumble on with minds of their own
they breathe in our lives, and make them their own
and time, time disappears
like the wind from a sail …
and every good day will be 
just another good day
of eternal life. 

Susan and David Fetcho, May 2006 (Jim Friedrich)

“Time of Quarantine,” recorded in his basement in June 2020, knows no such lightness of being. The present moment is heavy with longing for the return of a lost world: “dearest friends may fall / and sorrow’s tide wash over all.” The unwavering close-up of David singing is powerfully intimate (especially so now that he’s gone), yet we see a certain inexpressiveness in his face (but not his voice!), as though another power is speaking through him. This is not a performance, but a message. And the message is hope: 

If there’s a meaning to be found, 
it’s that love can still abound 
in this time of quarantine … 

What is the meaning of this plague we see? 
Even in our shelters we are not alone: 
our hearts can bridge the distance 
although we stay at home. 

Oh where is the time and place 
when I can finally touch your face 
and hold you like I did before 
this time of quarantine? 

And when we look back upon these days, 
we’ll remember how it felt to say, 
“We’re all in this together. 
We’ll make it through together.”

All of David’s work was grounded in a deep faith, a questioning mind, and a compassionate heart. In the 1970s, he and Susan belonged to the Bartimaeus Community in Berkeley, a communal experiment of the Evangelical left which included influential theologian/activist Ched Myers. Over the years, the Fetchos have worked creatively with many different church bodies, but in the years I have known them they have never had a lasting church home. I suspect that their belief in the deep connection between art, faith and imagination has never quite found a satisfactory institutional shelter. As David wrote to me in 2015:

“I want to look for a future shape of the Church unbound from the arbitrary conventions and protocols of manufactured traditions, and converted back to the one deep and abiding tradition of God’s self-expression in the multi-sensual forms of the world, and through the expression of human creative imagination lifted into the prophetic dimension.”

But to some extent, David and Susan found their true “church” in the community of singers who gather regularly to make a joyful noise with the expressive choral tradition of American shape note music. As a faithful supporter of singings in the San Francisco Bay Area, David was known not only for his strong voice, but also for his warm and welcoming encouragement to novice singers.  

Shape noters from all over have been posting fond remembrances. A Bay Area singer wrote: “David’s resounding voice was one of the first that truly stirred me at a local singing. I matched his tone next to me, in the lower tenor octave, and discovered the full sound in my own chest that you all have heard roaring from the alto bench in years since. He has driven me to countless Healdsburg singings, when I haven’t taken the weekend to cycle to them, and soothed me with such a gentle presence, calm with grounded wisdom.” 

In the following video, David and Susan lead a 2013 Palo Alto gathering in singing Rainbow: “Thy ways abound with blessings still, / Thy goodness crowns the years.” David’s radiant joy was a familiar sight at so many singings. He will be dearly missed.  

At last Sunday’s annual Seattle Sacred Harp Convention (on Zoom), 75 singers sang “Christian’s Farewell” for David. The final verse ends, “When I am done, I will go home / Where Jesus is smiling and bids me to come.” Dante’s Commedia reaches a similar conclusion, envisioning “the whole universe alight with a single smile” (Par. xxvii.4-5). To connect two such diverse sources to find a shared meaning is the kind of intertextual play that David’s brilliant mind was always quick to produce. But now he no longer needs to conceive the smile. He can enjoy it face to face. 

The ladder between earth and heaven (Daniel Cooney)

The shocking suddenness of David’s physical absence is hard to accept. I will be a long time sounding his name into the silence. But a Mary Oliver poem he sent me years ago brings comfort: 

When death
carts me off to the bottomlands,
when I begin
the long work of rising—

Death, whoever and whatever you are, tallest king of
tall kings, grant me these wishes: unstring my bones;
let me be not one thing but all things, and wondrously
scattered; shake me free from my name. Let the wind, and
the wildflowers, and the catbird never know it. Let
time loosen me like the bead of a flower from its wrappings
of leaves. Let me begin the changes

Slowly
up the hill,
like a thicket of white flowers
forever
is coming.

This video, perhaps the last recording David made, was shot at sunset on January 18, 2021.

An Unforgettable Night at the Troubadour (50th Anniversary)

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Fifty years ago tonight, I was lucky enough to hear a legendary concert by two extraordinary songwriters and performers, David Ackles and Elton John. A fanciful depiction of that night in the 2019 biopic Rocket Man shows the audience rising ecstatically to float above the floor. Actually, we were all sitting around big tables, but that is pretty much how it felt to be there. For the fiftieth anniversary of that unforgettable evening, I reprise my tribute written in 2016. 

David Ackles singing at the author’s ordination, Sept. 17, 1970 (Photo by Marilyn Robertson)

I have no explanation as to why the David Ackles albums spoke to me so intensely, but it was with those records that I probably spent the most time when I was about sixteen, listening in a darkened room, trying to imagine how everything had come to exist.” 

— Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink

They suffer least who suffer what they choose.

— David Ackles, “American Gothic”

 

The Troubadour, an intimate club in West Hollywood, has seen some pretty special nights over the years. Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman, Prince, Tom Petty, Pearl Jam and so many others have performed on its stage. Neil Young and James Taylor each made their solo debut there. The Byrds sang “Mr. Tambourine Man” for the first time in public. Tom Waits was discovered during amateur night. Springsteen, Dylan and Led Zeppelin dropped by after hours for legendary jams. Miles Davis and Van Morrison recorded there.[i]

When Elton John made his smashing American debut at the Troubadour on August 25, 1970, he was not yet widely known. He was originally booked as the opening act for David Ackles, a Los Angeles musical artist greatly admired by Elton John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin. But John’s record company pulled some strings to get the bill reversed. In conjunction with the release of his first album, John would become the headline act.

