A M AG A Z I N E O F T H E S O U T H WINTER 2023

SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE VOL. 25

D O M F L E M O N S • D O N N Y H AT H AWAY • M E LV I N L I N D S E Y • B E YO N C É

R. E. M. • P R O J E C T PAT • B O N N I E R A I T T • A N I TA B A K E R • PA R A M O R E
Ballads

ASHAWNTA JACKSON ON

Roberta
Flack
P U B L I S H E D I N PA R T N E R S H I P W I T H T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F C E N T R A L A R K A N S A S
Anthony “Big A” Sherrod | Ground Zero Blues Club, Clarksdale
 The blues. It’s still
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the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, the Delta Blues Museum, and
GRAMMY Museum® Mississippi. Find your rhythm at VisitMississippi.org/Blues.

#WanderMS
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SEASIDE • SEAGROVE • WATERSOUND • SEACREST • ALYS BEACH • ROSEMARY BEACH • INLET BEACH
 OXFORD AMERICAN • WINTER 2023

SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE VOL. 25

14 Prologue: Cigarette Smoke and Magic

by Patrick D. McDermott
Features
1 06

Points South N EV E R A LO N E I N T H E N I G H T
The queer alchemy of Melvin Lindsey’s Quiet Storm
22 Anita Baker Introduced Us and Patrice Rushen By Craig Seymour
Did the Rest by Ed Pavlić
112
30 Gracias a la Vida by Clarissa Fragoso Pinheiro
M O R E T H A N W H AT
38 Some Ballad Folks by Justin Taylor
YOU MADE OF ME
44 Inside Voice by John Lingan How Beyoncé’s “Listen” became the Philippines’
unofficial national anthem
48 Orphan Girl by Melanie McGee Bianchi
By Gaby Wilson
56 Hearing Aids, a story by Clyde Edgerton
120

58 The Feel of the Flames by Jason Kyle Howard WA S I T C O O L E R B A C K T H E N ?

64 The Final Gift, a new traditional by Dom Flemons A search for the memory of R.E.M. in Athens, Georgia
By Ben Hedin
126
The Middle Eight
76 Ashawnta Jackson on Roberta Flack
H OW T O T A K E I T S L OW
Following the rhythm of Shirley Horn
and Donny Hathaway
By Lauren Du Graf
82 Jim O’Neal on Sid Hemphill
134
86 Annie Zaleski on Bonnie Raitt
BLOOD HARMONY
88 Ben Dandridge-Lemco on Project Pat The far-flung tale of a murder song
By David Ramsey
90 Maggie Boyd Hare on Paramore
94 Madeline Weinfield on the Local Honeys
96 Noah T. Britton on Aretha Franklin
Art By
Amir H. Fallah, Alec Soth, Cara Weston, Hulda Guzmán,
100 Harmony Holiday on Madvillain Rachelle Baker, Joaquín Torres-García, Kristine Potter,
Kristina Knipe, Rob Amberg, William Ritter, Donald Saaf,
158 Music Credits Jemima Murphy, Meghann Riepenhoff, Abe Odedina,
Jim Marshall, Alan Lomax, Zachary Gray, Judy Koo,
Lila Callie Simpson, Kyle Dunn, Robert Pruitt,
Roberta Flack, circa 1970s © Michael Ochs Archives/ London Pierre Williams, Oggi Ogburn, Marigold Santos,
Getty Images
Sandra-Lee Phipps, Thomas Hart Benton

8 WINTER 2023
They Will Say a Collection of Untruths, 2022, acrylic on canvas, by Amir H. Fallah © The artist.
Courtesy Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 9
MELANIE MCGEE BIANCHI is a journalist who
has lived in western North Carolina for thirty
years. She is the managing editor of three
lifestyle magazines and has published exten-
sively on topics of regional cultural impact,
including music, visual art, architecture,
food, folkways, and outdoor adventure.
Bianchi has also published poetry, short
fiction, and humor essays in national and
international print formats and online. The
title story in her debut book, The Ballad of
Cherrystoke and Other Stories (Blackwater
Press, 2022), appeared first in the Missis-
sippi Review Summer Prize Issue 2020, and
other short stories in the collection were
published in print literary journals from
Atlanta to Ireland.
NOAH T. BRITTON is a writer from northeast
Georgia based in Barcelona, Spain, where
he is the assistant editor at Apartamento mag-
azine. His work has appeared in the Oxford
American and online with Little White Lies.
BEN DANDRIDGE-LEMCO is a writer from
Oakland, California, now living in Brooklyn,
New York. His work has appeared in the New
York Times, Rolling Stone, and the FADER,
among others.
CLYDE EDGERTON is the author of ten novels
and two nonfiction books. He lives with his
family in North Carolina, where he teaches at
the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
DOM FLEMONS is a songwriter, multi-
instrumentalist, and slam poet. He is also a
tradition bearer of American roots music.
Among his honors are those from the Gram-
my Awards, the Living Blues Awards, and the
International Folk Music Awards, as well as
a 2020 United States Artists Fellowship in
Traditional Arts. Flemons is the founding
host of American Songster Radio Show on
WSM in Nashville, Tennessee. His most recent
album is Traveling Wildfire (Smithsonian
12 WINTER 2023
Folkways Recordings, 2023). “The Final Gift”
is a new traditional ballad poem written
and performed by Flemons, commissioned
for this issue.
LAUREN DU GRAF is a writer based in Seattle,
Washington. She holds a PhD in English and
comparative literature from UNC Chapel
Hill. This is her third contribution to the OA’s
Southern Music Issue.
MAGGIE BOYD HARE is an MFA candidate at
UNC Wilmington where she works as a teaching
assistant and as poetry editor for Ecotone.
Her work has appeared or is forthcoming
in Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Arkansas
International, Juked, and elsewhere.
A frequent contributor to the Oxford Amer-
ican, BENJAMIN HEDIN is the author, most
recently, of a novel, Under the Spell. He lives
in Atlanta, Georgia.
HARMONY HOLIDAY is a writer, a dancer,
an archivist, a filmmaker, and the author
of five collections of poetry, including
Hollywood Forever and Maafa. She curates
an archive of griot poetics and a related
performance series at L.A.’s music and ar-
chive venue 2220 Arts. Harmony writes
for the Los Angeles Times’s Image mag-
azine, 4Columns, and the New Yorker,
among other publications. She received
the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a
Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a
Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book
Award, a research fellowship from Harvard,
and a teaching fellowship from UC Berkeley.
She's currently working on a collection of
essays for Duke University Press and a bi-
ography of Abbey Lincoln.
JASON KYLE HOWARD is the author of A
Few Honest Words: The Kentucky Roots of
Popular Music and coauthor of Something’s
Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountain-
top Removal. His work has appeared in the
New York Times, the Atlantic, the New
Republic, the Oxford American, Salon,
the Nation, the Millions, Utne Reader, and
on NPR. He directs the creative writing pro-
gram at Berea College in Kentucky and serves
on the faculty of Spalding University’s
Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing.
ASHAWNTA JACKSON is a writer and record col-
lector living in Brooklyn whose love of music
came from her Louisiana-born-and-raised
parents. Her work has appeared on NPR
Music, PBS American Masters, Bandcamp,
Wax Poetics, and Vinyl Me Please, among
others. She is the author of the book
Soul-Folk (forthcoming 2024), part of
Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 Genre Series.
JOHN LINGAN ’s most recent book is A Song for
Everyone: The Story of Creedence Clearwater
Revival, which was named a Best Music Book
of 2022 by Variety. He is currently writing
a history of rock & roll focused on fifteen
drummers.
JIM O’NE AL cofounded Living Blues,
America’s first blues magazine, in 1970, and
continues to serve as a founding editor. As
research director of the Mississippi Blues
Trail, he also writes text for the historical
markers. He has owned several record labels
and operates a mail-order business special-
izing in rare 78s, 45s, LPs, and magazines at
www.bluesoterica.com.
ED PAVLIĆ is author of more than a dozen
books written across and between genres,
most recently: Call It In the Air (2022),
Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding
Solitudes (2021), Let It Be Broke (2020), and
Another Kind of Madness (2019). He lives in
Athens, Georgia, where he is Distinguished
Research Professor of English, African
American Studies, and Creative Writing at
the University of Georgia.
CLARISSA FRAGOSO PINHEIRO is a Brazilian
writer living in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA in
literary reportage from New York University. Her
work has been featured in the Los Angeles
Review of Books, the Paris Review, Musée
Magazine, and elsewhere.
DAVID RAMSEY , a contributing editor to the
Oxford American, last wrote for the magazine
about Hank Williams. You can follow his cur-
rent work at his Substack blog/newsletter,
“Tropical Depression.”
CRAIG SEYMOUR is a native Washingtonian
and author of Luther: The Life and Longing
of Luther Vandross. He puts out the weekly
newsletter “Craig’s Pop Life” and is also a DJ.
JUSTIN TAYLOR is the author of the nov-
el Reboot, forthcoming in early 2024. His
work has appeared in the New Yorker,
Harper’s, the Baffler, and Bookforum. He is the
director of the MFA program at Sewanee,
the University of the South.
MADELINE WEINFIELD is a writer based in
Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in
the Washington Post, Condé Nast Traveler,
Travel + Leisure, and other publications.
GABY WILSON is a writer and journalist based
in New York. Her work has appeared in Roll-
ing Stone, Elle, and SSENSE, among other
places. Previously, she was a correspondent
reporter for HBO’s VICE News Tonight,
an Emmy and Peabody award–winning
documentary news program, and for
MTV News. In 2022, she was a finalist for
the Asian American Writers’ Workshop
Margins Fellowship.
ANNIE ZALESKI has had her work published
by Rolling Stone, NPR Music, the Guardian,
Salon, Time, Billboard, Vulture, Classic Pop,
and the Los Angeles Times. She’s the author
of a 33 1/3 book on Duran Duran’s Rio, illus-
trated biographies of Lady Gaga and P!nk,
and a volume on the best Christmas music
of all time. She also contributed liner notes
to the 2016 reissue of R.E.M.’s Out of Time
and Game Theory’s 2020 collection Across
the Barrier of Sound: PostScript.

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“Oxford” and “Oxford American English” are registered trademarks of Oxford University Press, which is not affiliated with The Oxford American Literary Project, Inc. We use the title with their permission. Printed in the USA.

Enchanted Forest (36), Texas, 2006, a photo by Alec Soth. The work is on view through January 14
in the exhibition A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, at the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta.
The accompanying catalog was co-published by the museum and Aperture. OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 13
 PROLOGUE
Cigarette Smoke and Magic
B Y PAT R I C K D . M C D E R M O T T
W
hen I was twenty-two, I lived in a roach-infest-
ed two-bedroom on the fifth floor of an eighty-
one-year-old apartment building in Brooklyn.
Some nights, when her metalhead boyfriend was
stuck working at an Irish bar across the city, my roommate Molly
and I would stay up late watching YouTube videos that made us
cry. It was a mixed-up time in my life: I was partying too hard; I
couldn’t figure out if I wanted to date men or women; and between an
unpaid magazine internship and a full-time gig flipping burgers, I
was working seven days a week. I was confused, I was always tired,
and my hair smelled like cooking grease. The elevator in our building
only sometimes worked.
And so we chain-smoked and watched old videos of Sally Field
accepting her second Best Actress Oscar for the 1984 film Places in
the Heart. We watched Stockard Channing confess that there were
worse things she could do in the open-air hallway of a Los Angeles
high school. We watched Billy Crystal sprint through Manhattan after
realizing he loves Meg Ryan, a clip that features Frank Sinatra’s take
on “It Had to Be You,” which was arranged by the singer’s longtime
collaborator Billy May and appeared on the 1980 concept album Tril-
ogy: Past Present Future. But more often than not, we watched and
listened to big, slow, melodramatic love songs—like Whitney Hous-
ton’s 1985 performance of “Saving All My Love for You” on The Late
Show with David Letterman; or the music video for “Stay,” Rihanna’s
duet with the Louisiana-born musician Mikky Ekko; or versions of
14 WINTER 2023
“My Heart Will Go On” that overlay the instrumental passages with
dialogue from Titanic. Once, Molly wept so hard watching a video
of a twenty-eight-year-old Dolly Parton performing “I Will Always
Love You” that she popped a blood vessel in her eye.
When the editors decided “Ballads” would be the theme of our
25th Southern Music Issue, the songs from those videos were some
of the first that sprang to mind. But of course, not all ballads are
sad and slow. The term has historically been used to describe a
sung narrative set to melody—story songs with long verses passed
down through oral traditions, with lyrics that change depending on
where the singer calls home. “Murder ballads” tell tales of death and
wickedness; the lyrics were sometimes sold as printed broadsides
containing specific details of a gruesome crime and its aftermath.
Even the more contemporary definition of the ballad form—often
characterized by an unhurried tempo, a sing-along chorus, and a
wistful mood—has dozens of genre variations and subcategories,
including but not limited to: sentimental, soul, protest, pop, gospel,
jazz, country, hip-hop, heavy metal, and power. The notorious tale
of “Stagger Lee,” a nineteenth-century Missouri pimp who shot a
man in a saloon on Christmas, has been interpreted as a folksong, a
blues ballad, a chart-topping r&b record, and more; it is referenced
in three separate stories in the issue.
In putting together this magazine and its accompanying CD, it felt
important to highlight this nebulous quality of ballads, to spotlight
a wide range of creatives who push the form forward and keep old
Escaping Keys, CA 2023, archival pigment print, by Cara Weston. Courtesy the artist
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16 WINTER 2023
traditions alive. And yet, in spite of this inclusive approach, certain motifs
emerged, not least being the boundless ability of ballads to bring people
together across region and time, from the shaded porches of rural Mis-
sissippi and Appalachia to the unpaved roads of a tiny village in Brazil to
professional recording studios overflowing with cigarette smoke and mag-
ic. In her essay about the gorgeous duets that our cover star Roberta Flack
created alongside Donny Hathaway, first-time OA contributor Ashawnta
Jackson writes: “These celestial beings were always destined to meet.”
Cosmic moments of human connection fill these pages. In a short mem-
oir, Ed Pavlić details how songs by artists like Anita Baker and Patrice
Rushen scored a formative and intimate friendship between two men in
the ’80s. In “More Than What You Made of Me,” Gaby Wilson travels to
Houston, where Filipino Americans gather in karaoke clubs to hear and
sing covers of acrobatic showstoppers—especially Beyoncé’s “Listen,”
the Dreamgirls ballad that has unexpectedly acquired emotional and
cultural significance within their community. In “Blood Harmony,” con-
tributing editor David Ramsey follows a murder ballad across centuries
and continents—but it’s really a story about people: the ones who inspire
a ballad and the ones who keep its tune safe in the pockets of their hearts.
Elsewhere, our writers illustrate how ballads have shaped both the history
of popular music and the personal histories of their lives. “Ballads allow
hip-hop, a genre known for edge, to buckle with feeling and fall on its knees
seeking mercy momentarily,” explains Harmony Holiday in “Getting On”,
a spellbinding lyric essay about the groggy Madvillain track “Accordion.”
Lauren Du Graf tells the story of prodigious jazz pianist Shirley Horn, one
of Miles Davis’s favorite vocalists, whose considered approach to life and
career mirrored her hypnotically slow singing style. “The Final Gift,” writ-
ten especially for this issue by the Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist
and old-time music performer Dom Flemons, demonstrates the ballad’s
resilience in American art and beyond; it’s published here in poem form,
while its musical counterpart closes out the Ballads Issue CD compilation.
In another one of our features, Craig Seymour paints a beautiful
posthumous portrait of Melvin Lindsey, the D.C. radio personality who
died from complications related to AIDS in 1992. As the host of the Quiet
Storm at Howard University’s WHUR-FM, Lindsey originated an amorous,
sophisticated, vibe-heavy format that was nationally duplicated and res-
onates culturally to this day. As Seymour reminds us, Lindsey’s late-night
selections—and rich, warm radio voice—spoke directly to a generation of
queer listeners who heard subtext in those carefully curated r&b ballads
that others may have missed. “I can’t help but think he was revealing a bit
of himself, sitting alone each evening in the radio booth, when he played
Norman Connors’s ‘You Bring Me Joy,’ sung by Adarita (Ada Dyer) [and
made famous by Anita Baker], with its lyrics, ‘I’m so lonely at night / And
I’m mixed up again…’”
When I was living in that apartment, listening to melancholic music
wasn’t a new phenomenon for me: I grew up in an era when schmaltzy
love ballads filled the airwaves, and I spent my early teens obsessed with
melodic punk tearjerkers by emo groups from Florida and the Midwest.
And yet I’m not confident that I could have articulated why those insomniac
YouTube binges became such an important ritual, not back then at least.
With some distance, I’m able to recognize how good it felt to cry on pur-
pose, and how rare it was to have some control over the things that made
our hearts ache. There was also something comforting about listening to
those songs with a friend, about experiencing loneliness without actually
being alone. I hope this issue provides a similar kind of comfort.
Patrick D. McDermott
Multimedia Editor
 MEMPHIS
BEALE STREET,
JUSTIN FOX BURKS

Songs, stories, and places are interconnected – especially in Memphis, where almost
any location can conjure a musical lyric, legend, or new-generation artist.
We asked Memphis’ music community which songs these storied locations call to mind.
Use it like a playlist, an itinerary (or both) the next time you’re in town.
“Everybody Knows (The River Song)” “People Make the World Go Round”
“ Your Love Is Too Late” by O.V. Wright: The Mississippi River by The Temprees: Soulsville &
BY DON BRYANT: From “the minor stomp of the intro to Wright’s soaring Stax Museum of American Soul Music
BEALE STREET first lines and minor groove on the final word,” An “amped-up guitar and string
“This song takes me back to the early nothing captures the emotion of the Mississippi River section” make The Temprees’
1960s Beale Street scene: singing in like this song, says Alex Greene of Reigning Sound. version of this song “grittier
Willie Mitchell’s band, working in the and funkier,” says Tonya Dyson,
clubs, writing songs for The 5 Royales, “Respect Yourself” by The Staple Singers: Executive Director of Memphis Slim
Solomon Burke, and Little Junior Parker National Civil Rights Museum Collaboratory, a space for sharing
– whose music you still hear today on In the years following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s and creating music in Soulsville,
Beale,” Bryant says. The street’s 20-plus death, artists including The Staple Singers composed home to Willie Mitchell’s Royal
live music venues are book-ended by the soundtrack of the civil rights movement. Memphis’ Studios and the Stax Museum of
the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum and historic Lorraine Motel is now the National Civil American Soul Music, celebrating
Memphis Music Hall of Fame. Rights Museum. its 20th anniversary in 2023.

