When I turned the car ignition yesterday morning to start my commute, the radio came on and the first line I heard was a twangy call to arms: “We need a whole lot more of Jesus and a lot less rock and roll.”
I’d been thinking for some time of writing about my fondness for bluegrass music, but I’d struggled to come up with a “hook” that might make such as essay more than simply the banal equivalent of a Facebook “like.” I’ve found my gateway, I thought as I listened to the tuneful diatribe. I later would learn it had been recorded 52 years ago by singer/songwriter Wayne Raney, an Arkansan who’d died in 1993.
See, my personal sentiments are more or less the exact opposite of those expressed by the late Wayne Raney. Extending “Jesus” to describe the frighteningly expansive reach of moralizing Christianity into seemingly every corner of American life—as represented by everything from the battle over reproductive rights to the recent surge in the GOP presidential race of Rick Sanctimonious, um, Santorum—I feel strongly that we actually need a whole less Jesus in our national life, not more. And if I can define “rock and roll” as all the great early recordings that apparently were raising Raney’s blood pressure back in 1960—Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, the late Buddy Holly—I’d frankly love to hear more of that stuff on the airwaves, and would rather Americans spend their spare time rediscovering the Sun Records catalog than lobbying their lawmakers to ban abortion and prevent gays from marrying, based on the Bible or their reading of it.
In fact, there’s little about bluegrass music that would suggest I’d be a fan. (Its contributions to rock and roll’s roots notwithstanding.) As a genre, it historically has produced, and continues to spawn, a lot of Wayne Raneys. While many bluegrass songs don’t center on That Old Time Religion, many, too, are all about the wages of sin and the redemption that comes only through accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Which isn’t surprising, given bluegrass’s roots in the God-fearing hollows of the Appalachian Mountains in the early decades of the 20th century. But this means I spend a lot of time listening to combos whose message to me is not exactly encouraging. Last weekend, for instance, as I drove home from Starbucks, some True Believer started singing none-too-sympathetically into my ear about how the likes of me will be eternally gnashing our teeth and burning in hell as soon as the Son of God returns and “time is no more.”
But it’s not just the religious aspect of bluegrass music that makes it and me an odd couple. It’s the sound, the socioeconomic disconnect, seemingly everything. I mean, I grew up on a suburban cul de sac in New Jersey, lived for The Who in college, had Springsteen parties with my newspaper buddies in the ’80s, and for the past 16 years have lived in Bethesda Fricking Maryland, a town of attorneys and government workers where every bumper sticker carries some liberal, secular-humanist sentiment. If bluegrass music is all about the Righteous Path and the riotous fun of pickin’ and pluckin’ down at the general store, my white-collar surroundings are all about separating church and state and listening to Pandora inside one’s McMansion.
Not that Lynn and I live in a McMansion, or that I personally have moved, technologically, beyond CDs and radios. The point, though, is that on paper I would seem an unlikely candidate for bluegrass fandom. Yet, what station has become my go-to preset in the car? WAMU ‘s Bluegrass Country. Not only that, but one of my favorite programs on that station—105.5 locally on your FM dial, streaming at http://bluegrasscountry.org—is Sunday morning’s “Stained Glass Bluegrass.” Which, as it name suggests, is, well, “right church-y.”
Not that I’d call myself a real aficionado of bluegrass music. Although at this point I know a lot of the traditional and contemporary Big Names—the Carter Family, Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley, Hazel Dickens, Ricky Staggs, the Seldom Scene, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver—and can recognize some of those artists when I hear them—much of the time I’ve no idea who I’m listening to. Or even what instruments are being played, beyond the obvious ones like fiddle and banjo. And I haven’t started buying bluegrass music, either. It’s still mostly what I listen to in the car or when I’m dressing for work, mixed in with public radio programming and local all-news station WTOP.
What’s bluegrass’s appeal for me? It’s energetic. The musicianship can be amazing and the vocals starkly beautiful. It’s heartfelt. Its themes at root are loving, longing, losing and hoping—and who can’t relate to those things? Death is a frequent visitor, just as it is in this blog. Bluegrass is hand-crafted and somehow not of this time. Which appeals to me, as uncomfortable as I am in this new century of sensory overload and nonstop connectivity. Also, the radio station I listen to has great hosts, whose folksy patter I enjoy and find soothing. My favorite DJ is an old-timer named Ray Davis who knew and taped many of the greats. He regularly plays songs recorded decades ago in the home-basement studio in West Virginia from which he now broadcasts.