He would admit later to some embarrassment at being promoted above Ackles on the billing, since Ackles was one of his heroes, “one of the best that America has to offer.” Elvis Costello was also a fan, “It’s a mystery to me why his wonderful songs are not better known,” he has said.[ii] When Costello interviewed John on his Sundance cable series, Spectacle, they both voiced generous tributes to Ackles’ genius and influence, and closed the show with a duet of his great song of loss and longing, “Down River.” [iii]

Ackles put out four memorable albums between 1968 and 1973. His masterpiece, American Gothic (1972), generated critical raves. “The Sergeant Pepper of Folk,” gushed a noted British critic, astonished at its thematic brilliance, structural complexity and musical originality. Rolling Stone called it “moving” and “eloquent.” A retrospective appraisal in 2005 acclaimed it “a largely unrecognized work of genius, one of the most unfashionable and uncompromising American albums ever. . . Crafted layer upon layer, it reveals itself more as a dramatic work than a conventional rock or pop release, drawing on modern American classical composers such as Charles Ives and Aaron Copland as well as gospel, rock, blues, and soul. Imagine an art-folk album that bridges Woody Guthrie’s passionate storytelling and Kurt Weill’s orchestrations.” [iv]

Rolling Stone said at the time that American Gothic “deserves a wide audience,” but when sales proved weak, his recording company, Elektra, lost interest. Ackles made one more album on the Columbia label, but his music seemed too hard to categorize in an industry driven by identifiable genres. Was it folk, pop, classical, musical theater, or what? His originality didn’t fit the system. A ten-minute elegy to a lost past (“Montana Song”) was not going to get much radio time. And you couldn’t dance to it. But however neglected, the heartbreaking beauty of Ackles’ imagery still blooms like wildflowers on a deserted prairie:

The fallen barn, the broken plow,
the hoofprint-hardened clay;
where is the farmer, now,
who built his dream this way ?
Who felled the tree and cut the bough
and made the land obey,
who taught his sons as he knew how,
but could not make them stay. [v]

Disappointed by the lack of tangible support for his work, Ackles abandoned his recording career, but not his joie de vivre. “I’m not bitter about a thing that’s happened to me,” he told an interviewer in 1998. “I would hate for people to think I’m over here getting all twisted up about what happened 20 years ago. All that feels like another life, lived by someone else.” [vi]

Although he could write an achingly beautiful love song like “Love’s Enough,” he was at heart a storyteller, weaving poetic and sometimes tragic narratives of American dreamers and strivers, who “joined the circus, worked the fields,” but “never saved a dime.” And even when they had to “learn to dance to someone else’s song,” they managed to endure:

But I hold on to my dreams, anyway.
I never let them die.
They keep me going through the bad times,
while I dream
of the good times coming by. [vii]

Bernie Taupin, who produced American Gothic, summed up Ackles’ intensity and conviction in a 2008 remembrance: “Man! If you didn’t believe every word this guy was singing, you were dead inside.” [viii]

I first met David Ackles in early 1970, when I was working at Canterbury House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, an Episcopal campus ministry and coffeehouse known as one of the premiere folk music venues in the country. I was just out of seminary, working with two priests as an intern during the year of my “transitional diaconate,” the prelude to priestly ordination. While I was in residence, Canterbury House featured Neil Young, Doc Watson, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and David Ackles.

David was one of Canterbury’s most popular performers, loved not only for his music but also for his manifest warmth and wry humor. He was a lifelong Christian, deeply spiritual and theologically astute, an authentic and generous man. And though some of his songs revealed a profound empathy with the suffering of displaced souls, there was an essential core in him—a comedic faith in resurrection—which survived the harrowing descent of the artist into the nether regions of the human condition.

By summer of 1970, I was back home in Los Angeles, awaiting my ordination to the priesthood in September. When I saw that David was playing at the Troubadour, I knew I had to be there. Meanwhile, the radio was starting to preview a few unreleased songs by the other guy on the bill, and he sounded quite good as well. Word got around, excitement grew, and on August 25 the house was packed. We shared a table with Odetta, the “queen of American folk music.” [ix]

Before the show, I went backstage to ask David if he would consider singing at my ordination, and he graciously consented. While we were talking, Elton John entered the dressing room, wearing denim overalls with a cartoon duck patch on the front, to tell David how much he admired his work and how honored he was to share the stage with him.

And the concert? It’s been nearly fifty years now. Details grow hazy; I can’t recite the set lists anymore. But I can still feel the electricity of that Hollywood night, the passion of the performers, the visceral connection they made with their audience.

Stacy Sullivan, a jazz singer who once worked with David, is currently performing, in small New York clubs, “A Night at the Troubadour: Presenting Elton John and David Ackles.” While showing the brilliance of two stars aligning, her re-imagining of that night suggests the strangeness of fate: one singer became an international superstar, the other remained largely undiscovered.

The New York Times has called Sullivan’s tribute a “tour de force” which “interweaves more than a dozen Ackles songs with several of Mr. John’s hits, radically deconstructed, into a dual portrait in which their opposite sensibilities (Mr. John’s gregarious showmanship, and Mr. Ackles’ dignified introspection) eventually merge.” [x] Lucky Easterners can still see her at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Room on September 10 and October 8 [Note: this was in 2016]. I can only pray that she will do a West Coast reprise. I promise to come.

A few weeks after the Troubadour show, David sang two songs for my ordination at All Saints, Beverly Hills, where the opening hymn was “Let It Be” and large projected images filled the wall behind the altar. Those were the days! During communion, David sang “Be My Friend.” At the Dismissal, he led the congregation in “Family Band,” which he said was autobiographical, since he grew up in a musical family of church-going Presbyterians. I still play that song on my guitar every ordination anniversary:

I remember the songs we sang Sunday evening . . .
when my dad played the bass, mom played the drums,
I played the piano,
and Jesus sang the song.