NATIONAL CIVIL STAX MUSEUM OF

RIGHTS MUSEUM, AMERICAN SOUL MUSIC,
BRAND USA ALEX SHANSKY

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION

“ Can’t Help
Falling in Love”
BY ELVIS PRESLEY:
GRACELAND
When Elvis was asked what
he missed most about
Memphis while he was
away in the Army, he
answered, “Everything.” GRACELAND MANSION,
ALEX SHANSKY
Pay tribute to The King at
his home, Graceland.
“She’s a Mover” by Big Star:
Overton Square Entertainment District
“This was part of a late-night session at
Ardent. Within a stone’s throw of Overton
Square, Ardent Studios was the heart of
Midtown nightlife,” says Big Star drummer
Jody Stephens, who serves as Studio
Manager at Ardent today, still down the
street from the vibrant Overton Square
Entertainment District.
“We Need Love” by Donald O’Connor:
Crosstown Concourse
“This song embodies the fortitude of
creators in Crosstown Concourse and the
surrounding neighborhood with its driving
disco beat,” says Jared Boyd, program
manager for community radio station WYXR
91.7FM, which broadcasts from Crosstown
Concourse alongside a listening lab, live
music venues, art galleries, and more.
SUN STUDIO,
PUP AND ROO
THE BLUES FOUNDATION'S
“Hot Cheetos” by MonoNeon: BLUES HALL OF FAME,
ALEX SHANSKY
South Main Historic Arts District
In this song recorded in a home
studio off Main Street, MonoNeon
“demonstrates the funk, jazz, gospel, and
soul of Memphis over hip-hop drums,”
says producer IMAKEMADBEATS.
Also in the neighborhood: The Blues
Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame, and
Central Station, a boutique hotel in a
century-old train station that’s still in
MEMPHIS
use today. ROCK 'N' SOUL
MUSEUM,
M A R I S S A D A I LY
“Love You Nice and Slow”
by Southern Avenue: Overton Park
“This song is inviting and familiar with
tons of character, much like my favorite
park, where mornings and evenings
bring about peek-a-boo sunrises
and sunsets,” says Tikyra Jackson of
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SENSATIONAL
BARNES BROTHERS,
CRAIG THOMPSON
“All I
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Is You”
BY BLACK CREAM:
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neo-soul artist Nick Black. WWW.MEMPHISTRAVEL.COM/MUSIC
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Points South

SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE VOL. 25

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Courtesy the artist and Alexander Berggruen, NY. Photo: Dario Lasagni OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 21
22 WINTER 2023 Illustration by Rachelle Baker
 Anita Baker
Introduced Us
and
Patrice Rushen
Did theRest
12:45 A.M. SEPTEMBER 2, 1986.
t's dark now and the balcony
makes it seem like we’re sitting
up in the middle of the night sky
high above the glow from Day-
ton Street in Madison. Ric talks
and I think, “Well he’s not small
because he don’t eat that’s for
damn sure.” An empty carton of
mozzarella sticks sits open on a large pizza
box, also empty, which covers most of the
patio-type table we made from two milk
crates emptied of my records. Remembering
Liz’s lesson from last summer about drinking
vodka with grapefruit juice has helped me
defend myself against repeating unavoidable
evenings like that one that got out of hand
at La Maison du Caviar in Paris. I’ve mixed
the grapefruit between as much ice and as
little liquor as possible, so this tastes like
cold juice with some distant heat lost in it.
I don’t see the point of drinking at all but,
B Y E D PAV L I C
up here, tonight, and diluted as much as
possible, okay I don’t mind it. And Ric’s not
all theatrical and pushy about it like Claude
Haddad and his Lebanese-exile crew yelling
at me, “Yalla, Eddie, Yalla!”
“They don’t scratch, ever, and you can
set them to repeat like an auto-reverse tape
deck. Just think: pure music, no skipping
and popping.” Ric’s convinced cds are the
future and that we’ll need a cd player in here
asap. Back down the hall in the living room
Anita Baker’s singing about See about me…
Come on see about me. Her scatting fades
out and Ric rises up out of his chair, saying,
“See this, I’m talking about no getting up to
flip the record.” I can see it. But then what
happens to the records? We gotta buy it all
again? I’d heard “Sweet Love” and “You Bring
Me Joy” on the radio, but I hadn’t heard
Rapture before leaving for Boston for work
last spring and then on to France for the
summer. I take a moment to feel the dark
breeze curl over the low balcony wall and
notice how three radio towers slow-strobe in
the distance. Ric steps back onto the balcony
followed by a woman singing turning back
the hands of time… “Mystery,” first song,
side two on Rapture. I’m not sure if it’s the
trip back from Greece to Paris to Chicago to
Madison and then today and the run-in with
the sheriff and the mess with Terrance, or if
it’s something else that feels like it’s coming
out from behind the air in every direction at
once, but I haven’t ever heard anything like
this album on this balcony before. Did she
just sing Only images survive? Ric sees this
in my face: “I’m telling you, E, you stay over
there too long and get culturally deprived.
Might as well be sub-urban.” He says that last
part like it’s a synonym for subhuman then,
“Hell, Madison’s bad enough! But at least I
can get home in a hour.” I think, home? To
Chicago? In an hour?
I want to tell him about the no-gravity-sus-
pended feeling among the murmurs of Pari-
sians in the streets of Beaubourg, the relief
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 23
from the way everything in the U.S. feels like
it’s trying to tear itself (or at least me) apart.
But it’s not the time. I’m watching him talk
and mostly listening to the album and balanc-
ing what Anita Baker’s doing with these songs
against the grim imitations of togetherness I
remember from those Paris discos. I haven’t
even noticed the invisible things weaving Ric
and me into each other right here yet; it’s too
close. Instead, I’m feeling that moment when
the Commodores’ “Lady” appeared out of
Euro-drone in the disco and the warmth of
people dawned behind my eyes like it was cut
through by the vanishing groove in the cold
spray from the brick saw. That warmth and
those people weren’t in that disco, that was
all in me. That image, though, the diamond
blade, the vanishing groove, comes and goes
from my body like it’s made itself a home in
me. Like maybe it is only images that survive?
T welve hours ago I was sitting on
a picnic table at the Union with
no place to live. I hadn’t planned on
coming back to school at all, at least
not now. My plan—which okay wasn’t a
plan—had been to stay in Paris, where
I’d lived half the summer riding along
with the modeling industry run amok,
my girlfriend T and her roommates and
the agency owner Claude and a buzzing
cloud of his generously pushy friends
whose need for “company” seemed as
endless as their cashflow. I had the little
money I’d made earlier this summer
running a brick saw for a small con-
struction crew in the tank room of a
Budweiser brewery in New Hampshire.
Don’t ask. I’m not sure about how it all comes
together either.
Twelve hours ago I hadn’t really even met
Riccardo Williams, who, somewhere between
noon today and midnight tonight became
my best friend, and, who, a little less than a
year from now, and according to a scale of
lived time there’s no measure for, will die of
a sickle cell crisis and vanish from—but leave
a permanent hole blasted out of—my life as
fast as he’d appeared into it. Before today I’d
mainly known Ric through Terrance, who I’d
run into just before leaving town last spring;
Terrance talking about they might be looking
for a roommate for next fall and would I be
down? I’d said I’d think about it and then
forgot about it. Until the moment my plane
touched down at O’Hare yesterday at 5:05
P.M. and I realized I’d returned to school and
I had nowhere to live.
24 WINTER 2023
So, then, a few minutes before noon today:
I rang the buzzer to this apartment, #902,
unannounced; woke up Ric, who had rolled
into town himself about an hour before me
and gone back to sleep; asked Ric if he was
cool with another roommate; drove across
town to clear it with Terrance at his shady-
ass job “selling art” for a boss who’s about
as legit as the bootleg Patrick Nagel prints
he had Terrance hawking by phone; went
back, moved in our stuff, and got to clean-
ing the place after Terrance and whoever
else had hurricane’d in it all summer, which
went along okay but for a hole smashed in
the hallway wall and a football-shaped spot
burned into the carpet—Ric: “I can’t believe
them fools was ’basin’ in here”—in the living
room; talked for the first time with Ric over
Parthenon Gyros and George Howard’s A
Nice Place to Be, a conversation that began
to distantly sparkle over Howard’s version
Rapture and us
on this balcony casts
the sun, the saw,
and the vanished
groove. All of it.
of Sade’s “The Sweetest Taboo” just when
the sheriff showed up with an eviction no-
tice talking about how no rent (which, each
month, Ric had sent to Terrance) had been
paid all summer and so we, or someone, owed
$1,575 before Friday or we best get to packing
up or deputies would do it for us starting
end of this week at eight A.M.; agreed to Ric’s
claim that if I “invested” $1,000 of my savings
from the brick saw in the brewery into paying
the back rent and solving the shit with the
sheriff it would pay off and pay off quick;
then paused the cleaning work to pack up
all Terrance’s shit in Hefty bags—everything
except his Raleigh Technium road bike that
Ric said he’d deal with after he figured out
exactly how pissed he was and how pissed
he wasn’t—and deliver the load to shady
bossman’s ranch-style house where Ter-
rance—talking about “man I know, my bad
on the rent man, my bad”—had already been
staying; then finished finishing the cleaning,
leaving the oven—Jesus, the oven—for later
and Ric saying how he thought this was a day
that could end with a six-pack of La Cerveza
Mas Fina between new roommates but that
was now going to have to be an evening with
a bag of ice and a bottle of Stolichnaya and
whatever I want in between—and me: “in be-
tween?” and Ric: “between the vodka and the
ice!” and me keeping quiet about the fact that
I drank alcohol reluctantly and only when
it absolutely couldn’t be avoided, like with
Claude and his gold-Cartier’d, red-Ferrari’d,
silk-unbuttoned confrères and Ric looking
me directly in my eyes and saying without
saying this was absolutely one of those un-
avoidable nights I was keeping quiet about.
A ll that earlier today and yet still spi-
raling through the cooling evening
air around us.
Rapture and us on this balcony casts
the sun, the saw, and the vanished
groove. All of it. One after another
these songs start in some small, safe
and secure place, places that feel cozy
or blurry or both, it’s home, a home
in people, home between people. But
sleepy. Then, in a few minutes, and with-
out ever leaving home, which, when
she sings it, like a picture in a frame,
it remains the same, these songs sear
and soar and search. Wide awake: See
about me, come see about me-e; it’s a
desperate plea and an open taunt. Ba-
sic as Ms. Baker barefoot on the album
cover. All these songs say “Come closer,
I dare you.” But, closer to what? We take
turns getting up, flipping the record over,
and playing it again. This is how we meet.
Each other, yes, but also something far, far
beyond ourselves: a need, a burning, to make
a formal acquaintance with flaming mysteries
we’ll never understand. Come closer to that.
Flames we have to keep and connect and
not let burn the whole shit down. Saying
far more than it’ll ever say, a song about
how something or someone been so long
sings now don’t you understand… I need you
to come closer, I can’t hide. And when she
sings “hide” the word opens up, wide, and
there they are: all the people. We talk on
and on. Each song searches itself, searches
us both, and, without us noticing, pushes us
closer. This started right here above Dayton
Street on September 1, 1986. And meantime
all this—the meeting up inside the meeting
up—happens far, far away from here and,
probably, a long, long time ago. As if from far
away and long ago, the soaring and searching
inside these songs release a meeting up from
inside our meeting up. There’s a rhythm up
in this, too, and another rhythm up inside
that. I feel my weight shift in my chair as
the balcony, or the building, or the whole
hemisphere begins to rock back and forth.
Over Anita Baker singing about I can’t do
I can’t do without you… now don’t ask me to,
Ric describes his family. He’s the only child
and lives in a townhouse on South Michigan
Ave. with his mom and dad. There are fam-
ily businesses, vaguely described, an office
on South Vincennes Ave., city contracts, a
trucking company, the Tree House, a hotel in
Negril, Jamaica, where he says we need to go.
A grandmama he calls Ms. Lou is married to
a South Side alderman, Beavers, which,
as Ric puts it, “covers a whole lot. And
with Harold Washington in office? A
whole lot.” He looks at me and asks, or
really he just states:
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah I get it.”
I have no idea what he means. From
comings and goings of friends and fam-
ily when I was a kid, from following
Chicago Public League basketball over
the years and from coming to know all
the Black students in the AOP during
my first year at UW, I’d learned about
a range of Chicago high schools: Taft,
Westinghouse, CVS, Kenwood, Lindb-
lom, Mendel, Whitney Young, Simeon,
and MLK along with South Shore High
School, where my mother graduated.
But Ric says he went to a school on the
Near North Side, at North Ave. and Clarke St.,
near Lincoln Park: “Latin. The Latin School
of Chicago?” I say I never heard of it. He
laughs and says that’s because it’s a small
private school, “probably the best in the
city.” Then he leans back and smiles, “See
you don’t know nothing about that, I tried
to tell you the way we got it covers a lot.” Are
you happy now with your life? blows onto
the balcony from Rapture and I remember,
just a few hours ago, how Ric, sounding a lot
like he just did, had handled that sheriff like
a charmer handles a snake.
As he talks to me Ric spins a thin ring, a
gold snake with ruby eyes that wraps almost
three times around his right pinkie finger.
The light on the balcony gathers around the
ring and loops back and forth between the
eyes of the snake and the matching shimmer
26 WINTER 2023
from a gold Mercedes-Benz medallion that
hangs from a thin chain high in the middle of
his chest. Ric weaves through sentences the
same as he’d driven through traffic earlier
today. I follow along remembering those few
times last year how space seemed to clear out
in conversations among us when he spoke.
He says last year he flew home (flew home?
So that’s the “home in a hour” thing) about
twice a month but he plans to cut that back to
maybe once a month this year. Ultimately, he
doesn’t see graduating from UW, more likely
he’ll transfer to a Chicago school, probably
Northwestern, maybe junior year. I say I go
to UW because in-state tuition is like $350
a term. Ric says his high school cost waaay
more than his out-of-state tuition at UW. He
mostly came up here for a little independence
that was also close to home and, then holding
I feel my weight
shift in my chair as
the balcony,
or the building, or the
whole hemisphere
begins to rock
back and forth.
up his cloudy glass of vodka and grapefruit
juice on ice, “because the drinking age up
here is eighteen. My Ps play me pretty close.
And I love ’em but damn.”
We talk and talk more about France and
last year at school and T and Valerie and
Feeda and the Ferraris and about, before
that, how I finished high school trapped in
a little all-white town in Wisconsin, “that
shit was like a blizzard that never stopped.”
Ric says, “My brother I know they musta
loved them some you.” Ric’s got at least one
serious-sounding girlfriend in Chicago, Lisa,
a connection as he describes it that feels
familiar to me from mine in France. Then
he says “but if I go home and don’t want to
be home I can always stay with Deborah, one
of my pops’s women.” I let that one go by.
None of the details we’re saying really matter
that much. Whatever’s really happening is
far away and also riding inside these words
like whatever imminence has been hiding
behind the air for about the last ten hours
since the sheriff interrupted our conversa-
tion over gyros and George Howard. Anita
Baker’s Rapture blooms searing searches out
of simple, sleepy scenes and sentences and,
by ten P.M., after a box of mozzarella sticks,
a large pizza, and a few splashes of heat into
glasses of grapefruit juice, we both feel this
thing—bottomless and nameless—start to
pour over us or out of us or into us as if the
air itself is doing that thing where you turn
your t-shirt inside out without taking it off.
A song says been so long missing you baby.
But what’s there for two twenty-year-olds
who, anyway, just met to say about that? A
few minutes later, and after who knows how
many times we’d flipped the record over,
Anita Baker rips apart some silly sen-
tence about no one in the world loving
her and she’s breaking inside and the
words burn around us in the air, flare
after flare softens the sharp edges of
the late-summer night as it cools into
tomorrow.
Ric stands up, stretches, and says,
“Come on let’s finish fixing this place
and get it into shape suitable for guests
who ain’t baseheads.”
“Who,” I ask, “do you have in mind?”
“We’ll see about that this week.” He
goes inside and walks over to the wall
between the door to the hallway and
the row of closets Terrance’s bike leans
against. On that wall hangs a poster of
a white Porsche 911, the one with the
whale tail spoiler. It’s unframed but fixed
to a plastic foam mat. “Hold this,” Ric says to
me, taking down the poster. He holds up his
chin with his hand, thinker style, and then,
“I know what goes here.” Removing a gold
thumbtack from the wall, he turns around
and digs a folder out of a bookbag sitting on
the foot of his bed. He opens the folder and
takes out a six-inch slip of paper. Maybe a
half-inch wide, it looks like a headline or a
piece of ad copy he’s cut out of a magazine.
He turns back around and pierces the gold
tack through the slip of paper and then sticks
it back in at the center of the wall where it
used to hang the poster of the Porsche. Ric
steps back making a fake camera frame by
touching index fingers and thumbs extended.
He nods approvingly, “That’ll work.” I turn to
my right so I can see what he did on the wall
around the poster I’m holding. A headline:
 upcoming events