In fact, this past week was the winter pledge drive, and one hour my buddy Ray was bemoaning the lack of callers. So, I opted to put my money where my radio dial was and ante up. It turned out that one of the thank-you gifts available at my giving level was Wayne Raney’s 20 Old-Time Gospel Favorites—featuring, yes, “We Need a Lot More of Jesus,” and other none-too-subtle pieces of lifestyle advice such as “Drifting Too Far from the Shore” and “Don’t You Want to Go to Heaven?”
I ended up going with Don Rigsby’s Doctor’s Order: A Tribute to Ralph Stanley. While I’m surprisingly comfortable being damned by my radio station to the eternal fires, I find I’d still rather my personal music collection cut me a little more slack.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012
A Reading on Loss
I flew down to Savannah last weekend to visit my old friend David.
I rented a car. Went first to his place, then out to Tybee Island, where I toasted him at his favorite dive bar. Joined his parents and older sister at a reading of his poetry Saturday night in a tiny but charming bookstore in the historic district. Made a point Sunday of catching the early-morning sun over the marshes on Bluff Drive on the Isle of Hope. Thanked him for having turned me on to that beautiful spot—a narrow lane that’s framed by the water on one side and stately old homes and Spanish moss-draped trees on the other. It looks exactly like the set of a Civil War epic, and has served as one. Scenes from the 1989 film Glory were shot there.
David’s voice followed me everywhere I went. He always was the kind of guy you had to strain to hear—a classic low-talker long before Seinfeld made that term a cultural Thing. I spent the years 1989 through 1992 leaning into him with my better ear, hoping to catch the gist. He could amp up the volume when he was introducing jazz records on air, or reading verse to a rapt coffeehouse audience, or, later, teaching literature to college kids. But in one-on-one conversation he tended to be mumble city, his words delivered in a smoky timbre that made women swoon and guys wonder if precision wasn’t perhaps overrated.
Our mutual friend Fred Johnson, who’d worked with him in public radio decades ago, sometimes calls him “Lonesome David.” He did so Saturday night, telling the crowd of family, friends and old lovers what they already knew and were attesting to by their presence—that the nickname is meant to evoke gait, mood, and cadence, not popularity.
David Starnes went from low-talker to no-talker almost five years ago, having died instantly in a head-on collision caused by a woman driving on the wrong side of an interstate highway. He was 64 years old. At a May 2007 memorial service packed with family, friends and one-time lovers, his father—the elder David—eulogized his only son as “the freest man I ever knew.” He repeated that description at Saturday night’s reading.
What he meant was, David lived by his own terms, not society’s expectations. He never married, never owned a home, tended not to remain at any given residence or with any girlfriend for all that long. Only in the last decade or so of his life did he finally earn a steady paycheck for a sustained period and assume a public role—that of an English professor at Georgia Southern University. Whether all that amounted to “freedom” or was more the confluence of restlessness, romanticism and fluctuating depression, I’m not sure. It made him his father’s hero—a word the elder David uses at any opportunity to laud his cherished son. How awesome, and how heartbreaking, is that? I can see it. But David’s brand of independence more echoes, for me, a line from the song “Me and Bobby McGee”: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” I might be misinterpreting that Kris Kristofferson /Fred Foster lyric, but I interpret “freedom” in that context as being the life one wears after having surveyed many ill-fitting hats.
I first met David very early in my three-year stint as a feature writer and editor at the Savannah Morning News. It was late 1989 or early 1990. I was 31, so basic math tells me David must’ve been 46. I’d worked into the evening one day, since I had no social life in Savannah. David had come in to write his freelance column on the local nightclub scene. I’ve never been good at describing physical appearance, but suffice it to say he was short, lean and ruggedly handsome. When he shook my hand, he seemed at once to trust me as his editor and announce himself as my first friend in town.