David got lung cancer in the late nineties. When he went into remission, he and his wonderful wife Janice rented a Pasadena mansion, filled it with musicians, and threw a grand party for their friends, to celebrate the gifts of life and love. Then, in 1999, David departed this world, far too soon. He is dearly missed. But that gathering in Pasadena remains a joyous foretaste of the blessedness which awaits us all.

And I will cherish the faith in the songs we knew then,
till we all sing together, till we all sing together,
till we sing them together again.

 

 

[i] For a more extensive historical list: http://www.troubadour.com/history

[ii] Reuters obituary in March, 1999, cited in Kenny MacDonald interview: http://www.terrascope.co.uk/MyBackPages/David%20Ackles.htm

[iii] YouTube has a version of their duet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXvlCjrlHCQand their conversation about David is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qbt1Cee7Usw

[iv] George Durbalau, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, 2005. Along with other review quotes, found at http://www.superseventies.com/spacklesdavid.html

[v] David Ackles, “Montana Song,” on American Gothic. Some of David’s songs can be heard on YouTube, and his albums can be found online as well.

[vi] Kenny MacDonald interview

[vii] “Another Friday Night,” American Gothic

[viii] Bernie Taupin’s blog, Dec. 3, 2008

[ix] Attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr.: http://entertainment.time.com/2011/10/24/the-all-time-100-songs/slide/take-this-hammer-odetta/

[x] New York Times, July 16, 2016: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/16/arts/music/stacy-sullivan-david-ackles-review.html?_r=1

 

“Be known to us in the music we make”

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Ted Mercer leads a song at the California Sacred Harp Convention.

I am the chaplain this weekend for the 30th Annual All-California Sacred Harp Convention, where over a hundred singers have gathered from a dozen states (along with a few enthusiasts from Europe) to sing about 190 shape note songs over the course of two days. It’s an intense immersion in a uniquely American repertoire––loud, raw, and deeply expressive. You can read about it in my post, A Musical Tsunami.

While the song texts mostly reflect images and themes from 18th and 19th century Christianity, a shape note gathering is not a community of religious consensus. Non-Christian people of faith and no faith are in the mix, and there is no discussion of verbal meanings. It’s all about the singing. And yet, there is a sense of “church” about these gatherings. We tap into a power beyond the self, form bonds of communion with one another, and are transported by a shared experience that can verge on the ecstatic.

By long tradition, each day of a singing convention opens and closes with prayer, composed or selected at the discretion of the chaplain. The following prayers are mostly my own. While seeking to honor and express the sacred dimension of a shape note singing, I tried to be inclusive, avoiding explicit sectarian language. But you may notice some Anglican phrasing––and theology––seeping through.

Saturday (Jan. 20)

Opening prayer

O divine Beloved, Maker of all things and Lover of souls, we are gathered here by your grace to sing the life that conquers death, the joy that dries all tears, the peace that passes understanding, the love that resists every evil.

Be known to us in the music we make and the songs we share.
To spend one day with Thee on earth exceeds a thousand days of mirth.

We are truly thankful for the generations of composers and singers who have entrusted us with the Sacred Harp, and we pray that our singing in this place will gladden the whole company of heaven with an awesome and holy sound.

Draw us together with the cords of friendship.
Let no one be a stranger here.
Lift up our hearts and make us one.

Now sanctify this hollow and hallowed square, that it may be for us not just a refuge from the storms of the world, but a tangible experience of our truest humanity, reflecting your glory in the harmonious beauty of our shared communion.

We ask this in your holy Name. Amen.

 

Grace for the mid-day meal

Blessed are you, O God, giver of breath and bread,
from whom all blessings flow.
We give you thanks for the abundance of this hour,
for the food and drink prepared from your bounty by human labor
and spread before us by generous hands.
Give us such an awareness of the sacredness of every feast,
that the sharing of this meal may manifest the connections between us,
and deepen our gratitude for life.
Blessed be your Name forever. Amen.

 

Closing prayer (by Brian Wren*)

May the Sending One sing in us,
may the Seeking One walk with us,
may the Greeting One stand by us,
in our gladness and in our grieving.

May the Gifted One relieve us,
may the Given One retrieve us,
may the Giving One receive us,
in our falling and our restoring.

May the Binding One unite us,
may the One Beloved invite us,
may the Loving One delight us,
in bliss both human and divine.

Now let us go forth in peace,
rejoicing in the power of the Spirit. Amen.

* Brian Wren is an Anglican hymn writer in the UK.
The “in bliss” line is my own, while the final lines are
a eucharistic dismissal from the Book of Common Prayer.

 

Sunday (Jan. 21)

Opening prayer

Grace of melody be upon us
Grace of harmony be upon us
Grace of shapes be upon us
This day and evermore.

Grace of lyric be upon us
Grace of meter be upon us
Grace of fugues be upon us
This day and evermore.

Grace of praise be upon us
Grace of union be upon us
Grace of joy be upon us
This day and evermore. Amen.

 

Grace at the mid-day meal*

Holy God, giver of breath and bread,
it is with gratitude and joy that we receive the gift of this meal.
Into ourselves we take these changing forms of matter and light
through which we shall be changed:
other bodies becoming our bodies,
other lives becoming our life.

That there is but one body,
one life shared by all,
we vow to remember.

Now bless this food to our use, and us to your service,
and make us ever mindful of the needs and rights of others.
Let all the people say: Amen.