       
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 THIS MAN GETS A NEW CAR EVERY DAY
Now I hand him the poster, “Okay my
turn.” Leaving the bedroom I enter my room
via the hallway door and take out a red fold-
er where I keep clippings like that. Mine
are mostly photos of the best moves I cut
from Sports Illustrated. Moves like the one
where Dr. J dunks on Bird and the whole
Celtics squad. But I know exactly the one
I’m looking for. Coming back in I tell Ric to
turn around and, just below the headline, I
tack the photo to the wall with one of the
gold thumbtacks lying on top of his dresser:
This photo’s not large, about 5 x 7, so it fits
underneath the headline, which now reads
like the photo’s caption.
“Now okay turn around.”
“Oh man, MJ, yes! Look at the
wrist. Fingers extended—He’s gon-
na take the whole city. He’ll take
the league too if they can get him
a team. Brad Sellers ain’t it. You
should have heard Bonnie DeShong
all summer throwing it at MJ on
WGCI inviting him over to her
house so she could play piano for
him in the dark.”
“For real? I thought she did
traffic.”
“Exactly! She keeps taunting
him with traffic updates and the
hours of night when the travel
times are best.”
Next we take the Porsche poster
into the hallway across from the
bathroom where the wall’s bust-
ed in. Ric pushes in another gold
thumbtack and hangs the poster
over the hole in the wall.
“That’ll just about do that. What
do you think?”
“Works for me.”
“Imma get me one of these.” He
gestures to the car on the poster.
I laugh. “Yeah right, me too.”
But Ric doesn’t laugh. He points his thin
finger at me, cocks his head to the side and
says, “Man, you know what?” I’m not sure
which “what” he means so I shake my head.
Ric turns toward the living room, takes one
step and then turns back to me. Side two of
Rapture is coming to an end, again. Anita
Baker’s howl-searching something about the
way you-u… the way you live… the way you
live your life. Ric says, “All spring Terrance
asking if he could come to Chi for the summer
and work for the family, you know, ‘drive a
truck.’” I don’t know why he makes the finger
28 WINTER 2023
quotes around “drive a truck.” Then, “Man,
can you imagine Terrance pulls some shit
like he did with the rent on my pops?! Nooo
buddy.” Shaking his head, he turns around
to walk toward the living room and I assume
he’s going to flip the record over again. But
after two steps Anita Baker’s take it easy,
you better, better take it easy ricochets down
the hall and, as if on cue, Ric turns around
and steps toward the bedroom. I hear him
whisper “damned straight” as he walks past
me and through the door and turns left into
the room. I’m not sure if he was talking to me
or to himself, talking back to the record, to
Terrance and the finger-quote “truck,” or to
the Porsche he’s saying he’s getting. But I’m
wrong. It’s none of that. Turns out it’s about
how pissed he is or isn’t. Turns out it’s “is.”
A few seconds later Ric passes across the
open doorway holding Terrance’s Raleigh
Technium road bike over his head. Holding
up the bike he disappears past the doorway
to the right and I run the few steps to the
door. I hear myself think, “oh-shit.” I look to
the right and see Ric, all in one motion, turn
to the side, step one foot through the sliding
doors, and heave the bike to his left and
over the railing. Ninth floor. The whole-ass
Raleigh Technium road bike over the edge.
When he turns back around Ric’s wipe-clap-
ping his hands together and making that
frowning-certain face you make when you’ve
just finished a solid and sensible task. A job
well done. When I hear the soft smash of
metal down below I’m still hesitating over a
shocked cloud of what-ifs: what if the bike
doesn’t clear the sixth-floor balcony below;
what if someone’s walking on the sidewalk at
the wrong time; what if the fucking cops the
fucking cops the fucking cops? Untouched
by these what-ifs, Ric looks up to me:
“Like she said we better take it easy.”
2:45 A.M. SEPTEMBER 2, 1986.
M y plan is to use this thin
futon as a bed for the year.
Almost as much a padded rug as a
futon, it fits perfectly in the corner
of this small room between the out-
side wall and the path of the door
that swings in from the hallway. In
the morning I can roll it back up
and slide the folding door open
to the living room. That’ll expand
the space. Plus this corner stays
dark despite the yellow light that,
even with the blinds closed, spills
through the window at night. Class-
es start tomorrow, well, today, and
I still need to register, but I’ll start
thinking about that when it’s really
tomorrow. I can’t get to sleep with
the last twelve hours whirling in my
arms and legs and that smug-ass
sheriff in my face at the door when
I close my eyes and Ric talking to
him over my shoulder like he’s
laying down winning cards in a
poker game we’d just found out
we were playing.
The flight of Terrance’s Raleigh
Technium road bike from Capitol
Centre’s apartment #902 ends our first night
on the balcony. After the bike leaves the
building, even with Ric’s don’t-give-a-fuck-
ism, we agree it would be wise to move inside.
The spur of the moment ceremony of the
bike’s exit also changes the air, or maybe
it makes us notice all the changed air all
around us all between us. Ric makes him-
self another glass of Stoli and grapefruit on
ice. Inside the living room now everything
feels like it’s leaning toward everything else.
Yellow light from the street hazes across the
ceiling. Ric sits down leaning forward with
his legs wide apart and talking about when
he gets married he’s going to sing “Ribbon
in the Sky” at the wedding. He has no plans,
understand, but, he says, he’s gonna sing it
when she’s coming down the aisle. He’s been
practicing. A closeness gathers around us.
He says living beyond fifty is pointless; fifty
years should be plenty. I notice a little yellow
haze from the ceiling gathers and mixes in
his bright, dark eyes. I don’t know about all
that “should be plenty” stuff but fifty’s so far
off it’s strange to even mention it. I say I’m
not trying to sing at my wedding but it’s got
to have music. He leans back at the kitchen
table rotating his glass, looks up at me and
asks what song I’d play to dance to, like for
that first dance? I’m surprised to be talking
about this at all, really, but I look away from
him toward the window and, under the air
conditioner, on the floor, Patrice
Rushen still stares out from the cov-
er of Pizzazz. So I say maybe “When
I Found You,” which floats and then
has that great breakdown at the end.
Ric doesn’t remember that song but
wants to hear that breakdown part.
So I take off Rapture and pick up
Pizzazz. But when I turn it over “When
I Found You” isn’t on there. Then I
remember it’s on her earlier album
Patrice. You know, Pizzazz–Patrice,
it’s close. I’m saying how after “Forget
Me Nots” in high school I’d bought
as many of her previous records as I
could find. And Now, too, with “Feels
So Real,” which is up there with Nie-
cy’s “Do What You Feel” and “I’m So
Proud.” Come to think of it “I’m So
Proud” might be a contender for the
wedding-dance thing itself but, no,
not quite. My fingers walk through
the records and find Patrice. There it
is: “When I Found You,” second song,
after “Music of the Earth,” on side one. I put
the record on, drop the needle, and catch
the last breaths and congas of “Music of the
Earth.” Then static in the pause before “When
I Found You” comes on and, by the time
the horns introduce the theme, soft, and I
sit back down on the futon in front of the
poster of the blown-away Maxell tape dude
on the living room wall, the rest of all what’s
been hiding behind the air is on its way out
front. It’s like every inch of air in the room
is invisibly tsunami-ing into every other inch
of air in the room. Also it’s as if the room has
somehow rotated 90 degrees inside itself
like north is now east, east is now south and
south has moved around to nine o’clock. And
where the songs on Rapture start up close
and then sear and search and tear out the
walls while leaving them in place, “When
I Found You” starts all up under your ear,
whispering, and then draws all distance into
this first closeness that really sounds like
touch, I mean if you listen—or touch—close
enough: a centripetal closeness; a gathered
togetherness. The kind of closeness where
the closer you get the further out—and back
that togetherness extends. That's when things
like balconies and buildings and hemispheres
start to rock back and forth.
Ric sits at the table, sips his grapefruit juice,
and acts unimpressed. But he’s nodding his
head up and down to the slow beat and shak-
ing it side to side with the lyrics, I found love…
and now I can say for me it’s a brighter day…
“Oh, snap, yes, yes...”
he says under his
breath and slow-drags
a two-step in a circle
around the living room,
dipping his shoulder
forward like he’s
headed out from the
beach moving through
the darkened waves.
When he turns his head my way his eyes are
closed, brows up, which somehow opens his
face wide. It’s like that; it sneaks up on you.
Every time. If you’ve heard this song you
know that the lyrics are feather light, riding
on an easy rhythm, a soft rolling sea. Then
the strings follow the saxophone solo and lift
the song, lighter than before. It’s pure sweet-
ness. But then toward the last minute, when
Patrice Rushen repeats the chorus, held up
by the strings, she pins the “me” in “for me”
up an octave and then bends the line about
“a brighter day” down into a minor key. The
water darkens. This signals the beat to come
back, doubled up at the start of like every
fourth measure, and a little harder, more ur-
gent, and the breakdown I was talking about
begins. Now most people I know, and all the
dudes I know, would have been talking about
something by now and so the load of brick
brought down by these subtle shifts in voice,
by the beat inside the beat, and by the heat
inside the dark, would get talked over. But Ric
hasn’t said shit since the needle dropped. In
the wedding fantasy, as it appears to me in
this moment, this, when the water darkens,
when the waves rise up, is where the families
join in dancing—which should have signaled
something about just what families are gonna
be joining which dancing. But my mind’s too
far behind all this to see any of that. So we
can leave that for later.
In the living room of apartment #902
right now, with the song turned up and the
air turned inside out and the walls
drawn in around us and Patrice Rush-
en repeating Baby when I found… and
twisting the You-u like she’s wringing
out her next breath from the word
itself, the word inside the word, Ric
Williams rises up from his chair hold-
ing his glass in his right hand, left hand
snapping and flipping twice with the
double-first beat in those measures.
“Oh, snap, yes, yes…” he says under his
breath and slow-drags a two-step in a
circle around the living room, dipping
his shoulder forward like he’s headed
out from the beach moving through
the darkened waves. The song fades
and the urge begins to hear it again,
to feel it go over the edge, again, into
the breakdown. Again. As I watch Ric
dance his little dance and chop out
that double-beat with his left hand,
stepping out with his right foot when
the high-hat closes, and while the
backup chorus and Patrice Rushen
trade repetitions of Baby when I found you, I
know I’ve arrived somewhere I’ve never been.
For all we know it’s a place that’s never been;
maybe whenever something like this happens
it happens for the only time. And again. Every
time. And maybe one day this song will be
about a wedding, a wedding inside some
unrealized revolutionary rocking back and
forth, but here and now it’s about a meeting,
a friendship, an intimacy even closer than
skin on skin. And it’s about the turned-inside-
out, tsunami’d-ass-air in this living room—
living room, I think suddenly—with some
basehead’s burnt-blind eye in the carpet,
in this ninth-floor apartment that’s but
recently been vacated of a Raleigh road bike
off its balcony.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 29
 Gracias a laVida
BY C L A R I S SA F R AG O S O P I N H E I R O

30 WINTER 2023 La Guitarra, 1935, oil on board, by Joaquín Torres-García

 hey lived near a
country town like
any other, about
sixty miles away
from São Paulo. It
was a quiet place
with a church at
the center, surrounded by colorful build-
ings. Depending on the season, the dirt road
leading to their house was either so muddy
that our car got stuck or so dry that I could
taste a layer of dust coating the inside of
my mouth, even with the windows shut. The
wooden gate, which opened to a green lawn
flanked by flowers and their one-story house,
appeared dreamlike, tucked away at the
end of an unnamed street.
There, my grandparents led a simple
life, growing vegetables and fruits and
raising chickens at home. My grand-
mother, a sturdy woman with expres-
sive and cheerful eyes, tended to their
house, hanging clothes on the line out-
side, potting flowers, and cooking on
her wood stove. Her strong arms worked
at a consistent pace, stirring sauce and
kneading dough.
My grandfather, a short and honest
man with a weathered face, spent most
of the day toiling under the sun—prun-
ing, watering, and weeding—tending
to his fruit. He only stopped working
in the afternoons, to briefly eat lunch
and rest on his rocking chair, and in the
evenings, when he went to a local bar to
have a glass of Jurubeba, fruit-infused
cachaça, and play pool with ranch hands
before dinner.
There wasn’t much else around their
house. There was one bakery, an extension
of someone’s house; a second bar that dou-
bled as a bodega; and a reservoir, which
always seemed on the verge of drying up.
Most days, when the two of them were alone
at home, the morning silence stretched on
for hours, interrupted only by the barking of
dogs. But on weekends, when their children
and grandchildren visited from the city, loud
voices and music filled the house.
On Sundays, I would spend the day outside,
playing with my brother and cousins, using
bamboo sticks as posts for soccer goals, or
in the kitchen, watching the women cook,
always listening intently to their gossip.
Even after all these years, I can still taste
my grandmother’s fig preserves or see my
grandfather loading our car with boxes of
fruit from his garden. I remember the tangy
acidity of the oranges and the velvety sweet-
ness of the lychees he grew. I also remember
the music that played in the background,
often folksongs from Latin America or música
caipira—old country tunes about the lives of
men like my grandfather. But most of all, I re-
member Mercedes Sosa singing “Gracias a la
vida,” her deep voice beautiful and earthy like
everything else from that period in our lives.
“Gracias a la vida” was one of my grandfa-
ther’s favorite songs, and it’s easy to under-
stand why. The emotional ballad celebrates
the simple pleasures of life. The chorus,
translating to “thanks to life that has given
me so much,” carries a nostalgic sentiment
Growing up, I always
associated the
melody with
the fragile beauty
of rural life:
the quiet days
spent with my
grandparents,
away from the city.
that is both tender and poetic. Yet, within
its verses, hardship coexists with gratitude.
She sings:
Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto
Me ha dado la marcha de mis
pies cansados
Con ellos anduve ciudades y charcos
Playas y desiertos, montañas y llanos
While the singer thanks life for her ability
to walk through many places, she recog-
nizes she walks with fatigued feet, having
traversed cities and puddles, beaches and
deserts, mountains and plains.
This bittersweet feeling, I think, is often
felt in Latin America, particularly in the
countryside. The campesino way of life—
with its rich cultural traditions, close-knit
communities, and strong connection to the
land—is in constant threat of disappearing,
and people’s lives are often marked by pov-
erty and state neglect.
Growing up, I always associated the mel-
ody with the fragile beauty of rural life: the
quiet days spent with my grandparents,
away from the city. The place seemed to be
a kind of miracle, thriving on that red clay
that turned to dust in winter and mud under
summer rains.
And, naturally, there was the voice of Mer-
cedes Sosa. Through the Argentinian singer,
the song takes on an almost ethereal quality,
its impact lingering well beyond its last note.
It was much later in my life that I learned
about its original composer, Violeta
Parra, and the sad story behind the
song. “Gracias a la vida” was one of
her final compositions, a culmination
of her life’s work that foreshadowed
her demise.
V ioleta Parra is one of Chile’s most
important artists, but she had a
difficult life, marked by personal trage-
dies. The anthology Violeta Parra: Life
and Work, edited by researcher Lorna
Dillon, is one of the few books in En-
glish that considers the breadth of her
work. In one essay, scholar Catherine
Boyle writes: Parra lived “between fame
and invisibility, a space between great
success and deep failure and hardship.”
While she was an extremely successful
and internationally recognized artist,
Parra remained stubbornly committed
to the dying folkloric art of Chile. It is
precisely this duality that isolated her
throughout her life.
Born in 1917 in a small town in the Ñuble
province, Parra grew up in a large and
artistic household influenced by both urban
and rural culture. Her father was a music
teacher who played country ballads and
popular urban songs. Her mother, a seam-
stress from a peasant family, carried folk
traditions with her, which she channeled
into her own music and poetry. Both parents
supported their children’s creativity, en-
couraging theatrical play at home. Parra’s
father even organized family shows, where
she sang peasant songs, particularly those
by the Aguilera sisters, a little-known duo
from her region that, with her mother,
sparked her interest in folk culture. As she
recounted later in her autobiography writ-
ten in verse, Décimas, as translated by
Christina Azahar:
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 31
 With those girls I learned
The nature of vat and plow,
must, porridge, and toddy,
and bobbin that is sewing;
the stone that is grinding;
sowing, reaping, pruning, and threshing,
laying grain, cut and harvest;
now I know the darnel
and how many types of spiders
eat away at the chamomile.
Yet, for much of her life, Parra suppressed
this deep-rooted connection. Her musical
career was born out of necessity, in 1929,
when she began performing in public with
her siblings to sustain the family after her
father contracted tuberculosis and died.
Her family’s crisis coincided with the ar-
rival of the Great Depression in Chile and
a collapse of nitrate and copper exports.
32 WINTER 2023
The country faced major unemployment
and homelessness. Like many Chileans, the
siblings struggled to survive. They toured
small towns, playing a mixture of popular
music genres—tangos, corridos, guarachas,
and boleros—whatever made them money.
When she was about fifteen years old, Parra
relocated to Santiago, where she performed
with her sister, Hilda Parra, in working-class
bars and eateries. The sisters achieved some
success. They performed on radio stations
and even recorded albums featuring Violeta’s
original compositions of popular music, but
she had yet to find her authentic voice as
a musician. By her mid-thirties, much had
changed in her personal life: Violeta had
married twice and birthed four children.
Santiago exposed Parra to a truly urban-
ized society, much different from the one
where she grew up. After the Great Depres-
sion, Chile underwent a period of rapid ur-
banization as desperate workers relocated to
urban centers looking for work. The influx
from rural areas to Santiago transformed it
into the bustling and messy metropolis that
it is today, but it also triggered changes in
traditional ways of life. Influenced by Western
ideas, many Chileans began regarding the
country’s rural character as something anti-
quated, to be overcome. As a result, Chilean
folk culture was slowly disappearing.
In 1952, Parra’s brother, Nicanor Par-
ra, now considered one of Chile’s most
renowned poets, encouraged Violeta to
document this issue. So she began trav-
eling through rural areas with her note-
book, guitar, and tape recorder to study
and collect samples of Chilean folk culture.
She interviewed hundreds of elders and
recorded thousands of tales, riddles, and
Photo of Violeta Parra © GDA/AP Images
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folksongs—including tonadas, cuecas, siril-
las, and periconas. The result was one of the
most comprehensive studies of Chilean folk
culture to date, which she published in the
book Cantos Folklóricos Chilenos.
To Parra, the project was deeply personal.
It evoked memories of her childhood, recon-
necting her to her past. She began to see her
subjects as mentors, if not close friends. In
another essay in the anthology, scholar Paula
Miranda writes: “Violeta discovered in these
male and female singers not only texts, but
above all ways of speaking, being, thinking,
establishing oneself as an autonomous sub-
ject, and more than anything, singing.” The
project also opened her eyes to the poor
conditions of Chilean campesinos—the
extent of their poverty, health issues, and
illiteracy. From then on, engaging with and
preserving their traditional culture became
Parra’s life mission.
As a musician, she began reworking
folksongs, such as “Casamiento de ne-
gros” and “Que pena siente el alma,”
or creating her own contemporary
brand of folk music that was deeply
political, addressing social issues and
the struggles of campesinos.
Back in Santiago, through her
brother, she also became involved in
the Chilean urban art scene. One of
the earliest performances of her new
songs was, in fact, at Pablo Neruda’s
forty-ninth birthday in 1953. Intellectu-
als and leftists were drawn to her. Her
strong personality, disheveled clothes,
long messy hair, and face marked by
scars left a lasting impression. But her
untrained voice, which was raw, dramatic,
and melancholic—sad and beautiful at the
same time—was unlike anything they had
ever heard.
Her career began to take off. She started
hosting the radio show Así Canta Violeta
Parra, where she interviewed folksingers and
played their music. In 1954, she received her
first national award, the Premio Caupolicán,
as folklorist of the year.
But in the summer of 1955, something more
personal changed the course of Parra’s life.
She was invited to participate in the Warsaw
International Youth Festival, her first time
in Europe. But, shortly after she arrived in
Poland, her youngest daughter, Rosita Clara,
died of pneumonia in Chile. Devastated, Par-
ra didn’t see the point in returning home. She
left her husband and other children behind
and remained in Europe for nearly two years,
34 WINTER 2023
where she dedicated herself entirely to her
music, but she never quite recovered from
the loss.
W hen my grandfather fell ill, first
from a stroke, then from cancer, my
grandparents relocated to a bigger city to be
closer to hospitals. They rented a one-story
house with my aunt, a cream-colored house
with a concrete yard, and hired a caretaker
to tend to their home until they returned.
The cancer treatment left my grandfather
horribly frail, and his emphysema, a conse-
quence of many years of smoking, further
complicated his recovery. He struggled to
complete small tasks. Showering became a
laborious activity that he could only man-
age with the help of my grandmother, who
bathed him as he sat on a shower chair.
As my grandfather’s health deteriorated,
Even amidst
these expressions
of gratitude,
the song is
melancholic and
evokes sadness.
so did his garden. Unpicked fruit began to
fall and rot, feeding no one but insects.
The only positive change came a week
before his eighty-second birthday, when my
grandfather suddenly felt better and was
able to visit his home for the first time in
many months.
They left on a Wednesday. This time, my
grandfather wanted to stop in the town be-
fore taking the dirt road that led to their
home, so my aunt drove past the main square
and the church. While she went to a shop
with my grandmother, my grandfather went
to his barber for a shave and haircut. Back
at home, my grandfather, who could bare-
ly stand up just a few days before, walked
around the veranda and played with the dogs.
After dinner, he watched his soccer team win
a game, and then he went to sleep next to
my grandmother.
But my grandfather woke up in the middle
of the night struggling to breathe. With my
grandmother’s help, he walked to the living
room and settled in his rocking chair. He
took his final breath at dawn, keeping his
promise to only leave his house in a coffin.
I was having breakfast in our apartment
in São Paulo when my aunt called with the
news. It was a sunny spring morning, too
beautiful and too bright for a funeral.
Inside his coffin, the lifeless hands of
my grandfather held small branches of his
jabuticaba tree. One of them still bore the
dark fruit.
I n 1960, Violeta Parra met the great love
of her life, the Swiss anthropologist and
musician Gilbert Favre. At the time, Violeta
was a rare creative force. She made paintings,
ceramics, sculptures, and large arpilleras,
textile works inspired by pre-Colum-
bian art. In 1964, she became the first
Latin American artist to be exhibit-
ed individually at the Musée des Arts
Décoratifs at the Louvre.
But the task of protecting her coun-
try’s art didn’t come easily for Parra. In
a letter she wrote to Favre a year after
they met, one can get a glimpse into
her deteriorating state of mind. “I feel
this anger at everything, and I work
very little. All joy is gone, gone to the
desert. This wooden house is crying.
This guitar has no feeling,” she wrote.
“I have been dead years and years.
Enslaved to my work and my country.”
At the height of her career, Parra
decided to pursue her most ambitious
project. In 1965, she opened La Carpa de
la Reina (The Tent in La Reina), a cultural
center in the foothills of the Andes for folk-
loric arts, where she hoped to establish the
National University of Folklore. The project
was the embodiment of the world she had
always dreamed of—a communal place where
people continued to disseminate Chilean
history and culture.
Parra gave it everything she had. But to her
disappointment, the center was never full. The
location was too inconvenient for most of her
friends, who had to travel from the city by car.
Locals treated it with indifference, believing it
attracted too many rich city people. The weak
structure of la carpa itself made it difficult to
sustain long term: the ceiling, made of canvas,
leaked whenever it rained.
Parra felt extremely isolated. At the same
time, her relationship with Favre began
deteriorating. She became deeply depressed,
resenting her family and friends for not sup-
porting her at the center, unable to let go of
Favre. She began taking pills to sleep and
spending days in bed. When Favre left for
Bolivia, she decided to go to La Paz, looking
for him.
It was there that Parra began writing some
of the songs of her last album, Las últimas
composiciones, her most carefully crafted
work, considered by most critics her mas-
terpiece. “Gracias a la vida” was the album’s
opening song. Three months after it came
out, on February 5, 1967, Violeta Parra took
her own life inside La Carpa de la Reina. She
was forty-nine years old.
I t’s difficult to reconcile the song with the
reality of Parra’s suicide, and it’s almost
impossible to not read between the lines,
looking for answers. As the title suggests, the
song is an ode to life. With its verses, Parra
thanks life for its many blessings: her eyes
that allow her to see starry nights; her ears
with which she hears the sounds of crick-
ets, canaries, and rain; her tired legs; and
her heart that was still beating. Even amidst
these expressions of gratitude, the song is
melancholic and evokes sadness.
Its composition and melody are simple.
The repetitive strum of her charango, ac-
companied by a gentle guitar, serves as the
backdrop for the entire song, allowing Parra’s
voice to take center stage. But unlike many
of her other songs, she doesn’t explore her
full vocal range. Her voice remains flat, then
slowly begins to soften, almost to the point
of fading away. Then, in its last stanza, she
breaks the fourth wall, addressing her lis-
teners. Her subjectivity turns to a general
“you.” She sings:
Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto
Me ha dado la risa y me ha dado
el llanto
Así yo distingo dicha de quebranto
Los dos materiales que forman mi canto
Y el canto de ustedes que es mi propio
canto
Here, Parra acknowledges the opposing
forces that inspire her music—the joy and
pain that connect her to her listeners. Even
if the song wasn’t written as her final good-
bye, it is the culmination of her talents: her
poetic songwriting, her evocative voice, and,
most importantly, her ability to articulate
the nuances of life.
36 WINTER 2023
Parra didn’t live to witness the profound
impact her songs would have on social move-
ments in Latin America, particularly the
Nueva Canción, a movement of politically
engaged music inspired by folk traditions.
She also never lived through the military
dictatorships that swept across the region.
She died before Augusto Pinochet took pow-
er in Chile and banned many of her songs,
including “Gracias a la vida.”
But in 1967, as Parra died in La Reina,
Mercedes Sosa’s career began to take off in
Argentina. Considered “the voice of Lat-
in America,” the Argentinian singer tran-
scended geographic divisions and united
the region behind her voice. At a time when
political repression threatened the continent,
it was Sosa who resisted by singing Violeta
Parra’s songs, particularly “Gracias a la vida.”
Sosa approached the song with gravitas. She
gave it the clarity and the dramatic inter-
pretation that it deserved and that allowed
it to reach my grandparents’ radio in the
interior of Brazil.
S hortly after my grandfather’s funeral,
my grandmother moved in with my
aunt in São Paulo. But in a matter of months
she suffered two strokes that left half of her
body paralyzed. She was bedridden for weeks
and never regained the ability to walk on
her own.
I believe that, deep down, my grandmother
expected her death would come shortly after
my grandfather’s, so when her body began
to recover and death didn’t come for her,
she didn’t know how to go on living without
him. She developed a sad and distant expres-
sion like she was lost somewhere inside her
mind. She preferred napping to being awake.
She told me that in her dreams she saw my
grandfather at their house.
The truth is that nobody in our family
could make sense of the growing distance
between the past and the present. We mourn-
ed the loss of a person we loved but also a
place and time—a way of life we knew would
never return. Violeta Parra mourned this loss
through her art and by attempting to pre-
serve folk culture. My family coped through
nostalgia. We held on to relics—pictures,
books, and songs.
A few years after my grandmother’s stroke,
we spent New Year’s at the beach. The sum-
mer was unusually hot, so most of us swam
and drank beers during the day. At night, we
went into town to eat, and then we gathered
in the backyard to play guitar and sing.
For my grandmother, it had been a chal-
lenging year with little improvement. Most
of the time, she felt tired and wanted to rest,
but on New Year’s Eve, while lying in bed, she
requested “Gracias a la vida.” So we gathered
around her and sang together. Thanking life
that has given us so much. Thanking our ears
for recording the sounds of crickets and
canaries, our tired feet that allowed us to
traverse cities and puddles, and the house,
the house and the backyard, and our beating
hearts. My grandmother sang softly, crying.
Then my uncle began to cry.
Singing “Gracias a la vida” as a family was
an opportunity for us to honor my grandfa-
ther’s legacy, to grieve collectively, but in a
way, it also felt like looking life in the eyes,
in all its complexity, beauty, and cruelty.
M y grandparents’ house was sold. I
visited it for the last time in 2021 with
my partner, parents, uncle, and aunt. We
improvised a barbecue and set up a table by
the starfruit tree, where we ate, gossiping
about the family as we usually did. After
lunch we walked around the garden, picking
fruit. Most of the trees had dried out, but
there were still wildflowers, some limes and
oranges, and a lot of avocados. My mom and
aunt picked limes while my uncle climbed
the avocado tree, tossing the ripe ones down
to us.
When it was time to leave, my uncle
scooped up some dirt and placed it in a bag.
That’s what he tossed on my grandmother’s
casket when she died shortly after, a handful
of earth from the place she loved.
After we loaded the car with fruit one
final time, we closed the wooden gate be-
hind us. As we drove away in silence, leaving
behind my grandfather’s garden and my
grandmother’s wood stove, dogs chased after
us, barking. As we reached the end of their
street, we noticed something unfamiliar be-
hind the cloud of dust. A new sign displayed
the street name for the first time, Rua Lou-
renço Gonçalves, named after a person we
didn’t know. Last I heard, the city had begun
paving the road.
Listen to “Gracias a la vida,” a playlist
by Clarissa Fragoso Pinheiro, while you read.
Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit
Oxford American Magazine on Spotify to stream the playlist.
Love
&Anarchy
On view through
Feb 18, 2024