By the time I moved to DC in late 1992 he no longer was writing for the newspaper, but he continued to live an itinerant life filled with house-painting jobs, handyman’s work, literary and musical enthusiasms, ever-changing residences and briefly glimpsed girlfriends. I wouldn’t seen him for weeks at a time, but then he’d call and suggest we meet for dinner at a riverside restaurant in Thunderbolt or that aforementioned dive bar on Tybee Island. For all the mystery, masculinity and vague melancholy that made him so magnetic, his depth of interest in my life was meant to suggest that I, in fact, was the fascinating one. Per a comment I later would post on the funeral home’s memorial page, I never felt as cool as I did when I was with him.
We corresponded over the years and visited back and forth. After his parents moved to Northern Virginia he came up our way every so often. He got to know Lynn, and she him. She totally got what the ladies saw in him, but professed not to have been tempted. By letter and the occasional phone call, I followed David’s progress from 50-something college student to graduate to professor. I visited him once in Statesboro, where his home refrigerator was decorated with photos and postcards celebrating me and other friends, and where he proudly showed me his university office. I sat in on one of his classes. He engaged students in a clear, audible voice and they called him “Mr Starnes.”
Then one day I received an e-mail from Fred that David had been killed.
I never read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the bestselling book about a scandalous local murder and the sordid underbelly of Savannah—mostly because, my friendship with David aside, my years there were so dull and pedestrian that I’ve always felt a little bitter about everything I apparently missed. Anyway, the “Bird Girl” statue on the book cover once adorned a gravesite in Bonaventure Cemetery, an incredibly evocative place of weathered memorials, Spanish moss-decorated trees, sandy soil and marsh views that’s near my old apartment and was my go-to destination for mopey walks. Those perambulations sometimes would include the newer, adjacent Forest Lawn Memorial Park, which was where I found myself standing in May 2007 as David’s coffin sat poised to be lowered into the ground.
I revisited the gravesite last Saturday afternoon for the second time since the interment. The first occasion had been a fiasco a couple of years ago involving an ill-anchored bouquet that kept falling over and a lot of very awkward one-sided conversation. This time, while I felt compelled to audibly greet David despite my continuing near-certainty in death’s finality, I didn’t linger at his marker.
I did take a leisurely walk around David’s eternal neighborhood, though, and spotted some epitaphs and memorial bench adornments that I think he would have enjoyed as much as I did. One read, sensibly enough, “Nonexistence didn’t bother me before I was born. I don’t think it will bother me after I’m dead.” There was this sentiment, engraved on a bench on the cemetery’s periphery, overlooking the river and marshes that border the site: “Finally, waterfront property. This is as close as we can get.” On another bench, a drawing had a man reeling in a big fish. The tribute read, “Life enjoyed him.” It was signed by “Your favorite ex-wife, Linda.”
The big event this past weekend was, of course, the poetry reading, which in part was a book-signing without the signing, for obvious reasons. A faculty-mate of David’s had compiled and seen through to recent publication a second chapbook of David’s poems—the first having been published during his lifetime by a small university press. Family and friends read from both collections in the cramped bookstore space, many sharing personal anecdotes and remembrances. I read a poem that doesn’t appear in either book, but that David had enclosed with his holiday cards in 2004. It’s a sweet Christmas-morning story that speaks to his love of family. It was well-received by kin in attendance, as I knew it would be.
In fact, the main reason I’d flown down for the event was because it was almost certain to be the last group celebration of David during his parents’ lifetime (and perhaps ever). While David remains his father’s hero and his mother’s darling “Davey,” they, in turn, were far more vital to their son than one might have thought any set of parents could be to such an iconoclast. He always spoke reverently of them, which made me like them before we ever met. That would have been sometime around the turn of the new century, at their Annandale, Virginia, apartment. That was the only time we'd meet before they and I would reconvene at the memorial service, as it turned out.
It’s an odd aspect of my relationship with David’s mother, Jackie, that we’ve been e-mail correspondents for a few years now but we never physically see each other, even though our homes are only about 10 or 12 miles apart. At any rate, she seemed delighted to see me at the bookstore in Savannah. She even snuck me a special thanks from her daughter Toni’s computer a few days later, while they were still out of town.
I e-mailed back that David would’ve done the same for me. I can’t imagine he’d have missed my memorial service, had our fortunes been reversed. Or any subsequent celebration of me that was within his logistic reach. Naturally, I do wonder what he’d have said about me. He’d no doubt have made me out to be far brighter, more talented a writer, cleverer and more interesting than I’ve ever considered myself to be.