* Adapted from various sources. The first line is from Gerard Manley Hopkins, the last lines are at traditional grace, and the middle part I learned from a priest at a campfire on a kayaking retreat for clergy. I don’t know the source.

 

Closing prayer

Holy and gracious God, you are a mystery beyond all telling,
yet have we not heard your voice sounding in our midst this day?
You are beyond all seeing,
yet did we not glimpse your glory in the faces of one another?
You are beyond all knowing,
yet has not each of us heard a word spoken today––
a word of love or consolation,
a word of encouragement or mercy?

It has been such a blessing to join our voices with one another,
in union with the countless singers who have gone before us.
Our hearts are full, and we are deeply grateful.
Now send us forth in peace, guide us safely home,
and help us to carry the grace of these precious hours
into the rest of our lives,
that the world may resound
with the melody of compassion
and the harmony of justice,
and your blessing be known
through every land by every tongue.

Glory to you for ever and ever. Amen.

Related post: A Musical Tsunami

It Ain’t Me, Babe: Dylan Wins the Nobel Prize

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One of my prized 45s is this obscure single, released Dec. 21, 1965.

One of my prized 45s is this obscure single, released Dec. 21, 1965.

Well, I try my best
To be just like I am
But everybody wants you
To be just like them
They say sing while you slave and I just get bored
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.[i]

All these people that you mention, yes, I know them, they’re quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces and give them all another name
Right now, I can’t read too good, don’t send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them from Desolation Row [ii]

Little red wagon, little red bike
I ain’t no monkey but I know what I like [iii]

Whenever the Nobel Prize for literature is announced, the American response is often “Who?” In our cultural insularity, few of us know their work or even their names. Not this year. Everybody’s heard of Dylan, and many can recite his lyrics.

The surprise in 2016 stems from the bursting of old academic wineskins. What constitutes literature, anyway? Some of the literary establishment are unhappy that a songwriter tainted with lower-brow genres of popular culture (and currently performing in Las Vegas!) should steal the laurels from more “serious” candidates such as Syrian poet Adonis or Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. It’s “a joke,” fumed one French writer. A Scottish novelist dismissed the Nobel committee as “gibbering hippies.” [iv]

But if the linguistic arts trace their origins to the sung poetry of shared rituals, and Homer, the father of western literature, was a blind singer-songwriter who never put pen to paper, then Dylan can justly claim an ancient lineage, and stretching the definition of literature to include his work seems more restoration than innovation.

While Dylan’s jumping the queue ahead of American writers like Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, and Don DeLillo might seem inappropriate to some, it is at least defensible. Oates herself calls the award “an inspired and original choice. His haunting music and lyrics have always seemed, in the best sense, ‘literary.’” [v]

Dylan has certainly had his down periods of uneven albums and terrible concerts. I myself have endured one too many evenings of mumbled words, mangled melodies, and an almost contemptuous stage presence. But to sustain such an influential and ever-evolving body of work over half a century, bridging the cultural divide between high and low, making the play of language a lever to move the world, is an astonishing achievement. His poetic and musical gifts have so often given voice to the collective longing of our “subterranean homesick blues.” They have also taken us inward, to the places of the heart where “we sit here stranded, though we’re all doing our best to deny it.” [vi]

As Bruce Springsteen has written, “Bob pointed true north and served as a beacon to assist you in making your way through the new wilderness America had become. He planted a flag, wrote the songs, sang the words that were essential to the times, to the emotional and spiritual survival of so many young Americans . . .” [vii]

Dylan was the soundtrack for my own coming of age. During my first year of college in 1963, a classmate thrust Dylan’s first album into my hands. “You’ve got to hear this,” he said. As soon as that growling, barbaric yawp started blasting out of the speakers, I was spellbound. Like so many others, I took up the guitar just so I could play his songs. “Blowin’ in the Wind” (from his second album), was my first attempt (key of D with its easy chords). By my senior year, dozens of Dylan songs were in my repertoire. I even learned the ten-minute “Desolation Row” by heart, once performing it on Rome’s Spanish Steps, by the house where Keats died, during a post-graduate summer of hitchhiking Europe with my guitar.

In Berkeley on March 28, 1965, I caught one of Dylan’s final all-acoustic concerts, just before the release of Bringing It All Back Home, the first album in his unmatched trilogy (Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde would follow). Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg were sitting up front. Hippies and Hell’s Angels mixed with students and professors. The hall was charged with anticipation. From “Gates of Eden” to “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” it was an amazing night.

It was the first time I ever heard “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Top 40 radio, or even Dylan’s previous work, had not really prepared me for the trippy ride “upon that magic swirling ship.” Behind its dazzling succession of vivid images, I recognized something primal and urgent, the call to leave everything and to follow, to look everywhere for the “windy beach, far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.”

As a poetic equivalent of the kingdom of God, the windy beach where the Spirit blows, the space of supreme aliveness, is too little found, and never possessed. And yet, now and then, I have danced beneath its diamond sky with one hand waving free, and hope to do so again as grace permits.

I was also in the crowd on September 3 of that same year, when Dylan played the Hollywood Bowl, backed by The Hawks (later The Band) along with Al Kooper on organ. There all the songs from Highway 61 Revisited were performed in public for only the second time (after a New York concert the previous week). Since the album had yet to hit the stores, it was my indelible first communion with the image world of Dylan’s surrealism. “There’s something happening here, but you don’t know what it is.”[viii]  Indeed.

The encore was “Like a Rolling Stone,” the one song we already knew from the radio. Before beginning, Dylan searched among his harmonicas in vain, then spoke into the microphone, “Anyone got a C harmonica?” As I remember it, 17,000 harmonicas came flying onto the stage, and soon we were all shouting with one voice, “HOW DOES IT FEEEEEEEL?”