This exhibition is organized by Marshall N. Price, Chief

Curator and Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger
Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Love & Anarchy is made possible by the Nancy A. Nasher

and David J. Haemisegger Family Fund for Exhibitions; the
Derek and Christen Wilson Fund for the Nasher Museum of
Art; and the John and Anita Schwarz Family Endowment.

Honor Titus, Portable Prince (detail), 2022. Oil on canvas,

72 × 60 inches (182.88 × 152.4 cm). Collection of the
Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2023.1.1.
Gift of Claudia and Edward Rose, T’02. © Honor Titus.
Courtesy of Timothy Taylor.

nasher.duke.edu
38

’m a millennial Jew from subur-
ban Miami. My parents are New
York expats and their parents
were mostly immigrants or first-
gens who grew up speaking Yid-
dish. Outside of Hebrew prayers,
my family’s conception of “tra-
ditional” music started with the
Woodstock soundtrack and ended with Billy
Joel. So my introduction to American roots
music was inevitably going to come from
either Bob Dylan or the Grateful Dead; as it
happened, the Dead got there first. It would
have been 1998, circa age sixteen, when I
first encountered the word “Traditional”
as a songwriting credit in the liner notes of
Reckoning—a compilation of acoustic per-
formances from the Grateful Dead’s fall 1980
tour—which featured “Jack-a-roe,” “Deep
Elem Blues,” and “On the Road Again,”
alongside their usual mélange of covers
and originals. And, in a different essay on a
different day I would go long on the Dead’s
relationship to the American canon—the
Knoxville Girl, 2016, a photo by Kristine Potter from her monograph Dark Waters,
published in July by Aperture © The artist. Courtesy Sasha Wolf Projects
B Y J U S T I N TAY L O R
one they drew from as well as the one they
gave us—but for now let it suffice to say that I
wanted to hear what the Dead had heard, so I
started tracking down their sources, and then
their sources’ sources, and it was the strang-
est music I’d ever encountered, certainly
not part of any “tradition” I recognized: It
wasn’t classic rock, it wasn’t hip-hop, and it
wasn’t the Macarena. This music sounded like
it came from the fucking moon. But, as the
contemporary folksinger Robbie Fulks aptly
put it: “‘Stagger Lee’ would sound good on
the moon, you don’t need a cane chair and
a hound dog.”
With the aid of my Best Buy employee
discount, helpful Deadheads on AOL forums,
those old 12-for-a-dollar mail-order music
clubs, and (eventually) the high-speed in-
ternet connection in my first college dorm,
I came to know and revere the music of Doc
Watson, Ralph Stanley, Roscoe Holcomb,
Jean Ritchie, the Harry Smith Anthology of
American Folk Music, the New Lost City Ram-
blers, Reverend Gary Davis, Woody Guthrie,
and so many more. I developed a love of
American roots music—bluegrass, blues,
country, gospel—in its own right, with a par-
ticular interest in the ballad tradition. Be-
cause I was an aspiring writer, I read as well
as listened: Francis J. Child’s foundational,
multi-volume English and Scottish Popular
Ballads; The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles;
Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s
Basement Tapes; David Dodd’s The Complete
Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics (an MA in
American Studies all on its own), and whatev-
er else I could get my hands on, including—at
some point—Some Ballad Folks by Thomas
G. Burton, published in 1978 by the Center
for Appalachian Studies and Services at East
Tennessee State University in Johnson City.
It’s a slender volume, paperback, hardly
one hundred pages. The book presents five
brief personal sketches of female ballad sing-
ers—Rena Hicks, Buna Hicks, Hattie Presnell,
Lena Harmon, and Bertha Baird—all living
on Beech Mountain, North Carolina, which
is just over forty miles east of Johnson City,
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 39
Tennessee. The relative isolation of Beech
Mountain made it a rich reservoir of tra-
ditional ballads and tales, many traceable
back to seventeenth-century England and
Scotland—some are older yet, though sooner
or later the trail of definitive provenance
always disappears into the mists of history.
Their ages ranged from seventy to nine-
ty-seven, and they had all lived most of their
lives on Beech Mountain. The profiles are
supplemented by a “Ballad Box” of lyrics and
musical transcription for the ballads under
discussion. Black-and-white photographs of
the subjects and their homes are peppered
throughout. The cover image, which bleeds
across the front and back, is a photograph
of a broken tree stump and some low green-
ery flashbulb-lit against an impenetrable
black backdrop that I take to be the forest
at night. At some point my copy must
have spent a long time on a shelf in partial
sunlight, because half of its pages have
yellowed. The spine is badly creased, its
glue dried and cracking, but so far no
leaves have been lost.
I’m not sure where it came from or how
long it has been on my shelf—fifteen years
at least, maybe twenty. I thought an old
friend had given it to me as a gift, but I
called her and she said she didn’t know
what I was talking about. Maybe I found
it myself, chanced upon it in a bookstore
or a library sale or in one of those give-
away boxes professors sometimes leave
outside their office doors. I’ll probably
never know, and in the end, it doesn’t
matter, because the facts of how and
when it came into my life are ultimately
of far less interest than the fact that it’s
still a part of my life, that I’ve got it open
in front of me again.
A t eighty-eight years old, Tom Burton
is older than most of his subjects were
when he interviewed them. He’s emeritus
from ETSU but still an active scholar and
documentarian. I emailed him through his
website and a few days later we spoke on the
phone. He seemed equally pleased and sur-
prised at my interest in Some Ballad Folks, an
obscure volume of admittedly niche interest.
(For a neophyte, there are far better places
to start, including Burton’s own Folksongs
and Folksongs II.) Still, he gamely talked me
through its genesis.
Burton’s interest in ballads took hold while
he was an undergraduate at Lipscomb Uni-
versity in Nashville in the 1950s. He’d had
40 WINTER 2023
a chance to take a class at Vanderbilt, with
the eminent poet and scholar (and, alas,
notorious segregationist) Donald Davidson,
for whom he wrote a paper comparing rough-
ly one hundred variants of “Lord Randall”
(Child No. 12). This led to graduate work at
Vandy, where Burton took a PhD in English in
1966. He taught at ETSU for his entire career,
and though his scholarship is rooted in field
collection, and documentary in nature, it was
all carried out under the aegis of the English
department. “This is English literature,” he
told me, his voice crackling with conviction,
as though I’d suggested otherwise. (I hadn’t,
but plenty of people have over the genera-
tions, so the reflexive ire is understandable.)
He believes that at least some of the original
authors would have been aware of (or part
of) the poetic traditions of the Renaissance.
“They were very sophisticated. There’s some
really good poetry that somebody who’s re-
ally good must have written.”
For most of the history of ballad collection,
it was standard practice to ignore the stories
of the people whose ballads one collected.
Few collectors noted their subjects’ names
for posterity, let alone their biographies or
opinions. Many, including Child, didn’t even
describe the tunes of the songs! Lyrics—es-
pecially variant versions of the same song—
were the only thing that mattered to these
colonialist poindexters, who methodically
converted centuries of vibrant oral tradi-
tion into thousands of dusty, silent pages
of dead text. (Pages I have read and loved,
mind you, but even so.) In the course of this
destructive perseveration, the singers were
reduced to passive vessels of transmission,
the flesh equivalent of tombs to be raided so
their contents might be boxed up and hustled
off to some museum.
By 1970, Burton had published three an-
thologies of regional folklore and songs.
His interest shifted from the songs to the
singers: Who taught you this one? What do
you like about it? What does it mean to you?
“Mountain folks…are done an injustice if
they are viewed in either a romanticized
or a brutalized manner,” Burton writes in
Some Ballad Folks. To me he said, “It was
an important thing not just to have the
songs themselves. The implications of the
language, the music—that wasn’t enough.
I wanted to introduce their relationship
to it, their understanding.”
R ena Hicks calls them “old people’s
songs,” because old people taught
them to her when she was young. “It’s
the words; it ain’t the tune,” she says.
“The feeling of the song, the feeling of
the people that was in that place when
the songs was made, even if it was death
or life.” Hattie Presnell doesn’t discount
the music: “All the old ones has got a
lonesomer, you know, it’s got a lonesomer
tune to it than the new ones do.” “To
me I have a picture in my mind, a very
vivid picture of it all,” says Lena Harmon.
“And all my life I could create that scene.”
Bertha Baird says, “I always sung just
like I learnt ’em.” Buna Hicks—who is
Rena’s aunt and Hattie’s mother—says,
“They have new songs and they’re right
pretty—some of them is—but I still hold
to the old songs. Somehow or ’nother, they
have a meaning to them; just like to hold
them and keep ’em in memory.”
Every ballad is a folksong, but not every
folksong is a ballad. (Of the three Traditionals
on Reckoning, only “Jack-a-roe” qualifies.)
Ballads, as the term is defined in the context
of the folk tradition, are story songs. Their
major themes—love, work, death, salvation,
cross-dressing—are ageless, and therefore
easily legible to a contemporary listener,
even as their psychologies are bracingly
opaque. Ballad characters inhabit worlds
without subtext, perhaps without self-aware-
ness, at least in our post-Freudian sense of
the term. People are what they do or what
is done to them. Plots develop according to
the just-so logic of Greek myths and Japanese
RPGs. Some ballads are clearly intended to
reinforce the morality of school and church.
Others revel in the sex, violence, and absurdi-
ty they depict, even if a finger-wagging final
stanza is tacked on for plausible deniability.
The best ballads are powerfully ambivalent,
endlessly interpretable yet impossible to
pin down.
They have simple, hypnotic tunes and re-
cursive verse structures that serve as aide-
mémoire for singers who would have known
dozens, maybe hundreds, of them by heart.
Ballads sound good paired with dulcimer,
guitar, or banjo but sound best sung unac-
companied. They tell of romance and be-
trayal, cowardice and honor, justice and
vengeance, faith and heresy, marriage
and murder, lords and ladies, ghosts and
demons, fortunes lost and won. Some
seem to be based on real historical events
or local legends, but the histories and
localities in question are often as irre-
trievably lost as the original composers.
Ballads have been passed through so
many voices over so many generations
that they can only be called authorless,
at once everyone’s and no one’s.
T he text of a given ballad doesn’t
tend to vary much from singer
to singer in Some Ballad Folks, but the
women’s interpretations of it—its mean-
ing to them—often do. “I feel it’s mighty
sad,” Bertha Baird says of the female pro-
tagonist of “House Carpenter” (Child
No. 243), who leaves her family to sail
away with an old flame. “I think she ort
to been just smacked all over for leavin’
her husband and baby.” Hattie Presnell
thinks the woman’s real trouble was a
lack of faith in love itself. “There’s where
she would ’a’ made a mistake, lovin’ one and
marryin’ another’n. Cause she had loved him
before he went off, and when he come back
to get her, she’d done a-married.” When the
ship sinks, dooming the lovers, she sees God’s
judgment handed down.
Lena Harmon’s father wouldn’t sing the
most explicit parts of the ballads he knew,
so his bowdlerized versions became hers. She
complains that Doc Watson’s version of the
adultery-and-murder ballad “Little Musgrave
and Lady Barnard” (Child No. 81; recorded
by Watson as “Matty Groves”) “brings in
indecent things that I don’t like,” such as
the foot page telling his lord, “Little Matty
42 WINTER 2023
Groves is in bed with your wife and their
hearts both beat as one.” Rena Hicks includes
the explicit consummation of the affair in her
version (most versions do), but Harmon’s
prim rendition is all the more interesting in
light of her sympathetic, even progressive
take on Lady Barnard: “I’d say they were
both in love with her and she wasn’t the wife
of either one.”
Buna Hicks advises, “It pays anybody to
sing a little bit slow if you can and get the un-
derstandin’ of these words, what they mean;
they mean a lot sometimes.” Still, some things
are hard to understand. “Jobal Hunter,” bet-
ter known as “Sir Lionel” (Child No. 18), is
a truly eerie ballad from the late medieval
period about hunting a wild boar. Lionel is
a figure of Arthurian legend, foster child of
the Lady of the Lake, sidekick of Lancelot;
Edward III, who ruled England from 1327
to 1377, was a big fan. Buna likely would not
have known any of this. Her version doesn’t
even name Lionel. In a way this is fitting, since
the boar hunt is itself a folk archetype far
older than Arthurian legend, and it’s likely
that Lionel was swapped in as protagonist
later on, possibly because of Edward’s known
affection for him. We’ll never know. The song
unfolds in a litany of oblique couplets such as
“He met the witch wife on the bridge; blow
your horn, Center / They fit three hours by
the day, if you are the jobal hunter.” The
witch wife is incidental to the main action,
and doesn’t appear in many versions, but she
had the strongest claim on Buna’s interest.
“I’ve heard so many witch tales back when
I was a kid a-growin’ up till I really thought
that there was witches… I imagined ’em in
my sight, how they looked, an’ how they
done. And so that song is that witch. I may
be mistaken, but it’s somebody makin’ you
believe somethin’ that’s not thataway.”
F air Ellender, Lord Thomas, Young
Beham, Old Bangum. Little Matty
or Mattie or Massey Grove or Groves or
Musgrave. The miller’s will, the drunkard’s
wife, the two sisters, the devil’s questions
nine. The jobal hunter, the daemon lover, the
handsome cabin boy. Barbry Allen, Bolamkin,
George Collins, Blackjack Daisy, Stagger
Lee, and Jack-a-roe. Over every truelove’s
grave the rose grows round the briar.
To participate in any tradition is
always to (re)create it as well as sustain
it, because no matter how strictly tradi-
tionalist your approach, the ineluctably
original contribution is you. There is sim-
ply no such thing as neutral custody and
retransmission. Ultimately what you’re
preserving is not the mere fact of a past
but the prospect of a future. You carry the
tradition like an ember in a reed and it
lights fresh fires that its originators could
not possibly have imagined, from twen-
ty-one-year-old Bob Dylan’s world-wea-
ry “House Carpenter” to a band of
Californians finding a launch pad for
psychedelic improvisation in “Peggy-O”
to Rhiannon Giddens’s groove-forward
“Black Is the Color.”
For as long as Some Ballad Folks has
been in my life, it has saddened me that
I couldn’t hear these women’s voices. I
always assumed I never would. But after
the happy discovery that Professor Burton
was alive and well and checking his email, I
was inspired to do something so obvious that
it had literally never once before occurred
to me: I googled them. Mere moments later I
was watching video of Buna Hicks and Bertha
Baird (shot, LOL, by Burton himself, in 1973)
on Folkstreams.net. A bit more digging yield-
ed The Traditional Music of Beech Mountain
North Carolina, released by Folk-Legacy
Records as a two-volume LP in 1964. Buna
and Hattie are both on there, among sundry
Presnells, Hickses, and Harmons. Good luck
finding it on vinyl, but wouldn’t you know—
it’s on Spotify! I’m listening to it right now.
You could be listening, too.
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 Inside Voice
“I
really feel I’ve come
home,” Tom Petty told
his crowd. The rock leg-
end hadn’t performed in
Gainesville, Florida, for
thirteen years when he stopped there on his
Highway Companion tour with the Heart-
breakers in late September 2006. The band
was a long-running arena rock institution
by then, so even normal gigs were major
operations, full of extravagant lighting and
huge screens to ensure that even the rafters
could see their heroes up close.
44 WINTER 2023
BY J O H N L I N G A N
But Gainesville wasn’t simply another tour
stop. Instead, Petty’s appearance was the
occasion for a thirtieth anniversary blowout,
commemorating the November 1976 release
of the band’s debut record, Tom Petty and
the Heartbreakers. The 8,000-seat Stephen
C. O’Connell Center at the University of Flor-
ida sold out in only thirty minutes, and the
crowd included travelers from New Jersey
and California, as well as folks so local they
began doing the Gator Chomp during “Don’t
Come Around Here No More.” Guitarist Mike
Campbell, looking resplendently Floridian in
Front Room, 2017, a photo from the series Talisman by Kristina Knipe
a swampy brown vest and his hair in short,
tight braids, played an orange guitar embla-
zoned with the UF Gator emblem.
Their opening four songs, “Listen to Her
Heart,” “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” “I Won’t
Back Down,” and “Free Fallin’,” are all on
Petty’s epochal Greatest Hits and remain
radio staples. Live, three decades into their
public career, the Heartbreakers played them
with an unrushed, heavy swing, letting the
songs breathe and the individual musicians
shine, Campbell and keyboardist Benmont
Tench especially. They let the crowd scream
with every familiar riff and sing with every
beloved chorus, then moved on to the next
well-known tune. Those four songs set the
tone of mutual admiration between artist and
audience, and some additional surprises only
deepened the bond throughout the night.
Just past the midpoint of the set, a blond
figure sashayed out from stage left in a glit-
tering dark gown: Stevie Nicks, the Fleet-
wood Mac goddess and longtime auxiliary
Heartbreaker. She and Petty of course sang
their famous 1981 duet “Stop Draggin’ My
Heart Around,” and Nicks even took lead on
the group’s early rocker “I Need to Know,”
which she had covered in ’81 on her Bella
Donna tour, her first as a solo headliner.
The ecstatic atmosphere paused only for a
three-song sequence about two-thirds
of the way into the evening. First the
band played “Southern Accents,”
Petty’s protective, piano-led ballad
about his regional identity, which he
said he hadn’t performed since the
Heartbreakers’ last Gainesville show.
Despite a reverent Johnny Cash cov-
er in the 1990s, the song was still a
relative obscurity in his catalog and
a remnant of the awkward Southern
Accents tour, which featured Con-
federate flag iconography onstage.
Petty later disavowed that display,
though not “Southern Accents” or
the album that shares its name, and
by the Gainesville homecoming no
one associated the singer with stars
and bars. Instead, he was synonymous
with unkillable radio fodder like the
Greatest Hits warhorse “Learning to
Fly,” which, fifteen years after its re-
lease as an up-tempo single in 1991,
Petty had transformed into a spare
acoustic sing-along for the Gainesville crowd.
But between those songs, Nicks was invited
out again, this time to perform her other
1981 duet with Petty, “Insider,” which first
appeared on his record Hard Promises. That
studio version was a sorrowful ballad, but
like most of Petty’s songs from those early
years, it has a rousing chorus. Stan Lynch, the
Heartbreakers’ original drummer, pushed
“Insider” to dramatic extremes by moving
between subtle cymbal pings and big, crash-
ing fills. Tench added a plaintive keyboard
line that echoed the sweeping melodies he
laid on joyous singles like “Even the Losers.”
The band played this song throughout their
1981 tour, bringing Nicks onstage for the oc-
casion every time, and they included one of
those performances on their 1985 live album
Pack Up the Plantation! (the title of which
was another unfortunate Dixie-ism during
the Southern Accents era). But “Insider”
more or less disappeared from Heartbreakers
setlists for twenty-five years after that.
“This is one I wrote in 1981,” Petty intro-
duced the song in Gainesville, strumming
an acoustic guitar while Campbell tuned a
mandolin. “We very seldom do it but I love
to do it when we can.”
There were no drum fills in this perfor-
mance; drummer Steve Ferrone stuck to
tambourine. No soaring keyboard either, as
Tench played pensive piano and let Camp-
bell’s lilting high strings carry the counter-
melodies. The focus was squarely on Petty
Just past the midpoint
of the set, a blond figure
sashayed out
from stage left in a
glittering dark gown:
Stevie Nicks,
the Fleetwood Mac
goddess and
longtime auxiliary
Heartbreaker.
and Nicks’s harmonies and their narration of
a relationship fallen apart. “I’m an insider /
I’ve been burned by the fire,” they sang, fac-
ing each other instead of the audience. “And
I’ve had to live with some hard promises / I’ve
crawled through the briars.” It was the qui-
etest, starkest moment of a momentous day.
Throughout the late ’70s and 1980s, Pet-
ty was like Bruce Springsteen’s hippie Gulf
Coast cousin: a roots-rock hitmaker who
sold untold millions of records and concert
tickets through a steady stream of fist-pump-
ing, half-twangy anthems. He was a calm,
smiling presence on stage, not an acrobatic
showman like Bruce, but Petty’s laid-back
charm belied a serious work ethic and cre-
ative drive: He was one of the few rock acts
from the 1970s to establish a groundbreak-
ing music video career, one that lasted into
the ’90s. He worked with Del Shannon and
Johnny Cash, and was the youngest member
of the Traveling Wilburys, where he sang
group harmonies and co-wrote with Bob
Dylan, Roy Orbison, and George Harrison,
a damn Beatle. Petty and the Heartbreakers
were Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees
in 2002, the highest-profile lifetime achieve-
ment award of many that Petty received in
the early twenty-first century.
And now, in 2006, Gainesville was doing
its part to celebrate its favorite sons. The
mayor deemed September 21 “Tom Petty
and the Heartbreakers Day,” and presented
each band member with keys to the city. Even
Ferrone and guitarist Scott Thurston,
relative newcomers to the band, were
granted the same honor as Campbell,
Tench, and bassist Ron Blair, Alachua
County natives all. The perennially
aloof, long-haired Petty, who never
bothered with college, then received
a UF Distinguished Achievement
Award.
“I thank the university for making
us distinguished people,” Petty said
at the ceremony.
Behind his familiar laconic wit,
Petty was genuinely grateful, and
the inclusion of “Insider” in the set-
list was proof. Like every Petty bal-
lad, it was a reminder of the ragged
creative soul that underpinned his
crowd-pleasing tendencies and all
those well-known radio anthems. For
such a singles-focused artist, Petty
created a shadow career in his acous-
tic, gentler, and otherwise non-rock-
ing album cuts—moments where he
showed his range as a writer, singer, and
creative thinker. Ballads are where Petty
indulged his artistic whims, shared his fears,
expressed vulnerability, and spoke most
directly to his audience—essential offerings
from an artist who cultivated such closeness
with his fans.
P etty began speaking through his bal-
lads on his self-titled 1976 debut. “The
Wild One, Forever,” though not as well known
as the record’s singles, “Breakdown” and
“American Girl,” was a defining artistic state-
ment to match either one. While the former
established Petty’s snarling guise (“I'm not
afraid of you running away, honey / I get the
feeling you won’t”) and the latter was the first
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 45
of his many tributes to free-spirited young
women living on their own terms, “Wild One”
showed the true extent of his fascination and
sympathy for outsiders:
They call you the wild one
Said, “Stay away from her”
Said, “She couldn’t love no one if she tried”
But then something I saw in your eyes
Told me right away
That you were gonna have to be mine
Musically the song feels more E Street Band
than Heartbreakers, with a chiming piano in-
tro and a full-band entrance on the muscular
chorus. But purely as writing, this is a riskier,
more romantic song than even “American
Girl” or that classic’s spiritual cousin, “Free
Fallin’.” Unlike those, “The Wild One, Forev-
er” is not a sympathetic character sketch, it’s
a pledge of devotion; not a portrait of
someone else’s strength but a statement
of defenselessness and desire.
The group’s lunkishly titled second
album, You’re Gonna Get It!, came out
in 1978 and was in general a leaner,
heavier set of songs, epitomized by the
stunning Byrds/Cheap Trick hybrid “Lis-
ten to Her Heart.” One exception was
“No Second Thoughts”—not a ballad
per se but a strummy acoustic novelty
with uncredited bongos and Campbell
playing an exotic sitar-sounding lead
line. Many of Petty’s songs describe an
unnamed “she” with complex emotional
desires—for freedom and escape more
often than romance—but to me, “No
Second Thoughts” feels like a sequel to
“The Wild One, Forever,” where Petty nar-
rates the reality of following his free-spirited
crush. I imagine it finds our heroine a few
years later, after she’s tried to live on the
straight path as a married woman. The singer
has stayed in her life, patient and undemand-
ing, and now she’s accepted that she needs
to live as she’s meant to, as he knows her:
We’ll drive for the line now
There’s nothing to be lost
You and I will cross over
With no second thoughts
Here again, with the volume turned down,
Petty veers away from the snarl in his early
singles and makes plain the implicit promise
that defined his whole songwriting persona,
from “American Girl” to “Wildflowers”: to of-
fer up a love and romance worthy of his muse.
46 WINTER 2023
P etty’s real-life muse at this time—
and for the first twenty years of the
Heartbreakers’ existence—was Jane Benyo, a
blond, lissome Gainesville beauty. They met
in high school and married in 1974; if “Wild
One” isn’t directly about her, it captures the
kind of young, lightning-strike bond that
she and Petty shared for decades. But that
kind of bond can be tumultuous, and after
the two grew indispensable to each other,
Petty became a grinding professional musi-
cian, often away from home. Benyo struggled
with drug addiction and, according to the
daughters she had with Petty, she suffered