My friend had all the attributes he’d have assigned me, and more. Though I can’t quite consider him a hero. He’d have rejected that label himself, I feel sure—mindful that freedom has costs for both the allegedly unfettered (see “Lonesome David”) and those who’ve been, well, cut loose (see "girlfriends"). But I will say the outsized loss I still feel speaks to David’s importance and uniqueness in my life.
The truth is, I couldn’t have stayed home last weekend—any more than I could have resisted a friendship that was so immediately and completely extended to me more than two decades ago.
I rented a car. Went first to his place, then out to Tybee Island, where I toasted him at his favorite dive bar. Joined his parents and older sister at a reading of his poetry Saturday night in a tiny but charming bookstore in the historic district. Made a point Sunday of catching the early-morning sun over the marshes on Bluff Drive on the Isle of Hope. Thanked him for having turned me on to that beautiful spot—a narrow lane that’s framed by the water on one side and stately old homes and Spanish moss-draped trees on the other. It looks exactly like the set of a Civil War epic, and has served as one. Scenes from the 1989 film Glory were shot there.
David’s voice followed me everywhere I went. He always was the kind of guy you had to strain to hear—a classic low-talker long before Seinfeld made that term a cultural Thing. I spent the years 1989 through 1992 leaning into him with my better ear, hoping to catch the gist. He could amp up the volume when he was introducing jazz records on air, or reading verse to a rapt coffeehouse audience, or, later, teaching literature to college kids. But in one-on-one conversation he tended to be mumble city, his words delivered in a smoky timbre that made women swoon and guys wonder if precision wasn’t perhaps overrated.
Our mutual friend Fred Johnson, who’d worked with him in public radio decades ago, sometimes calls him “Lonesome David.” He did so Saturday night, telling the crowd of family, friends and old lovers what they already knew and were attesting to by their presence—that the nickname is meant to evoke gait, mood, and cadence, not popularity.
David Starnes went from low-talker to no-talker almost five years ago, having died instantly in a head-on collision caused by a woman driving on the wrong side of an interstate highway. He was 64 years old. At a May 2007 memorial service packed with family, friends and one-time lovers, his father—the elder David—eulogized his only son as “the freest man I ever knew.” He repeated that description at Saturday night’s reading.
What he meant was, David lived by his own terms, not society’s expectations. He never married, never owned a home, tended not to remain at any given residence or with any girlfriend for all that long. Only in the last decade or so of his life did he finally earn a steady paycheck for a sustained period and assume a public role—that of an English professor at Georgia Southern University. Whether all that amounted to “freedom” or was more the confluence of restlessness, romanticism and fluctuating depression, I’m not sure. It made him his father’s hero—a word the elder David uses at any opportunity to laud his cherished son. How awesome, and how heartbreaking, is that? I can see it. But David’s brand of independence more echoes, for me, a line from the song “Me and Bobby McGee”: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” I might be misinterpreting that Kris Kristofferson /Fred Foster lyric, but I interpret “freedom” in that context as being the life one wears after having surveyed many ill-fitting hats.
I first met David very early in my three-year stint as a feature writer and editor at the Savannah Morning News. It was late 1989 or early 1990. I was 31, so basic math tells me David must’ve been 46. I’d worked into the evening one day, since I had no social life in Savannah. David had come in to write his freelance column on the local nightclub scene. I’ve never been good at describing physical appearance, but suffice it to say he was short, lean and ruggedly handsome. When he shook my hand, he seemed at once to trust me as his editor and announce himself as my first friend in town.
By the time I moved to DC in late 1992 he no longer was writing for the newspaper, but he continued to live an itinerant life filled with house-painting jobs, handyman’s work, literary and musical enthusiasms, ever-changing residences and briefly glimpsed girlfriends. I wouldn’t seen him for weeks at a time, but then he’d call and suggest we meet for dinner at a riverside restaurant in Thunderbolt or that aforementioned dive bar on Tybee Island. For all the mystery, masculinity and vague melancholy that made him so magnetic, his depth of interest in my life was meant to suggest that I, in fact, was the fascinating one. Per a comment I later would post on the funeral home’s memorial page, I never felt as cool as I did when I was with him.