When, in 1966, I crossed the country to study at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, my guitar and my Dylan records came with me. In a school play, I sang an adapted version of “With God On Our Side” to parody the horrific biblical conquest narratives. I wrote an article on the prophetic theology of Dylan’s lyrics in the seminary journal. And I incorporated fragments of his haunting religious poetry from John Wesley Harding into a multimedia senior sermon (you can hear the audio collage here).

In later years, Dylan’s preeminence in my life’s soundtrack receded, although his masterpiece of anguish and longing, Time Out of Mind, managed perfectly to coincide with my own midlife dark night of the soul. Lines like “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there” may not have been balm in Gilead, but they kept me company until the dawn.

These days I occasionally sing old favorites like “Ramona,” “She Belongs To Me,” “Chimes of Freedom” and “Buckets of Rain.” And I never tire of leading friends and retreat groups in heartfelt renderings of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and “I Shall Be Released.”

Everyone’s got their Dylan stories, but at their core is a mysterious absence. Dylan’s identity has always been veiled by a succession of fictions, evasions, conversions and withdrawals. He has given interviews full of absurd biographical narratives.[ix] Even before he was famous, he invented personae to protect himself from the prying projections of others. From fixtures and forces and friends your sorrow does stem, that hype you and type you, making you feel you gotta be just like them. [x]

Does it matter whether we ever know the real Dylan, or find him a relatable personality? Or are the songs enough? Is their mysterious power to speak to us and for us enough?

“It’s like a ghost writing a song like that,” Dylan said about “Like a Rolling Stone” 40 years after recording his greatest hit. “It gives you the song and then it goes away. It goes away.”[xi] The ghost, the geist, the spirit blows where it will. The artist prepares to receive it, and learns how to give it away.

Another Nobel Laureate, poet Czeslaw Milosz, concurs, insisting that the artist’s vocation is to be “a secretary of the invisible.” Deliver the message entrusted to your keeping, then get the hell out of the way. It ain’t me, babe. This has been the essential kenosis of both art and spirit since the beginning.

Take Caedmon, for example. An illiterate herdsman in seventh-century Britain, he was suddenly commanded in a dream to sing the story of creation. Without learning or training, he began to sing words unknown to him, gifts from the same ghost who visited Dylan. Thus was English poetry born.

Denise Levertov imagines Caedmon’s in-spiriting in a poem of her own. He is huddling for warmth at night with the beasts of the barn, when suddenly the air is filled with “feathers of flame, sparks upflying.” The cows remain oblivious and calm, not seeing what the poet sees as “that hand of fire / touched my lips and scorched my tongue / and pulled my voice / into the ring of the dance.” [xii]

 

[i] Bob Dylan, “Maggie’s Farm” (Bringing It All Back Home)

[ii] Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row” (Highway 61 Revisited)

[iii] Bob Dylan, “Buckets of Rain” (Blood on the Tracks)

[iv] “Writers divided on whether Dylan deserves Nobel prize”: https://www.yahoo.com/news/writers-divided-whether-dylan-deserves-nobel-prize-180943929.html

[v] ibid.

[vi] Bob Dylan, “Visions of Johanna” (Blonde on Blonde)

[vii] Bruce Springsteen autobiography, Born To Run, q. on Springsteen’s website: http://brucespringsteen.net/news/2016/bruce-springsteen-on-bob-dylan

[viii] Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man” (Highway 61 Revisited)

[ix] To delve into the strange world of Dylan interviews: http://www.vulture.com/2007/10/the_ten_most_incomprehensible.html

[x] Bob Dylan, “Ramona” (Another Side of Bob Dylan)

[xi] Robert Hilburn, “Rock’s Enigmatic Poet Opens a Long-Private Door,” Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2004

[xii] Denise Levertov, “Caedmon”, q. in Edward Hirsch, Poet’s Choice (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2006), 15

A Night at the Troubadour: Discovering David Ackles (and Elton John)

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David Ackles singing at the author's ordination, Sept. 17, 1970 (Photo by Marilyn Robertson)

David Ackles singing at the author’s ordination, Sept. 17, 1970 (Photo by Marilyn Robertson)

I have no explanation as to why the David Ackles albums spoke to me so intensely, but it was with those records that I probably spent the most time when I was about sixteen, listening in a darkened room, trying to imagine how everything had come to exist.” (Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink)

 They suffer least who suffer what they choose. (David Ackles, “American Gothic”)

The Troubadour, an intimate club in West Hollywood, has seen some pretty special nights over the years. Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman, Prince, Tom Petty, Pearl Jam and so many others have performed on its stage. Neil Young and James Taylor each made their solo debut there. The Byrds sang “Mr. Tambourine Man” for the first time in public. Tom Waits was discovered during amateur night. Springsteen, Dylan and Led Zeppelin dropped by after hours for legendary jams. Miles Davis and Van Morrison recorded there.[i]

When Elton John made his smashing American debut at the Troubadour on August 25, 1970, he was not yet widely known. He was originally booked as the opening act for David Ackles, a Los Angeles musical artist greatly admired by Elton John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin. But John’s record company pulled some strings to get the bill reversed. In conjunction with the release of his first album, John would become the headline act.