from lifelong mental illness. But she was also
trying to find her way in a relationship that
formed in adolescence and then continuously
shifted under her feet.
In 1979, Petty’s career exploded at last,
as Damn the Torpedoes went to No. 2 on
You can almost read
the crisis in Petty’s
mind from the fact
that this song, of all
songs, spewed out of
his subconscious.
the U.S. album chart and sold nearly three
million copies. His most high-profile fan was
the willowy, full-voiced singer in Fleetwood
Mac, Stevie Nicks, who was as famous as a
rock star could be in the late ’70s and whose
songs and personal style perfectly embodied
the kind of young female “wild one” Petty’s
songs afforded such sympathetic consider-
ation. Nevertheless, she struggled to fit her
original material on LPs where she shared
songwriting duties with Lindsey Buckingham
and Christine McVie. Nicks was already ob-
sessed with Petty’s first few albums and even
told friends that she intended to somehow
join the Heartbreakers. Instead, as she plot-
ted a solo album, she told her manager she
wanted to sound as much like Tom Petty’s
band as possible.
“Stevie came to me around ’78,” Petty re-
membered later. “And she was this absolutely
stoned-gone huge fan. And it was her mission
in life that I should write her a song. And
we were a little wary of Stevie. We didn’t
quite know whether to like Stevie or not, be-
cause we kind of saw this big corporate rock
band, Fleetwood Mac…in those days, nobody
trusted that sort of thing and we just kept
thinking, ‘What does she want from us?’”
An early session with Nicks was apparently
too much for the Heartbreakers to handle.
They weren’t used to guests in the studio and
Nicks had a full entourage. They might have
been triple-platinum, but that was nothing
next to Fleetwood Mac in 1979. The band
slunk away, and Petty recommended Tor-
pedoes producer Jimmy Iovine.
Bella Donna took shape over the next few
years, with Iovine producing. Nicks told him
in no uncertain terms, “I want to be the girl
Tom Petty.” She ingratiated herself into Pet-
ty’s world in other ways: Mike Campbell
and Stan Lynch were enlisted to play
on the track “Outside the Rain,” Petty
regularly consulted with his friend Io-
vine about tracks in progress, and Nicks
befriended Jane Benyo. As anyone who
knows of Fleetwood Mac’s predilections
in this era can guess, this friendship
didn’t improve Benyo’s relationship to
drugs, so Petty soon found himself in-
creasingly close to a famous, influential
star who was eager to support his career,
but still stuck in a loop with a troubled,
unpredictable partner.
As the Bella Donna sessions wound
down in spring 1981, Petty and Iovine
agreed that the record lacked a single.
The moment had come for Petty to con-
tribute the song that Nicks had wanted from
him for years. He created it in the studio on
a whim, supposedly in less than five minutes.
Standing next to Tench, who accompanied
on keyboards, the haunting, fragile chords
and lyrics to “Insider” spilled out of him,
then they took it to the band.
You can almost read the crisis in Petty’s
mind from the fact that this song, of all songs,
spewed out of his subconscious. “You’ve got
a dangerous background,” it begins, and he
proceeds to call his partner “the dark an-
gel.” The wild one, it turns out, isn’t an easy
partner. “Insider” is a remarkably succinct
portrait of codependence: “I’m the one left
in the dust / I’m the broken-hearted fool /
Who was never quite enough.”
Petty recognized that he’d captured some-
thing elemental. Hearing this soulful con-
fession enlivened by his band and Nicks’s
forceful harmonies (she called their vocal
chemistry “intense, fiery”), Petty saw that
he’d unintentionally arrived at one of his
best songs. After they got the take, he told
her, almost bashfully, that he needed to keep
it for himself after all.
As a compromise, Iovine provided Nicks
with “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,”
which the Heartbreakers had already re-
corded in full. By coincidence, the song was
a high-volume version of “Insider,” another
lament for doomed love and self-destruction.
Nicks sang half the verses, recreating the
preexisting track as a duet when it was never
meant as such, and it became the lead Bella
Donna single. Eventually “Stop Draggin’”
went to No. 3, Nicks’s solo high point and the
best-charting Heartbreakers performance to
boot. Another hit, as if Tom Petty couldn’t
help but write them.
“I nsider,” meanwhile, remained a deep
cut, buried on side B of Hard Prom-
ises, and “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around”
overwhelmed any of that album’s singles. But
Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty, 1982 © Scott Weiner/MediaPunch/Alamy
Petty was clearly moved by the experience of
writing it. The song improved his confidence,
for one; on every record thereafter, he found
ways to stretch himself beyond the melodic
hard rock that he mastered with Iovine.
There are examples of this expansion in
every part of his catalog. The underrated
1987 LP Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) fea-
tures some of Petty’s most dated production,
but it also has “It’ll All Work Out,” a weary
acoustic waltz and the closest he’s come to
a Pogues-style Irish weeper. His first solo
album, 1989’s Full Moon Fever, was known
for its massive singles “Free Fallin’” and
“Runnin’ Down a Dream,” but it also had
room for a gossamer Roy Orbison tribute, “A
Face in the Crowd,” and a genuine lullaby,
“Alright for Now.” Petty also used ballads to
explore his feelings about the Florida home
he left behind; not only “Southern Accents,”
where his downtrodden narrator considers
working in Orlando “if them orange groves
don’t freeze.” In the stark Wildflowers out-
take “Harry Green,” performed only with
acoustic guitar, Petty remembers a trou-
bled high school classmate who died early,
sketching a world of football-playing good
ol’ boys and sexual repression. And as Petty
aged into a legacy touring artist, he treated
some of his most defining singles, “I Won’t
Back Down” and “Learning to Fly,” to solo
coffee-house reinterpretations so that his
audience could sing the beloved choruses
along with him.
“Insider” isn’t explicitly about Florida, but
it clearly emanated from the part of Petty
that was attached to his beloved Jane for
better or worse. Writing it was an emotional
purge that surprised even him. I suspect that’s
why he played it for nearly the first time in
a quarter century during that three-song
suite in Gainesville, the heart of the most
intimate moment of a long-delayed home-
coming. He brought an old friend along to
supply her trademark raspy harmonies, and
Campbell’s gentle mandolin underlined the
song’s melodicism and heartbreak. It wasn’t
the best-known song that this officially dis-
tinguished person played that night, only the
most personal and revealing.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 47
 Orphan
Girl BY M E L A N I E M C G E E B I A N C H I
O
n a Saturday afternoon
in mid-August, Historic
Marshall is trending hot
and drowsy. Relaxing
at an umbrella-shaded
picnic table behind the restaurant where
she works, eighth-generation ballad singer
Donna Ray Norton nurses a glass of sweet tea,
trying to keep up with the melting ice cubes.
The major waterways in western North Car-
olina have dipped low this summer, and the
French Broad River, usually scalloped with
light waves, goes by flat as a window pane.
A man on a unicycle rides past the parking
lot, but this spectacle doesn’t make a ripple.
He moves cautiously, perhaps because he
is traveling the wrong way—that is to say,
pedaling backward.
Marshall, in Madison County, is a Main
Street-with-benefits-size town that can only
be reached by a rural feeder road. Centu-
ry-old family businesses like Penland & Sons
Department Store, stocked with Carhartt
coveralls and serious flannel, hang on. So
does an artsy vibe with a hippie undertow—
Madison County has long been a refuge
for homesteaders. The old Marshall High
School, set apart on a nearby island in the
French Broad, was turned into art studios
in 2007, and a co-op gallery (named Flow in
homage to the inevitable river) fares well.
The Mermaid Parade & Festival is a beloved
annual event.
And yet the picturesque pocket communi-
ty, pop. 796, resists full-cloth gentrification.
Long-range views are on offer in other parts
of the region, but the hills here loom close
among all the red brick. Even the empty
48 WINTER 2023
storefronts, and there are plenty, seem like
proud outliers. The decay is more attitude
than entropy.
Real-estate numbers don’t sync up with
the twilight atmosphere. Due to the ongo-
ing national housing shortage, the median
home listing in Marshall rose forty percent
this year, up to a numbing $600,000. “The
people from here can’t afford to live here
anymore,” says Norton, whose family goes
back more than two hundred years in Sodom
Laurel, a deeply remote section of Madison
County. (She now lives on the western edge of
the neighboring county, Buncombe, halfway
between Marshall and Asheville.)
Marshall is blessed and cursed by its way-
back topography; despite perennial efforts at
refurbishment, it always feels a little haunted.
And if a town can manage, somehow, to be
at once booming and ghostly, the clue to
such dissonance isn’t likely to be found in
statistics. But it might be detected in song.
There’s something mournful about a river,
wherever it runs, and throughout the ballad
canon, death by drowning is as common as
a shrug. In “Wind and Rain,” a public-do-
main number favored, in different eras, by
tastemakers Jerry Garcia and Gillian Welch,
a girl’s skeleton is exhumed from a river and
turned useful again by a traveling musician.
Welch sings: “He made a fiddle peg of her
long finger bone, / crying, ‘Oh the wind and
the rain,’ /…and strung his fiddle bow with
her long yeller hair, / cried, ‘Oh, the dreadful
wind and rain.’”
T hose who do have enough money to
buy or build property in Madison
“Donna Ray Norton at home, Sodom, Madison County, NC 2015,” a photo by Rob Amberg © The artist OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 49
County, touted as the Jewel of the Blue Ridge,
are almost always “from off”—vernacular for
outside county lines. “Off off,” clarifies Nor-
ton. Ex-Floridians are a given; transplanted
Californians are increasing in number.
“If you want authentic, you better get it
while you can,” says the singer. To tradition-
al-music purists, her pedigree on that front
is unimpeachable. Her maternal grandfa-
ther was fiddler Byard Ray, who played for
Queen Elizabeth; Byard’s mother was Rilla
Mae Wallin Ray, a singer who played ban-
jo and fiddle and who always kept a pistol
in her purse, even on stage, according to
Norton. (Rilla Ray’s image was widely used
to promote the Mountain Dance and Folk
Festival in Asheville, billed as the country’s
longest continuously running folk festival.)
Kin on both sides of Norton’s family—includ-
ing her great-great-aunt by marriage Dellie
Chandler “Granny Dell” Norton and her
paternal grandfather Morris Norton—were
documented by Smithsonian curators. “Pap
Morris played the paper bag and spoons,”
says Norton. “His tune bow”—a long wooden
instrument with one banjo string—“is in the
Smithsonian archives, and I was taken to
see it when I sang at the Folklife Festival [in
Washington, D.C.] in 2017.” Norton’s second
cousin, NEA National Heritage Fellow Sheila
Kay Adams, is an internationally decorated
clawhammer-banjo player, singer, and sto-
50 WINTER 2023
ryteller, a professional performer since be-
fore Norton was born. This past May, Adams
appeared with cellist Yo-Yo Ma in Knoxville.
When she’s not traveling the festival
circuit, Norton pulls shifts here, at Zadie’s
Market, the bar/restaurant arm of the Old
Marshall Jail Hotel, a boutique venture that
is generating real buzz. Since March, Josh
Copus, the jail’s co-owner and passionate
renovator, has hosted a monthly ballad swap
on the Zadie’s patio. The building was active
in its original incarnation from 1905 to 2012;
at the time of its closing, it was the oldest
continuously operating jail in state history.
Typically, at festivals, the a cappella sing-
ers are given short time slots in between
lively string bands and clogging troupes.
“They’re afraid we’ll ruin the momentum,”
says Norton. But this song swap is a deter-
minedly ballad-only event. Copus gives the
performers free meals and beverages, and
they are shaded overhead by a sleekly built
river-observation deck. “He treats us right,”
says Norton. “He gets it.”
A fierce champion of Madison County,
Copus likens it to his native Floyd County,
Virginia. “I’m an Appalachian American,”
he says.
“I like to give Josh a hard time and say that
he fan-girled me,” says Norton. “He already
knew who I was when we were introduced.
He had heard me sing before. Which is hon-
Donna Ray Swann and Sheila Kay Adams at the Music in the Mountains Festival in Burnsville, 2022. Photo by William Ritter
estly still always shocking to me, when it’s a
younger person who says that.”
The singer, who’s forty-one and mother to
a toddler, a teen, and a twenty-year-old, is
bubbly with an edge. She smiles frequently,
she considers herself the family optimist,
but her large blue eyes can narrow quickly
with remembering.
“I’m an orphan now,” she remarks. Her
mother Lena Jean Ray, a singer, guitarist,
and schoolteacher, passed away two years
ago. Her father Donald Norton died when
she was two years old.
“I didn’t inherit any land,” says Norton,
who notes that her dad was one of ten sib-
lings. “And I didn’t inherit any money. This
is my inheritance. Singing is it. I’ve always
thought it was important to keep the ballad
tradition alive, but after my mom died, I
began to feel more urgent about it.”
It was Sheila Kay Adams, though, who
long ago taught Norton the family version
of “Little Mathey Groves” and dozens of
other mainstays of the old-time a cappel-
la repertoire, story-songs that go back as
far as the 1600s in the British Isles. In the
mid-eighteenth century, waves of Scots-Irish
settlers—many fresh from embattled Ulster
and others migrating from Pennsylvania and
other northern states—brought the ballads
with them to the lush hollers of America’s
oldest mountains. Here, they were preserved
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A nother man who’s fond of decorat-
ing is Josh Copus. As a comparative
newcomer, though, he is chained to scrupu-
lousness. For his vision to thrive, imagination
is key, but documentation is critical. Even
Zadie’s Market is diligently curated, named
for Zadock “Zadie” Ponder, E. Y.’s father.
A ceramics artist who doesn’t seem to re-
quire sleep—Adams affectionately calls him
“a force of nature”—Copus began homage
making in 2006, gathering quotes from lo-
cal children and adults and casting their
lines in brick using his wood-burning kiln.
Some of the story-bricks from this ongoing
installation line the thick interior walls of
the market and jail hotel.
More than one man died in these now ut-
terly transformed halls; the death that was
ruled a suicide has as many discrepancies
as any handed-down ballad. Excerpts from
E. Y. Ponder’s field notebooks are framed
next to the doors of the themed rooms; the
vintage pages were donated to Copus by a
community member during the building’s
five-year renovation.
“It’s actually the greatest success of the
whole project—to have built that level of
trust,” he says. “When she gave them to me,
I cried.”
Copus says the sight of the packed patio
in August has gone far toward fulfilling his
dream. The hotel, the craft food and drink,
54 WINTER 2023
the free and casual heritage event for residents
and visitors alike—all are manifestations of
“a keystone business that can bring positive
economic and social activity to Marshall.”
It’s more than a mission statement and far
more than casual branding. The hotel’s level
of historic corroboration is museum worthy,
although Copus rejects nostalgia—“The idea
of the ‘good old days’ is bullshit,” he says.
Sentimentality is tricky, even toxic: Many
before him have swept in to consume and
chronicle the vivid culture, only to move on,
sowing another generation of resentment.
For Copus, honoring the past is only the
starting point, like the clay he digs out of the
ground to make his bricks. “It’s about allowing
the people from here to tell their own stories,”
he says. “It’s about the current climate.”
“It’s about respect,” says Donna Ray Nor-
ton. Her father owned a store in Sodom
Laurel, where he was arrested for murder
following an altercation with a long-time
friend and customer. Before he was exonerat-
ed—the shooting was ruled an accident—he
did time in this very jail. It’s a fact the singer
can drop at every ballad swap and elicit a
gasp, as long as new people keep showing up.
Having begun her own career during the
back-to-the-land revival of the ’70s, Shei-
la Kay Adams has observed all the surges.
Ballad singing got a boost with the Coen
Brothers’ hit movie O Brother, Where Art
“Sheila Kay Adams and Dellie Norton, Sodom, Madison County, NC 1975,” a photo by Rob Amberg © The artist
Thou?, released in 2000 like Songcatcher. “It
happens about once every twenty or twen-
ty-five years,” she says.
Just so, Norton traces the most recent
swell to the isolation days of spring 2020,
when folks had time to indulge their offbeat
interests. Suddenly, calico-wearing young
women appeared all over YouTube, qua-
vering out the old songs like all the newly
minted birdwatchers “discovering” scarlet
tanagers. But Adams looks less to cultural
forces and more to natural, more mysterious
ones, like the shifting seasons or the fickle
river. “It comes in cycles,” she says.
In 1916, after six days of hurricane-spawned
rains, the French Broad River crested seven-
teen feet above flood stage in Western North
Carolina. The Great Flood brought down
bridges and washed away important railroad
lines forever. Towns, too. It was the same year
Cecil Sharp began whacking through dense
laurel “hells” to collect ballads in backwoods
cabins. In 2004, another flood, under similar
atmospheric conditions, caused more than
$20 million in damage in the area.
The summer of 2023 has been meteorolog-
ically dry, but weather changes quickly here.
As do fortunes, and tastes, and the degrees
of grace allotted to outsiders.
“I don’t want to be the gatekeeper who
shuts the door,” says Copus. “The idea is to
keep moving the right way—forward.”
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 Hearing Aids
t occurred to Forrest that he
needed to think about who he
should leave his hearing aids to.
His first thought was his brother
who had some cheap ones. But
no, not him. He was thinking this
while standing at the commode
urinating. While his pee was hit-
ting the water, making those sounds like a
slow-running kitchen faucet into a pan of
water, he sometimes liked to isolate one of
the sounds and make a word out of it. Well,
no. He didn’t exactly like to do that. It was
just something to do while standing there.
56 WINTER 2023
A S T O R Y B Y C LY D E E D G E R T O N
He listened… “prosecute.” Then… “scram-
bled.” He finished, flushed the commode.
He thought about Van, his neighbor. He
could leave the hearing aids to Van. Last
summer, out by the driveway, Van had said
he couldn’t hear shit. And then about two
weeks ago, when they stood a short way down
the road watching a bulldozer work, he said
the same thing again.
If he left the hearing aids to one of his own
children that wouldn’t work because by the
time they were needed they would be extinct,
like a DVD player. He remembered the old
man who used to sit in the lobby of the court-
The Hearing Trumpet, 2015, mixed media and textiles on canvas, by Donald Saaf. Courtesy the Clark Gallery
house holding what looked like a hollow elk
horn in his lap. He’d pull it up to his ear when
somebody talked to him, and on more than
one occasion Forrest’s mother had said, “Go
ahead over there, son, and say something to
him. Say ‘How are you today, Mr. Umstead?’”
His mother had gotten him to step up to a
lot of things that he was kind of undecided
about. She’d pushed him into piano, and art
lessons, and theater. None of it stuck. He’d
joined the army, served thirty years, and
then retired. His wives had encouraged him
to get involved in several hobby-things that
didn’t quite work. All that—gone.
 He thought now about how Mr. Umstead,
the man with the ear horn, must have, as a
boy, seen old men, maybe old women, sitting
somewhere with an ear horn, and how then
those people, as children, had seen old people
with ear horns…and so on for no telling how
many generations back—without change.
Just plain and simple steady human stuff
through time. He thought about his iPhone
and the misery that had brought on, his hear-
ing aids, his prostate, his dick, his elbow,
his eyesight—about how his handwriting
had started getting shaky, and then shakier,
and how he’d clearly noticed the same thing
when it happened with his mother, his father,
and finally Frances. He wondered how many
of those motherfuckers with ear horns in
the last thousand years had been happier
than he’d been. How many had died happy?
Who died happy? Happy in general. How
many had stayed happy all along? Had
had somebody they were intimate with
and laughed their asses off with right
up to the end. If Frances were alive, he
might mention that to her in front of the
fireplace. If his army buddy, Talmadge
Cochran, were alive, Forrest could call
him and say, “Talmadge, you want my
hearing aids?” They’d laugh about it.
By now he was in the backyard. He
sat down in the outdoor lounge chair
facing the morning sun, and he felt the
warmth on his face and knees and chest.
The morning was cool. An intense wave
of sadness came upon him, then ached
in his chest.
He couldn’t get the hearing aids out of
his mind. It occurred to him that there
should be a long list of people to leave them
to, but nobody much was coming to mind.
And who would clean them and prepare them
for the gift box? Maybe he should think of an
organization, an organization that would give
them away. He thought of Goodwill—some
old lady shopping in there and looking into
the glass case up front and saying, “Is that a
pair of hearing aids?” And there they’d be,
light gray, beside the necklaces and rings and
earrings—there they’d be, all cleaned up,
each with the little plastic string that you’re
not supposed to see, and the tiny speaker
the size of a match head that goes into your
ear canal. And the saleswoman says, “Oh,
they’re special. I think they retail for several
thousand dollars and they are…what? Two
hundred?” She and the old woman look into
the case but the price tag has been turned
over, so she pulls out her key ring and opens
the glass case and turns over the price tag,
and says, “Two hundred dollars. Yep, two
hundred dollars.”
Why isn’t there a hearing aid bank? he
thought. Think of how many perfectly usable
hearing aids become available in funeral
homes, for crying out loud. And think about
what you go home to if you’ve got a job at
Goodwill. Thank God he avoided that.
Forrest started to get up but sat back. He
thought about how in the last year everything
was going downhill. That song: “I’m on the
Downside of the Downswing.” He had noticed
that even with the hearing aids in, he was
hearing less and less well. But they were
very fine ones, adjustable in sensible ways.
He heard the eleven A.M. train whistle. That
was the slow train. The fast train was usually
somewhere between two and two-thirty. The
slow-moving morning train would have all
Think of how many
perfectly usable
hearing aids
become available in
funeral homes, for
crying out loud.
these clank and scrape sounds, and the fast
train would have a kind of simple, very loud
rumble-roar. It hauled ass. That’s the one he
liked to watch from up close. He wondered
how those sounds compared with the ones
from 1850 or whenever that final rail spike
had been driven, in the middle of the coun-
try. And how many people on that very first
cross-country passenger train ride had ear
horns in their laps? He wondered if some
people back then used ear horns that had
been in their families for hundreds of years.
Surely, they got passed down. Why didn’t you
see them in antique stores?
He thought about all those hearing aids
that were the size of a pack of cigarettes and
fit into a shirt pocket and had a wire running
up to one ear. Back in the fifties. He didn’t
recall ever seeing a woman with one. They
must have had them.
His helper, Sarah, would be by at noon,
with his lunch and some paperwork to leave
off. She was very faithful and a good worker.
Finally… He had had to let three others go.
He went back inside to wait for her.
He remembered that time he was getting
an MRI for his prostate cancer—to see if, or
how much, the cancer had advanced—and
he thought of the sounds coming from the
machine, a machine that had swallowed him.
The sounds were unlike any other sounds. A
high-pitched sound would be repeated for
maybe fifteen seconds and then it would
switch to a loud popping or some other
sound, but the next sound might sound like
two words: go man go man go man go man
go man, over and over.
The doorbell rang. Forrest greeted Sarah.
They walked into the kitchen and she set his
lunch on the table and beside it placed the
papers she had been working on. She
asked him if he felt okay, and he said,
“Fine.”
Then he said, “Let me ask you an odd
question, Sarah. Is there anybody in your
family who is hard of hearing and might
be interested in a pair of hearing aids?”
“Yes… Yes. My mother.”
He got Sarah to write down her moth-
er’s name on his notepad and when Sarah
left he wrote out a little codicil and pa-
perclipped it onto his will—where there
were several others clipped on. He’d told
his children he’d be doing this from time
to time. His lawyer had approved.
Suddenly he was very nervous and
shaking some. He walked to the bath-
room, took off his hearing aids, and
placed them beside the sink. He looked at
himself in the mirror. He saw and felt the
great wide valley, the great wide, dark val-
ley between him and Mr. Umstead, who was
sitting way over there beyond the valley, on
that hill. The valley had grown so deep and
wide and was crammed so full of so many
things, all those things that his mother saw
for the first time, airplanes and automobiles,
telephone wires, electricity, jets, wars, and
wars, and his war, and marriages, and chil-
dren. The valley had been expanding as if
alive. If he could count on somebody to love
him. If he gave a shit anymore for making
love. If there were somebody to help him have
experiences that he was kind of undecided
about. If he could go back, or if he could only
move forward a little bit.
Out back, he walked past the chair he’d
been sitting in, and went to meet the train.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 57
58