We corresponded over the years and visited back and forth. After his parents moved to Northern Virginia he came up our way every so often. He got to know Lynn, and she him. She totally got what the ladies saw in him, but professed not to have been tempted. By letter and the occasional phone call, I followed David’s progress from 50-something college student to graduate to professor. I visited him once in Statesboro, where his home refrigerator was decorated with photos and postcards celebrating me and other friends, and where he proudly showed me his university office. I sat in on one of his classes. He engaged students in a clear, audible voice and they called him “Mr Starnes.”
Then one day I received an e-mail from Fred that David had been killed.
I never read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the bestselling book about a scandalous local murder and the sordid underbelly of Savannah—mostly because, my friendship with David aside, my years there were so dull and pedestrian that I’ve always felt a little bitter about everything I apparently missed. Anyway, the “Bird Girl” statue on the book cover once adorned a gravesite in Bonaventure Cemetery, an incredibly evocative place of weathered memorials, Spanish moss-decorated trees, sandy soil and marsh views that’s near my old apartment and was my go-to destination for mopey walks. Those perambulations sometimes would include the newer, adjacent Forest Lawn Memorial Park, which was where I found myself standing in May 2007 as David’s coffin sat poised to be lowered into the ground.
I revisited the gravesite last Saturday afternoon for the second time since the interment. The first occasion had been a fiasco a couple of years ago involving an ill-anchored bouquet that kept falling over and a lot of very awkward one-sided conversation. This time, while I felt compelled to audibly greet David despite my continuing near-certainty in death’s finality, I didn’t linger at his marker.
I did take a leisurely walk around David’s eternal neighborhood, though, and spotted some epitaphs and memorial bench adornments that I think he would have enjoyed as much as I did. One read, sensibly enough, “Nonexistence didn’t bother me before I was born. I don’t think it will bother me after I’m dead.” There was this sentiment, engraved on a bench on the cemetery’s periphery, overlooking the river and marshes that border the site: “Finally, waterfront property. This is as close as we can get.” On another bench, a drawing had a man reeling in a big fish. The tribute read, “Life enjoyed him.” It was signed by “Your favorite ex-wife, Linda.”
The big event this past weekend was, of course, the poetry reading, which in part was a book-signing without the signing, for obvious reasons. A faculty-mate of David’s had compiled and seen through to recent publication a second chapbook of David’s poems—the first having been published during his lifetime by a small university press. Family and friends read from both collections in the cramped bookstore space, many sharing personal anecdotes and remembrances. I read a poem that doesn’t appear in either book, but that David had enclosed with his holiday cards in 2004. It’s a sweet Christmas-morning story that speaks to his love of family. It was well-received by kin in attendance, as I knew it would be.
In fact, the main reason I’d flown down for the event was because it was almost certain to be the last group celebration of David during his parents’ lifetime (and perhaps ever). While David remains his father’s hero and his mother’s darling “Davey,” they, in turn, were far more vital to their son than one might have thought any set of parents could be to such an iconoclast. He always spoke reverently of them, which made me like them before we ever met. That would have been sometime around the turn of the new century, at their Annandale, Virginia, apartment. That was the only time we'd meet before they and I would reconvene at the memorial service, as it turned out.
It’s an odd aspect of my relationship with David’s mother, Jackie, that we’ve been e-mail correspondents for a few years now but we never physically see each other, even though our homes are only about 10 or 12 miles apart. At any rate, she seemed delighted to see me at the bookstore in Savannah. She even snuck me a special thanks from her daughter Toni’s computer a few days later, while they were still out of town.
I e-mailed back that David would’ve done the same for me. I can’t imagine he’d have missed my memorial service, had our fortunes been reversed. Or any subsequent celebration of me that was within his logistic reach. Naturally, I do wonder what he’d have said about me. He’d no doubt have made me out to be far brighter, more talented a writer, cleverer and more interesting than I’ve ever considered myself to be.
My friend had all the attributes he’d have assigned me, and more. Though I can’t quite consider him a hero. He’d have rejected that label himself, I feel sure—mindful that freedom has costs for both the allegedly unfettered (see “Lonesome David”) and those who’ve been, well, cut loose (see "girlfriends"). But I will say the outsized loss I still feel speaks to David’s importance and uniqueness in my life.
The truth is, I couldn’t have stayed home last weekend—any more than I could have resisted a friendship that was so immediately and completely extended to me more than two decades ago.
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