He would admit later to some embarrassment at being promoted above Ackles on the billing, since Ackles was one of his heroes, “one of the best that America has to offer.” Elvis Costello was also a fan, “It’s a mystery to me why his wonderful songs are not better known,” he has said.[ii] When Costello interviewed John on his Sundance cable series, Spectacle, they both voiced generous tributes to Ackles’ genius and influence, and closed the show with a duet of his great song of loss and longing, “Down River.” [iii]

Ackles put out four memorable albums between 1968 and 1973. His masterpiece, American Gothic (1972), generated critical raves. “The Sergeant Pepper of Folk,” gushed a noted British critic, astonished at its thematic brilliance, structural complexity and musical originality. Rolling Stone called it “moving” and “eloquent.” A retrospective appraisal in 2005 acclaimed it “a largely unrecognized work of genius, one of the most unfashionable and uncompromising American albums ever. . . Crafted layer upon layer, it reveals itself more as a dramatic work than a conventional rock or pop release, drawing on modern American classical composers such as Charles Ives and Aaron Copland as well as gospel, rock, blues, and soul. Imagine an art-folk album that bridges Woody Guthrie’s passionate storytelling and Kurt Weill’s orchestrations.” [iv]

Rolling Stone said at the time that American Gothic “deserves a wide audience,” but when sales proved weak, his recording company, Elektra, lost interest. Ackles made one more album on the Columbia label, but his music seemed too hard to categorize in an industry driven by identifiable genres. Was it folk, pop, classical, musical theater, or what? His originality didn’t fit the system. A ten-minute elegy to a lost past (“Montana Song”) was not going to get much radio time. And you couldn’t dance to it. But however neglected, the heartbreaking beauty of Ackles’ imagery still blooms like wildflowers on a deserted prairie:

The fallen barn, the broken plow,
the hoofprint-hardened clay;
where is the farmer, now,
who built his dream this way ?
Who felled the tree and cut the bough
and made the land obey,
who taught his sons as he knew how,
but could not make them stay.[v]

Disappointed by the lack of tangible support for his work, Ackles abandoned his recording career, but not his joie de vivre. “I’m not bitter about a thing that’s happened to me,” he told an interviewer in 1998. “I would hate for people to think I’m over here getting all twisted up about what happened 20 years ago. All that feels like another life, lived by someone else.” [vi]

Although he could write an achingly beautiful love song like “Love’s Enough,” he was at heart a storyteller, weaving poetic and sometimes tragic narratives of American dreamers and strivers, who “joined the circus, worked the fields,” but “never saved a dime.” And even when they had to “learn to dance to someone else’s song,” they managed to endure:

But I hold on to my dreams, anyway.
I never let them die.
They keep me going through the bad times,
while I dream
of the good times coming by.[vii]

Bernie Taupin, who produced American Gothic, summed up Ackles’ intensity and conviction in a 2008 remembrance: “Man! If you didn’t believe every word this guy was singing, you were dead inside.”[viii]

I first met David Ackles in early 1970, when I was working at Canterbury House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, an Episcopal campus ministry and coffeehouse known as one of the premiere folk music venues in the country. I was just out of seminary, working with two priests as an intern during the year of my “transitional diaconate,” the prelude to priestly ordination. While I was in residence, Canterbury House featured Neil Young, Doc Watson, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and David Ackles.

David was one of Canterbury’s most popular performers, loved not only for his music but also for his manifest warmth and wry humor. He was a lifelong Christian, deeply spiritual and theologically astute, an authentic and generous man. And though some of his songs revealed a profound empathy with the suffering of displaced souls, there was an essential core in him—a comedic faith in resurrection—which survived the harrowing descent of the artist into the nether regions of the human condition.

By summer of 1970, I was back home in Los Angeles, awaiting my ordination to the priesthood in September. When I saw that David was playing at the Troubadour, I knew I had to be there. Meanwhile, the radio was starting to preview a few unreleased songs by the other guy on the bill, and he sounded quite good as well. Word got around, excitement grew, and on August 25 the house was packed. We shared a table with Odetta, the “queen of American folk music.” [ix]

Before the show, I went backstage to ask David if he would consider singing at my ordination, and he graciously consented. While we were talking, Elton John entered the dressing room, wearing denim overalls with a cartoon duck patch on the front, to tell David how much he admired his work and how honored he was to share the stage with him.

And the concert? It’s been nearly fifty years now. Details grow hazy; I can’t recite the set lists anymore. But I can still feel the electricity of that Hollywood night, the passion of the performers, the visceral connection they made with their audience.

Stacy Sullivan, a jazz singer who once worked with David, is currently performing, in small New York clubs, “A Night at the Troubadour: Presenting Elton John and David Ackles.” While showing the brilliance of two stars aligning, her re-imagining of that night suggests the strangeness of fate: one singer became an international superstar, the other remained largely undiscovered.

The New York Times has called Sullivan’s tribute a “tour de force” which “interweaves more than a dozen Ackles songs with several of Mr. John’s hits, radically deconstructed, into a dual portrait in which their opposite sensibilities (Mr. John’s gregarious showmanship, and Mr. Ackles’ dignified introspection) eventually merge.” [x] Lucky Easterners can still see her at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Room on September 10 and October 8. I can only pray that she will do a West Coast reprise. I promise to come.

A few weeks after the Troubadour show, David sang two songs for my ordination at All Saints, Beverly Hills, where the opening hymn was “Let It Be” and large projected images filled the wall behind the altar. Those were the days! During communion, David sang “Be My Friend.” At the Dismissal, he led the congregation in “Family Band,” which he said was autobiographical, since he grew up in a musical family of church-going Presbyterians. I still play that song on my guitar every ordination anniversary:

I remember the songs we sang Sunday evening . . .
when my dad played the bass, mom played the drums,
I played the piano,
and Jesus sang the song.

David got lung cancer in the late nineties. When he went into remission, he and his wonderful wife Janice rented a Pasadena mansion, filled it with musicians, and threw a grand party for their friends, to celebrate the gifts of life and love. Then, in 1999, David departed this world, far too soon. He is dearly missed. But that gathering in Pasadena remains a joyous foretaste of the blessedness which awaits us all.