T
he cover of Rosanne Cash’s
album The Wheel possess-
es a quality beyond her
natural allure, the ro-
mantic setting of Central
Park’s Bethesda Terrace, and even the famed
skills of photographer Pamela Springsteen.
The photograph captures something ineffa-
ble: a revelation.
Cash had been drawn to the terrace but
especially to its iconic fountain crowned
with an angel, “a quintessential New York
location.” Perhaps the dormant Catholic in
her, which at that point had given way to a
belief in the holiness of Art and a smattering
of New Age mysticism, felt the need for a
blessing—from the famous angel, from her
newly adopted city, maybe even from herself.
After all, she had only recently uprooted
everything to relocate to the cathedral of
steel, glass, and asphalt.
In the photo, Cash stretches out her arms,
as if she might be receiving the angel’s
Chasing Flames, 2022, oil on canvas by Jemima Murphy. Courtesy the artist and Gillian Jason Gallery
B Y J A S O N K Y L E H O WA R D
benediction or preparing to embrace her
new life. Her face is lowered in reverie.
Even in monochrome, she is illuminated. She
is a woman burning, as she wrote on one
of the album’s songs, with “the fire of the
newly alive.”
“I had met John and my head was all
a-swirl,” Cash laughs, recalling this
potent time, “and these songs just started
coming out.”
Isn’t that what love does? Brings you back
to life, enlivens your senses and loins, and,
if you are a writer, invigorates your craft.
Maybe that’s why The Wheel occupies such
a singular place in Cash’s acclaimed catalog.
Released in January 1993 when she was re-
making her life, The Wheel led to her falling
in love with John Leventhal, her partner ever
since. A deeply feminine record centered on
a woman in the middle of a personal renais-
sance learning to live and love again, it has
become beloved among Cash’s legions of
fans, who connect their own romances and
rebirths to its songs.
This year, she and Leventhal, the
award-winning instrumentalist and producer
who co-produced the record with her, are
celebrating The Wheel’s thirtieth anniver-
sary with a remastered version released in
November on streaming platforms, CD, and,
for the first time, vinyl, in both standard and
deluxe editions. The album is the first release
on Rumble Strip Records, the new in-house
label Cash and Leventhal founded after she
acquired the masters of her recordings on Co-
lumbia, the label she called home until 1994.
Cash and Leventhal are seated in the base-
ment studio of their Chelsea brownstone,
sipping on cans of ice-cold San Pellegrino.
They have just returned from a weekend
trip to Memphis and Dyess, Arkansas, where
they played a concert along with Sarah
Jarosz and Cash’s ex-husband Rodney
Crowell—with whom Cash remains close and
whom Leventhal counts as a friend and
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 59
collaborator—to support the Johnny Cash
Boyhood Home. Leventhal stretches his long
legs for a moment as if to shake the memory
of the plane ride. A deep thinker, a native
New Yorker with a Southern heart, he exudes
a particular brand of calmness that makes
one feel safe, protected. From her perch in a
rolling office chair, Cash describes Memphis,
her birthplace, with reverence. After de-
cades of forming guitar chords and scrawling
hundreds of lyrics, her hands are works of
beauty, fingers crowned with plum-colored
nail polish. She possesses the graceful ease
of a soul who carries whole worlds within
herself. As she speaks, her skin and auburn
hair glow in the sunlight filtering in from the
garden outside.
Cash and Leventhal’s interplay is full of hu-
mor and gentle teasing. Framed by artifacts
of their craft—a mixing console and
desktop monitor, a wall of acoustic and
electric guitars, and even an autoharp
lurking near a window—they complete
each other’s sentences and interject with
clarifications. After thirty years, their
chemistry is still electric; it is no wonder
that few albums are as sensual as The
Wheel, their first collaboration.
“It was a very heightened experience,”
Cash says of making the record. “I think
by the end…we both knew that we were
headed for each other.”
She had recently made Interiors, her
spare, acoustic 1990 album that was
lauded by critics but underperformed
commercially. Columbia’s Nashville di-
vision failed to promote the album,
and after a period of soul searching
Cash requested a transfer to the New
York division, which promised to market
her music beyond a strict country format.
Along with this professional upheaval,
her thirteen-year marriage to fellow sing-
er-songwriter and producer Crowell, which
had produced three daughters and included
a stepdaughter, was coming to an end. At
thirty-six, she moved with her youngest
daughter to Manhattan.
“I had this sense of both being thrilled
about what was ahead of me and being dev-
astated in that moment. So there was this
unbelievable juxtaposition of something
new and thrilling, and being consumed by
it.” Then, she adds softly, casting a tender
glance at Leventhal, “And by him, you know.
He was in my thoughts constantly, and…just
everything else was broken apart.”
They had met briefly in Nashville when
Leventhal played on an album Crowell was
60 WINTER 2023
producing, and she was jolted with recog-
nition. Even before she left Music City, the
songs started coming. First, the delicate
“Sleeping in Paris,” which mourns a rela-
tionship reaching its conclusion: No one
sees and no one knows / but every day I’m
letting go.
Then came “The Wheel,” a song that Cash
says erupted. “I was doing something in the
house and I thought, ‘If I don’t go get by
myself and write down this song, I’m gonna
explode.’ And I did. I told the babysitter—I
said, ‘Just give me an hour. I have to go lock
myself in a room.’ And the whole song came
like that. That doesn’t happen very often.”
A hopeful, expansive song, with a narra-
tor who has experienced an awakening, it
marked a transformation from the shadowy
Interiors. “That song—everything changed.
Cash portrays love
as Ithaca,
a destination
requiring a journey
that will impart
lessons
to the traveler.
I suddenly kind of looked out again.”
When Leventhal heard Cash play these
songs, then still unrecorded, at New York’s
Town Hall during her Interiors tour, he was
struck by their quality and depth. “I could
tell there was a little vortex swirling around
her,” he says, gently, searching for the right
words to describe her state of mind. She
presented him with several songs and in-
vited him to write the music to them and,
ultimately, to produce an album. Leventhal
was intrigued and agreed to come aboard,
but only if she co-produced. After all, she had
helmed Interiors alone and had received the
sweet vindication of a Grammy nomination
for Best Contemporary Folk Recording.
The close, intimate confines of the studio
created “a lot of electricity.…There was a
lot of sexual tension and a lot of—just over-
whelming emotions. For me, anyway. I mean,
I know for him too, actually.” She laughs and
shoots Leventhal a saucy grin.
He throws up his hands in mock reproach.
“Too much for the readers of the Oxford
American!”
“Yeah, it was there and it was thick in the
air. I remember…towards the end of the re-
cord—we were mixing at this point, like a
lot had happened through the record—and
a friend of mine came by the studio and I
was sitting on his lap at the mixing board.”
The songs on The Wheel crackle with that
tension—lengthy days spent tracking vocals
and guitar parts; nights hovered over the
mixing board, their keen ears and creative
minds attuned to the music, to each other,
the proximity of their bodies. The title track,
which opens the album, is a declaration of a
love that refuses to recognize the bounds of
time. I am a river with a voice / I came
into your life by choice, Cash sings, ur-
gency piercing her supple voice. Framed
by Steuart Smith’s iconic, circular guitar
pattern, it sounds as if we are hearing
Cash step into her new life.
Throughout the album, fire recurs as a
force of change, renewal, and desire. On
“The Wheel,” it’s the flame in our souls
/ it will never burn out. “Change Part-
ners” sees a narrator confronting cosmic
upheaval: The heavens rain down fire /
the earth and moon conspire. “Fire of
the Newly Alive,” which she co-wrote
with Leventhal, scorches the listener
with its groove and erotic heat.
Using the elements, Cash portrays
love as Ithaca, a destination requiring
a journey that will impart lessons to the
traveler. Grounded by Leventhal’s more
earth-bound sensibilities and production,
she turns to the skies for portents, to the
wind for direction, to water for sustenance.
All along the way, the moon seems to gov-
ern it all. Love, Cash sings on “Sleeping in
Paris,” is just a lunar slave / it’s tied to the
ebb and flow.
Neither Cash nor Leventhal deem The
Wheel a perfect album. If they could go back
in time, the pair would strip down some of
the arrangements. Cash worries about her
vocals, that she didn’t sing as well as she
could have. Both admit to feeling pressure
from Columbia, which had sunk a great deal
of money into financing the album, to pro-
duce a hit.
When it was released in January 1993, The
Wheel met with a rapturous reception from
music critics. The video for the title track—a
medieval desert drama, replete with knights
and swords, which Cash confesses to being
mildly embarrassed by—received airplay
on VH1 and even CMT, despite the fact that
country radio had long turned its back on
her songs. There was hope that the single,
along with others that followed—“Seventh
Avenue,” “You Won’t Let Me In”—would make
the Adult Contemporary charts, but none
did. In the aftermath, Cash remembers sniff-
ing the wind and feeling that Columbia was
turning its attention and marketing dollars
to other acts on the label. She asked to be
released from her contract.
Yet The Wheel still found its audience.
There is the pair of foreign correspondents
who, Cash recalled, fell in love while listening
to the album as they were hunkered down in
Afghanistan, reporting on the radicals who
would soon become al-Qaeda. There are the
devotees who have expressed their ardor for
The Wheel on Cash’s social media outlets,
most recently when she announced the al-
bum’s re-release. The news prompted scores
of listeners to proclaim it one of their favorite
albums, with many connecting it to turning
points—falling in love, new incarnations of
themselves—in their lives. Some are doubt-
less the same fans who, over the years, have
regularly admonished Cash after shows and
in hastily written notes delivered backstage
for not including “The Wheel” in her setlist.
There are her fellow singer-songwriters, like
our mutual friend Allison Moorer, who have
pinpointed the album’s influence on their
own songwriting.
And then there’s me.
I f music can be metabolized, if it can nour-
ish us like a good pot of tea or a Southern
casserole, then there are few albums that
have fed me so well as The Wheel. I was almost
twelve when the album was released. That
afternoon, in the heart of Appalachian coal
country, I convinced my father to drive me
to the mall twelve miles away so I could buy
it with money I had saved from my weekly
allowance. The kind of boy who was reading
Shakespeare tragedies and Anne Boleyn bi-
ographies while others were obsessed with
Kentucky basketball, I had already purchased
the title track’s cassette single after seeing
the video. I sensed that the album, that Cash’s
songwriting and voice, could offer me some-
thing I so desperately needed: a vision of how
my life might unfold beyond the conservative
confines of southeastern Kentucky.
The Wheel knew me; it intuited what I
needed then and what I would need in the
62 WINTER 2023
years to come. Although I hadn’t named it, I
was already a writer, and The Wheel affirmed
it was permissible to love and worry over lan-
guage without apology. There was something
else I couldn’t yet bring myself to name: I
was gay. The region’s fundamentalist culture
discouraged any discussion or exploration
of carnal desire, and Cash’s songs provided
a more literate and sophisticated rendering
than anything I heard on pop radio. The al-
bum encouraged me to question, to doubt. It
told me I could change, that I would change,
and it prepared me with the knowledge that
I would have to leave my place of origin to
find personal and creative freedom.
Later, as I began to come out at twen-
ty-three and felt as if I were awakening from
a nightmare of denial, Cash’s opening lines
of the title track articulated the question I
was cradling inside my chest: How long was
I asleep? Even now, the remarkable lines of
the third verse—the truth moves through
us / even when we sleep—send a current of
knowing down my arms. To this day, I have
an unwavering belief that to recognize me,
to really know me, you have to understand
my devotion to The Wheel.
I’m not alone in this attachment. Over
the years, Cash has been astounded by the
number of gay men who have told her how
much they cherish The Wheel. One man, who
recorded a cover of the ballad “The Truth
about You,” pointed her to this verse from
the song:
I know the truth about you babe
Where you’ve fallen, where you stand
Where your walls still come between us
Where you take it like a man
“He said he just loved that line, take it
like a man. That really meant something to
him. But I think it was the elemental stuff,
really—not just the nature metaphors, but
like that feeling of transformation.”
Leventhal agrees. “There’s this thing in
the record about searching, battling to get
to this place and sort of declaring, like, Fuck
it, this is it—”
“This is who I am,” Cash interjects.
“So many gay men have had to traverse
that same territory,” Leventhal says. “It al-
ways kind of made sense to me…the deep
femininity of the record was there. It’s prob-
ably the most feminine record she’d ever
made.…But I think beyond that, it’s the quest
for a complicated identity [and discovering]
who you are.”
T he Wheel ends with “If There’s a God
on My Side,” a song about a woman
walking a pilgrim’s path. Everything around
her is new, and though certain about the
need for the journey, she is nonetheless un-
sure of her direction. Thirty years later, Cash
remains a seeker. But her course has long
since been assured. Beyond anything else,
this might be The Wheel’s enduring legacy:
The quality of the record’s songwriting set
Cash on the path to being counted among
the nation’s finest songwriters, worthy of
mention in the same breath as Joni Mitchell,
Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen,
and, of course, Cash’s father.
A few days after we talked, Cash reunited
with Pamela Springsteen for another photo
shoot at Bethesda Terrace. After revisiting
The Wheel through the remastering pro-
cess, the session must have felt like a reunion
with Cash’s younger self—the woman who
was, she wrote then, changing like a girl /
on the threshold of her life. The shoot was
“thrilling,” Cash says. “I felt proud that I’d
persisted this long, to see the return of The
Wheel after thirty years.”
As she recreated poses beneath the an-
gel’s gaze, Cash says she “felt the passage
of time weighing on me at some moments.”
When she stared out of the tunnel beneath
the terrace, as she had in a photo from the
original shoot, “[it] felt bittersweet…like
looking into the future.”
With the steady Leventhal by her side,
it is assured. Over the past few years, the
pair has been collaborating on a planned
Broadway musical adaptation of Norma
Rae, the beloved 1979 film about a Southern
woman organizing a union—which, Cash
observes, remains timely. Another record
is in the works, and in February, Leventhal
will release his debut solo album on their
new label.
After our interview, I reached out to Cash.
I had a follow-up question about a couple
of lines from “The Wheel” that have long
held special resonance for me: just to know
the question / is good enough for me. They
seemed to echo Rilke’s advice to the young
poet—to learn to love the questions rather
than the answers—and I wondered how that
might relate to how she practices her craft.
“I try to start as a beginner with every
new work,” she replied. “I don’t want to be
an expert. Curiosity feeds everything I do.”
As I read her words, I couldn’t help but
think: All these years later, Rosanne Cash is
still ablaze.
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 The
Final Gift A New Traditional
BY D O M F L E M O N S