And I will cherish the faith in the songs we knew then,
till we all sing together, till we all sing together,
till we sing them together again.

 

 

 

[i] For a more extensive historical list: http://www.troubadour.com/history

[ii] Reuters obituary in March, 1999, cited in Kenny MacDonald interview: http://www.terrascope.co.uk/MyBackPages/David%20Ackles.htm

[iii] YouTube has a version of their duet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXvlCjrlHCQ and their conversation about David is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qbt1Cee7Usw

[iv] George Durbalau, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, 2005. Along with other review quotes, found at http://www.superseventies.com/spacklesdavid.html

[v] David Ackles, “Montana Song,” on American Gothic. Some of David’s songs can be heard on YouTube, and his albums can be found online as well.

[vi] Kenny MacDonald interview

[vii] “Another Friday Night,” American Gothic

[viii] Bernie Taupin’s blog, Dec. 3, 2008

[ix] Attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr.: http://entertainment.time.com/2011/10/24/the-all-time-100-songs/slide/take-this-hammer-odetta/

[x] New York Times, July 16, 2016: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/16/arts/music/stacy-sullivan-david-ackles-review.html?_r=1

 

Requiems and rainbows

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An era was over and a new Europe was being born. This much was obvious. But with the passing of the old order many longstanding assumptions would be called into question. What had once seemed permanent and somehow inevitable would take on a more transient air. . . Europe’s future would look very different—and so would its past. . . Whatever shape Europe was to take in the years to come, the familiar, tidy story of what had gone before had changed forever.

— Tony Judt[i]

In the introduction to his magisterial Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Judt was writing of Europe’s rise from the ashes of World War II as a continent of some 46 countries sought to overcome a long legacy of division and conflict. His book was published in 2005, and Judt himself died in 2010, but his words could have been written after the Brexit vote. Europe remains a very untidy story, unsettled and full of questions.

When the European Union was hammering out its constitution a dozen years ago, there was considerable discussion about the status of Europe’s Christian heritage in a secular and pluralistic age. Of course, a return to a “Christendom” was neither possible nor desirable, but Scottish theologian David Jasper suggests that the noblest aims of the European Union could trace their roots to the (often neglected) Christian understanding of self-giving love rather than authoritarian power as the divine principle at the heart of reality.

A political life governed by love rather than naked power, he argues, would be “voluntary, willed, and deliberate, a working through of our diversities in totally conscious acts of friendship pursued in love and charity with our neighbors.”[ii] It would build bridges instead of walls.

It remains to be seen which kind of story will prevail, not only in Europe and the UK, but in the United States as well, where many “longstanding assumptions” about social harmony and progress have been cast into doubt by the disturbing resurgence of nativism, bigotry and racism.

image

I took this photo on the Seattle-Bainbridge ferry on June 24. The Brexit vote had been announced the night before, on “Midsummer Night,” when, in olden times, mischievous spirits were said to be abroad, and bonfires were lit on British hilltops to aid the sun in its long decline toward winter.

I am not qualified to judge how much mischief and decline can be attributed to the Brexit vote, but the uncertainties of which Judt had written were much on my mind when I happened to see this rainbow, a biblical sign of promise. I snapped the photo on the fly without really composing it, but then I began to see things in it..

The woman seems representative of America as a land of immigrants. She contemplates her own image, like Venus with her mirror. Who am I? How did I get here? She is framing herself against the rainbow. She herself is part of the American rainbow. Is she surprised by what her screen is showing her? Does she register delight at existing in a world of rainbows? Will she turn to see the rainbow itself and not its image only?

We can’t see the face of the young man in the hoodie. He is a mysterious blank, the stranger from God knows where, a veiled presence destabilizing the scene with some unspoken question. His head is turned toward the rainbow, but his hands remain in his pockets. They are not extended in wonder or blessing. His thoughts and feelings are opaque to us. He is shut within the monastery of his dark clothing. Does he see promise in the sky? Is he sad, lonely, aloof, indifferent? Is he experiencing prayerful or poetic rapture?

We could compose a multitude of narratives about these two voyagers, but the only thing we know for sure is that they sail together on the same ark, and though the horizon seems dark, the shadows are illumined with the biblical sign of promise. This boat’s bound for glory, even if rough seas lie ahead.

Last night, at the Oregon Bach Festival, I heard the world premiere of A European Requiem, by Scottish composer James MacMillan. It is an astonishing work of complex sonorities, dramatic colors, and exquisite textures. Although it was composed before Brexit, its title and theme feel particularly resonant now. Do we live in a time of requiem or rebirth?

I was particularly struck by the work’s sublimity, that unnerving blend of fear and wonder generated in the presence of transcendent, overpowering mysteries. MacMillan seemed to suggest that the passage into whatever lies beyond our old familiar life is not altogether smooth and blissful. Hammering percussion and dissonant brass were anything but “rest eternal.” First the soul must be buffeted and broken open as the abyss of nonbeing widening before it. Only then can it hear the consoling chorus welcoming it into paradise.

But while MacMillan’s music allowed us to hear rapturous echoes from the “other side,” it did not take us across the divide. Instead, it concluded with the solemn sounds of the death bed. High, raspy strings whispered the last few breaths of mortal life. And after that, only the slow heartbeat of a bass drum, fading into silence.

Had the Requiem’s heavenly elements been merely a beautiful illusion, destined to vanish with every mortal thing? Or can we put our trust in something beyond the processes of dissolution and ending? Whether we are considering the fate of the world or the fate of the soul, it’s the question on which all else depends.

 

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On a lighter note, you can find my new photo essay on the spirituality of summer here.

 

[i] Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005), 1-2

[ii] David Jasper, The Sacred Community: Art, Sacrament, and the People of God (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2012), 127

Unsilent Night: An Advent Revelation

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Sun in black sky

Last Saturday after dark, about 60 people gathered at a Seattle’s On the Boards theater to begin a neighborhood walk called “Unsilent Night.” Created in 1992 by New York composer Phil Kline, it is a “luminous soundscape” enacted for 45 minutes on a single night in December. This year, 37 American and Canadian cities joined in.

Participants downloaded one of 4 separate but complementary music tracks of ambient minimalism on their phones, and carried portable speakers as they walked the streets together in a collective mobile sound sculpture. NPR has described Unsilent Night this way: “chiming and chants bounce off walls and windows, transforming the coldest urban area with the warmth of musical fellowship.”

And so we began, moving block by block, a mesmerizing river of sound flowing slowly along the sidewalks of the city. An initial shimmering of bright cascading notes eventually evolved into the low rumble of droning chords, succeeded by percussive xylophone patterns, as if Steve Reich were composing for gamelan. Those metallic notes later gave way to more drones and electronic chords, which became the ground for choral fragments: Gregorian chants, wordless repetitions of ‘ah’ pitched at varied intervals, and melismatic Alleluias. Despite this discernible evolution of musical shifts and changes, the cumulative effect felt unhurried and relaxed.

The Queen Anne neighborhood is a lively mix of small shops, restaurants, and theaters, plus a cinema and basketball arena. A diverse assortment of people was already out looking for the heart of Saturday night, so there were many witnesses to our sonic procession. But surprisingly few showed much reaction. Some stared blankly, as if this unexpected phenomenon eluded their emotional register. They simply didn’t know what to make of it. Others looked away, perhaps wishing us into invisibility. Such a thing should not be happening in their world, so they pretended it wasn’t. Still others wore earbuds, disabling any receptivity to a reality beyond their own self-enclosure.

Yet some indeed had ears to hear, responding with smiles or looks of wonder. Car windows rolled down to let in the sound. The Latino doorman of a boutique hotel grinned ear to ear as we passed. A homeless woman in a wheelchair gave us a knowing smile, as if we were a welcome sign of sad times ending.

Like the best liturgy, it created community out of strangers through a shared action, and forged our collectivity into both sign and instrument of mystery and wonder. It was a perfect rite for Advent, contesting the old order while announcing an “impossible possible” drawing near. For the 45 minutes of the sound sculpture, sidewalks designed for functionality (keep moving to your next purchase, or go home!) became spaces for play. The ugliness of traffic noise was challenged by sweeter sounds. Strangers were invited to smile at one another, forgetting their solitudes for a few precious moments. And the birth of something deeply poetic usurped the accustomed prose of urban life.

As Twylene Moyer has written concerning participatory public art, it invites us “to re-evaluate what we mean by quality of life, to reassess what we think we know, and to reconsider how we choose to live with ourselves and each other.”[i] Why shouldn’t we feel fully at home in our public spaces, experiencing them as places of human affection and delight, inclusiveness and solidarity, joy and wonder? Why can’t we?

Theologian Langdon Gilkey makes an even more sweeping claim for such a re-visioning process. Art, he says, “makes us see in new and different ways, below the surface and beyond the obvious. Art opens up the truth hidden and within the ordinary; it provides a new entrance into reality and pushes us through that entrance. It leads us to what is really there and really going on. Far from subjective, it pierces the opaque subjectivity, the not seeing, of conventional life, of conventional viewing, and discloses reality.”[ii]

Seeing “the truth hidden and within the ordinary,” piercing the “not seeing of conventional life” with the inbreaking of deeper reality – these comprise the essence of Christianity’s annual Advent project. Not everyone welcomes this kind of seeing, and many reject its very possibility. But for at least some of us who experienced the wonder of Unsilent Night, a richer account of the universe, making room for the transcendent, felt more persuasive than the alternatives.

As I walked in this procession of glorious sound, an Advent hymn came to mind:

Hark! a thrilling voice is sounding.
“Christ is nigh,” it seems to say.

Not everyone would put the name of Christ to what we did and the sound we made together, but that doesn’t alter the content of the experience.

If God is more of a situation than an object, then the community, relationality, mystery, beauty, wonder, delight, and communion produced by the event seemed apt expressions of divinity taking “place,” or “being here now.” You didn’t have to name it to live it.

Toward the end of our walk we were led into a bit of open space set back from the street, where the music was not so compromised by traffic noise. And there our little speakers, one by one, began to ring with a peal of sonorous bell tones, until we were all immersed in such a joyous tintinnabulation that I could imagine myself in heaven. Every face I saw around me glowed with amazement. If the Incarnation were a sound, this would be it, suddenly sanctifying a scrubby vacant lot in Queen Anne.

As the bells faded, we processed one more block, back to our starting point, where we stood in what felt like a prayer circle while the final portion of the composition slowly faded into silence. Some closed their eyes, and everyone seemed rapt and attentive, in a state of peace and gratitude.

Once the music ended, the spell was quickly broken. We went our separate ways, strangers once more, but perhaps “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.”[iii] For a moment we had known something better, and would not forget.

 

 

 

 

[i] Twylene Moyer, Artists Reclaim the Commons: New Works/New Territories/New Publics (Ed. Glenn Harper and Twylene Moyer, Hamilton, NJ: isc Press, 2013), 8

 

[ii] Langdon Gilkey, from an address given at the Art Institute of Chicago, published as “Can Art Fill the Vacuum?” in Art, Creativity and the Sacred: An Anthology in Religion and Art, ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (New York: Crossroad, 1984), 189-90

[iii] The phrase is from T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” expressing the incompatibility of what the Magi had experienced in Bethlehem with the unredeemed world to which they returned.