A letter came to Marie’s door

That had sailed from across the sea
Sent by her true love saying
Love, come rendezvous with me
come rendezvous with me

Now she jumped on her golden horse

And rode it across the land
All through the rugged countryside
The reins gripped in her hands
the reins gripped in her hands

And as she rode on through the streets

Her beauty graced the scene
All passersby took her to be
The image of a queen
the image of a queen

She reached the dock and said

I will cross the raging sea
The captain laughed and told her
Miss that depends upon your fee
that depends upon your fee

If you can promise me a crew

That can be both true and bold
Then you will be rewarded
And she tossed him a bag of gold
she tossed him a bag of gold

They sailed across the waves

Where the sun meets the sky
She stood boldfaced and watched the moon
As another day gone by
as another day gone by

And when they reached the land

She rode up to her true love’s door
And there she met with a terrible sight
That shocked her to the core
that shocked her to the core

64 WINTER 2023
 He lay sick in his silken sheets
With riches around his bed
He said to Marie to her surprise
In the morning I’ll be dead
love, in the morning I’ll be dead

He’d grown so thin his head flopped down

And his tears began to flow
My rambling ways never told you
How much I loved you so
how much I loved you so

She spoke composed with tiny tears

Racing across her eyes
Here’s the ring you gave me
When we last walked side by side
when we last walked side by side

My necklace has nine fine pearls

For each year you’ve been gone
When you took away your silver voice
And your melancholy song
your melancholy song

She then took off her emerald brooch and said

Take this gift from me
It’s like the green grass meadow
On the day I set you free
the day I set you free

She threw her arms around his neck

She made her final plea
And off he slipped into the night
As if he’d gone to sleep
as if he’d gone to sleep

And she returned back to her ship

Clutching her weeping heart
She turned her eyes up to the rain
As the clouds began to part
as the clouds began to part

Saying If I stare toward heaven

And see the lightning flashing high
Then I will know that it’s my true love
Calling me to his side
yes, a-calling me to his side

And they rode and rode on the raging sea

And an unforgiving wind
Capsized the ship with a mighty wave
And she was never seen again
Marie was never seen again

Littoral Drift #48 (Tower Beach, Hilton Head, SC 06.13.13, Three Waves, Dipped and Buried), a dynamic cyanotype by Meghann Riepenhoff © The artist.
Courtesy the artist and Yossi Milo, New York. Riepenhoff’s monograph, Ice, was published in 2022 by Radius Books and Yossi Milo Gallery. OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 65
N E W E P I S O D E S O U T N O W !

Photo: Walker Evans, 1936, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

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 P R E S E N T S

GOOD

LIVING
GOOD

READING
GOOD

TAST I N G
GOOD

LISTENING
Winter is the season to celebrate, reflect,
and be thankful for all we have.
The following pages will provide
some ideas on where to enjoy special times
with family and friends.

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BECOME THE

LEADER YOU’RE MEANT TO BE

millsaps.edu

A P R I L 5 J U L Y 2 0

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A SONG
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 OPEN NOW

FREE ADMISSION
1000 Rosa L. Parks Blvd.
615.741.2692 TNMuseum.org
Photos courtesy of Tennessee State Library &
Archives and Library of Congress
 G O O D L I V I N G , G O O D R E A D I N G , G O O D TA S T I N G , G O O D L I S T E N I N G

The New York Times bestseller is now in paperback!

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New from the University Press of Mississippi

Available at your local bookseller. upress.state.ms.us

MONUMENT
November 10, 2023 - March 31, 2024

Radcliffe Bailey, Sonya Clark, Willie Cole,

Stephen Hayes, Juan Logan, Alison Saar,
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Kara Walker
and others.

CameronArtMuseum.org
3201 S 17th Street • Wilmington, NC 28412
(910) 395-5999

Image Credit (Front): Kara Walker, Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta from the portfolio Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), 2005. Offset lithograph
and screenprint on paper, edition 35/35, 39 × 53 inches (99.1 × 134.6 cm). Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Museum purchase with funds
provided by Monica M. and Richard D. Segal, the Neely Family, and Barbra and Andrew Rothschild, 2006.7.1.12. © Kara Walker. Photo by Peter Paul Geoffrion.

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 The
Middle Eight A BALLADS SONGBOOK

Misty-eyed dreamers. Reluctant romantics. Doomed antiheroes. Heartbreakers, and

the owners of the broken hearts. Whether protagonists in a grisly plot or narrators of
an epic love, these are the sorts of folks who populate great ballads.
In this songbook—named for the pivotal section of the thirty-two-bar form, or
ballad form, where the lyric shifts and the music transcends—eight writers celebrate
how these characters and composers, with their private confessions and messy
motivations, reflect and transform the stories we tell—and sing—about ourselves.

Warm Leatherette, 2019, acrylic on canvas, by Abe Odedina. Courtesy Ed Cross Fine Art, London, and the artist. Photograph by Alan Roderick OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 75
 The cosmic collision
of Roberta Flack
and Donny Hathaway
BY
Ashawnta
Jackson

76 WINTER 2023
Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway performing on BBC TV, 1973 © Michael Putland/Getty Images OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 77
 T
here’s something called a kilonova, when two
fast-moving stars collide with one another. It
creates a brilliant light, brighter than anything
each body alone could create. Physicist Albert
Sneppen called it a perfect explosion because
of the “simplicity of the shape” and its “physical significance.”
And maybe that’s what made 1972’s Roberta Flack and Donny
Hathaway so special. It was something so simple, in its way: two
former Howard University students finding the musical force of
each other impossible to resist, colliding to create something so
78 WINTER 2023
bright, so beautiful, so heavy in its significance, that even now,
some fifty years later, all we can do is marvel at its weight and
let its brightness cover us.
There is something cosmic about this pairing. The way their
voices slide, tease, intertwine. Playing off each other in ways that
feel both sharply studied and effortless. There is something about
the way love flows between the two, letting it touch everyone in its
presence. This wasn’t just an album for them, this was an album
for us. “Black artists have a total sound and culture that sets their
work apart from others,” Hathaway told an interviewer in 1972.
Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway, 1972 © Jim Marshall Photography LLC

Music helped us find our way to freedom, a spiritual guiding
feet northward. It helped build churches, powerful spaces of
resistance where music helped steel the soul and the body for
the fight ahead. And in 1960s and ’70s America, Black music was
transforming not just the way others saw us but the way we saw
ourselves. For Flack, her music represented not just a display
of her talent but her contribution to this ever-growing fight for
rights. “As strongly as I believe in the black struggle,” Flack once
told an interviewer, “I know that my best bet is to express this
through music.” And for Hathaway, Black music was at the center
of American musical culture, and like it was for Flack, his way
to contribute. His songs displayed this passion, including “The
Ghetto” (“I felt it was a song that all Black people could relate to,”
Hathaway wrote in the liner notes of his 1973 album Extension of
a Man) and “Someday We’ll All Be Free,” a song that represents
a promise, a devotion, an eternal hope.
Their music, together and separately, was a defiance and a
rejection, but it was also an assertion: We see you. They saw the
shifting hues of Blackness in its beautiful arrays. They saw that
there was value, and spirit, and love in all of it. And then, as now,
80 WINTER 2023
Black love was a radical act. Their album of
duets, each track, each in its own way, explored
the fragility, the contentedness, the softness,
the hurt, the complexity, and the simplicity of
love. This wasn’t just a musical action, it was
a political one.
But maybe the one track that is most defiant,
most steadfast in its refusal to accept things as
they are, is “Be Real Black for Me,” a track writ-
ten by Flack, Hathaway, and songwriter Charles
Mann. It’s an album track, deep on the first side.
Not so much buried as discoverable, a treasure
waiting for you. The song is a celebration:
Your hair, soft and crinkly
Your body, strong and stately
Not only does it celebrate what Blackness is,
it celebrates what it is not. You don’t have to
wear false charms, Hathaway croons. You don’t
have to search and roam, Flack responds. It’s
not just that each is safe with one another. It’s a
rejection of the expectations society has placed
on this love, and a reflection on the ethos of
revolutionary Black art.
In a 1971 interview with Ebony, Flack said,
“I like to say that two preachers came from
Black Mountain [North Carolina]. Billy Gra-
ham and I. He’s preaching in his way and I’m
preaching my way.” And for me, a failed church
girl who, for a part of my life, was made to sit
on worn pews in an effort to save my soul, I
understand. Religion, at least in the way that
my parents hoped for, didn’t stick. It wasn’t the
words that kept echoing in my head, it was the music. I love the
way a hymn can make me feel, like a soft breeze on warm skin.
A whispered affirmation. And once I realized that music—any
kind—can feel holy and sacred, I knew I’d found my religion. I
found it in notes and hooks and soulful choruses. I found it in a
voice bending a note, sustaining it, caressing it. Preach, Roberta,
preach. Give your sermon of star-crossed lovers, hopeless roman-
tics, and joyful noises. I believe. “I think music does save you,”
she told Essence magazine in 1989. “[The arts] can save your life
if you’re able to reach out and touch them and hold on.”
We may not all be able to hold on, but when Flack’s voice
finally met Hathaway’s, these two stellar beings, moving faster
and faster toward each other, it felt like the universe was be-
coming something understandable, something graspable. “I’ve
never stopped being amazed at Roberta,” Hathaway told Blues
& Soul. And in this album, in “Be Real Black for Me,” we can feel
that amazement, and a shared wonder of being in each other’s
presence, in each other’s creation.
Two stars hurtling toward one another, toward perfection.
And for one electrifying moment, the collision was blinding.
Concert Flier, Sunday, September 16, 1981. Courtesy the Maynard Jackson Mayoral
Administrative Records at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library
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 Ballads by Request
Sid Hemphill and “The Strayhorn Mob”
by Jim O’Neal

lan Lomax, the world’s most famous and
prolific ballad and folksong collector and
researcher, called the fife and drum mu-
sic of Sid Hemphill’s band—the first ever
recorded by an African American group,
in 1942—“the main find of my whole ca-
reer.” The local fife and drum tradition
dated back before Hemphill’s birth in the 1870s and has lived
on in the hill country of North Mississippi ever since, led pri-
marily by men who made their own fifes from bamboo cane.
The most notable have been Napolian Strickland and Otha
Turner, who had both been playing for decades before making
their first recordings in 1967. Turner’s granddaughter Sharde
Thomas, now thirty-three, carries on the legacy in impressive

Sid Hemphill (with quills) and Lucius Smith (with banjo) on Hemphill's porch, Senatobia, MS, 1959. From the Alan
82 WINTER 2023 Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Courtesy the Association for Cultural Equity
 fashion today, incorporating modern
blues, soul, and hip-hop into her per-
formances alongside her vibrant fife
tunes. Hemphill’s granddaughter Jessie
Mae played drums in such outfits and
became world renowned in the 1980s
and ’90s as a blues singer-guitarist. Sid
Hemphill, who Lomax called “the blind
musical maestro” and “the boar-hog
musician of the hills,” played many
instruments, including fife, panpipes,
fiddle, guitar, drums, and mandolin,
all of which he made himself—even
the drums. He possessed an expansive
repertoire.
Lomax and his research partner Lewis
Jones recorded Hemphill at a hot, dusty
summer picnic near Sledge, Mississippi,
at the conclusion of a 1941–42 Library
of Congress–Fisk University project
that would go down in blues history
for capturing the first recordings of
Muddy Waters and a historic juke joint
performance by Waters’s idol Son House.
Fisk professor and musicologist John W.
Work III was a crucial contributor to this
study, but as it happened, he did not join
Lomax and Jones for the Hemphill re-
cording—though he did later transcribe
some of the songs.
While much of Hemphill’s music
had been passed down through gen-
erations, one genre was distinctly of
his own crafting: narrative ballads he
composed by request. Ballads were the
gems Alan Lomax and his father John A. Lomax had prospected
for in their years of fieldwork, and Hemphill “was a ballad maker
as protean as Woody Guthrie,” Lomax wrote in his 1993 book The
Land Where the Blues Began.
The ballads Hemphill recorded were all set to the same basic
music and brisk tempo, with Hemphill on vocals and fiddle,
accompanied by Lucius Smith on banjo and kazoo, Alec Askew
on guitar, and Will Head on bass drum. All were men in their
fifties and sixties who came up in an era that predated the blues,
which only started to be recognized as a distinct genre around
1910. Hemphill could play what are now known as “blues ballads,”
such as “Stack o’ Lee” (aka “Stagolee” or “Stagger Lee,” corrup-
tions of the name Stacker Lee), “John Henry,” and “Frankie and
Albert” (popularized as “Frankie and Johnny”). It’s important to
note that the term “blues ballad” in later years often referred to
the romantic, pensive, or sentimental songs crooned by Bobby
“Blue” Bland, Ivory Joe Hunter, and Lonnie Johnson, among oth-
ers. But there was nothing sweet or soft about Hemphill’s ballad
songs. Neither were they slow or relaxed. They were set to lively
dance tempos—like the back-country hoedowns that both Black
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OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 83
 and white string bands once played throughout the South. Still,
what truly set Hemphill apart were his original ballads. He was so
renowned in the region that both Black and white locals came to
him to commission songs about the deeds and misdeeds of them-
selves or others, or about events worth memorializing. Though the
songs were composed several decades earlier, Hemphill had no
trouble reeling off verse after verse with fresh enthusiasm when
he recorded for Lomax and Jones, his gruff vocals occasionally
elevating to a holler as he sawed on his fiddle.
“The Carrier Railroad” or “Carrier Line” described the wreck
of a train on the Sardis & Delta Railroad owned by lumber baron
Robert Carrier and Carrier’s dispute with the engineer he blamed.
“The Roguish Man” was composed for a Black ex-convict known
as Jack Castle who wanted his life in crime celebrated. Hemphill
recalled Castle exclaiming, “By God, make one ’bout me now,
what I done!” The most historically intriguing piece, however,
was “The Strayhorn Mob.”
Hemphill said he and “a buddy” (unnamed) composed “The
Strayhorn Mob” at the request of Sam Howell, one of the accused
troublemakers in a mob that stormed the jail in Senatobia on
April 12, 1905. They aimed to lynch a prisoner, Jim Whitt, who
had killed Buster Thomason with a double-barreled shotgun on
Christmas Eve of 1903. The incident made national news when
Sheriff J. M. Poag stood his ground at the jail and was shot and
killed by one of the mob, which was composed of relatives and
friends of Thomason’s from the Strayhorn community of Tate
County, according to newspaper reports. Whitt, a recent arrival in
the area, had confronted Thomason, who, according to testimony
reported in Memphis’s Commercial Appeal, “had made some
remarks that he was having a good time with all the ladies on a
certain road. Jim Whitt, hearing of this, believed that Thomason
was on familiar terms with his wife.” Whitt was sentenced to hang
at first, but the Mississippi Supreme Court granted him a new
trial, which prompted the Thomason crew to take matters into
their own hands. Whitt was sent to a jail in Jackson for safety, and
when thirteen men of the mob were indicted for Sheriff Poag’s
murder, those who surrendered or could be rounded up also were
dispersed to jails in other counties, with tension running high
among the townsfolk of Senatobia. The New York Times called
upon Senatobia to erect a monument to honor Poag’s heroism.
Some of the indicted Strayhorners, who had fled the scene of
the crime, spent time in jail awaiting their trials, but in the end,
none were convicted, to the particular dismay of one judge who,
according to a dispatch to New Orleans’s Times-Picayune, admon-
ished his jury, “You have disregarded your oaths and trampled
the law under your feet.” Whitt was found guilty a second time,
but on another appeal he was set free on grounds of self-defense,
returning to his former home in Alabama with relief in 1907.
All the principals in this saga were white, and most were de-
scribed as prominent citizens, although one early report in the
Jackson Evening News alleged that there were “nine persons
under arrest, five of them being white and four negroes.” Hemphill
named several of the mob members, including Sam Howell, who
was wounded in the fracas, in his ballad, but that was public
information, since those indicted had all been identified in news-
84 WINTER 2023
paper reports. (Lomax, by the way, misunderstood most of these
names; the spellings here are from contemporary newspaper
accounts, and the transcriptions are my own.) Hemphill sang of
the shooting and the mob’s flight to escape, and he accurately and
concisely depicted the circumstances of their trials. His verses
included the following:
Them boys around Strayhorn, they didn’t have no job
Went to Senatobi [sic] to head up a mob
Some walked ’round the jailhouse, stopped in at the gate
Some of ’em made a shot with a .38
When they talk about some runnin’ big boys, runnin’ just
like wheels
Oughta been there to see them run, seen Mister Will Sin-
quefield
Well, they’re talkin’ ’bout that mob, hadn’t been nary a
one since
Talkin’ ’bout Mister Hunter when he jumped the court-
house fence
The Strayhorn boys, tell the boys, tell you all a certain fact
The hounds got on the tracks and they brought the boys back
When they tried the Strayhorn boys they did not try ’em here
Tried the boys most everywhere but they all sho’ come clear
When they tried the Strayhorn boys did not try ’em alone
Tried the boys most everywhere but they sure come home.
True to his words, the defendants were tried in groups, not
alone, and at courthouses in other towns, not in Senatobia. In
typical deference of the times, Hemphill called them all “Mister”
in his ballad—Mister Sam Howell, Mister Hunter, Mister Norman
Clayton, Mister Will Sinquefield. Oddly enough, he told Lomax
he couldn’t remember the name of J. M. Poag, the sheriff who
took a .38 slug, and never named him in the ballad. Poag’s fate
is echoed throughout the song, though, in the refrains “They
laid him low.”
Hemphill imbued his ballads, even those about serious topics,
with a certain playful lightheartedness. His stories served not
only as oral histories but as vehicles to entertain and amuse and
to propel dancing feet in the Mississippi hills. His 1942 recordings
remained unissued for decades but have since been released
on various LPs and CDs, and his entire session is available on
YouTube. He died in 1961 after recording a few more songs for
Lomax in 1959—but no ballads, which had been consigned to
the distant past, never to be heard by most Black Mississippians
who had long since tuned in to blues, soul, disco, funk, jazz, hip-
hop, or gospel. The city never built a memorial to its murdered
sheriff, despite all the furor of the times, and it was Sid Hemphill
who was honored with a historical marker in Senatobia, placed
by the Mississippi Blues Trail in 2017.
 A F R E E MU SE UM I N T HE F R EN C H Q UAR T ER

SEE THE CULTURE

AND HISTORY THAT
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 Lost in Love
How “I Can't Make You Love Me” became a modern standard

by Annie Zaleski
hen relationships collapse,
it isn’t always due to one
explosive act or a sud-
den rupture. Sometimes,
the separation happens
gradually over time—so
gradually that when the
ending does arrive, the
realization feels like a dull ache, not an emotional sucker punch.
That’s the underlying premise of “I Can’t Make You Love Me,”
which chronicles a couple spending one last night together
before one person initiates a breakup. The song is considered a
modern standard, with the best-known version by Bonnie Raitt
on 1991’s Luck of the Draw. After her take came covers by Prince,
Carrie Underwood, Bon Iver, Adele, Aretha Franklin, Boyz II Men,
Tank, and many others. The song’s appeal comes from vulnera-
bility—there’s no sugarcoating the sadness and despair over the
relationship ending—and its inclusive approach.
Written from the perspective of the partner proposing the
split, “I Can’t Make You Love Me” is permeated by an agonizing
sense of resignation and isolation. The narrator realizes that their
partner isn’t in love anymore and forcing affection just won’t
work: “’Cause I can’t make you love me if you don’t / You can’t
make your heart feel something it won’t.” The latter line scans as
hard-fought acceptance: The narrator is repeating this as if it’s a
therapeutic mantra they’ve finally internalized.
That doesn’t mean splitting up is easy. In the first verse, the
narrator tries to quash any doubts they’re having (“Turn down
these voices inside my head”) so they can rest. But they also long
for a peaceful final night with their partner, free of discord and
deceit (“Lay down with me, tell me no lies”); in fact, they repeat
the plea “Don’t patronize me” twice for good measure, demanding
respect despite the chill between them. Furthermore, the song’s
chorus aches with poignant longing for what might have been,
had the relationship not become so one-sided: “I will lay down
my heart and I’ll feel the power / But you won’t—no, you won’t.”

86 WINTER 2023 Bonnie Raitt, 1980 © George Rose/Getty Images

 The twist of “I Can’t Make You Love Me” is that it’s unclear
whether both people in the relationship realize what the morning
will bring. The second verse especially vacillates between deep
pain born from a lack of affection (“I'll close my eyes, then I won’t
see / The love you don’t feel when you’re holdin’ me”) and the
knowledge that relinquishing the relationship is ultimately for
the best. The partner is dreading breaking the news, even though
they need one last night before they throw in the towel and end
things on their own terms: “Just give me till then to give up this
fight / And I will give up this fight.”
Throughout, the lyrics pointedly don’t indicate the gender of
either person, making the song universal and relatable, with that
ambiguity extending to interpretations of “I Can’t Make You Love
Me.” In another reading of the song, the narrator has realized
that their reluctant partner is about to walk away—the very next
morning. As a result, the lyrics represent an inner monologue
centered around preparing for this imminent departure, and
bracing for what’s sure to be a painful breakup.
“I Can’t Make You Love Me,” co-written by Mike Reid and
Allen Shamblin, has distinct Southern ties. A prolific and
decorated composer, Shamblin was raised in Texas near Houston
and has written (or co-written) songs cut by Randy Travis (“He
Walked on Water”), George Strait (“Poison”), and Miranda Lambert
(“The House That Built Me”). Reid took a more circuitous route to
Nashville. Although he earned a bachelor’s in music from Penn State
in 1969 and then played piano for the Utah Symphony Orchestra
and others, he put the arts on the back burner for a professional
football career. In his five years with the Cincinnati Bengals, he
was a two-time Pro Bowl defensive tackle. After retiring in 1974, he
returned to music and enjoyed similar success, winning a Grammy
for co-writing Ronnie Milsap’s “Stranger in My House.”
The songwriting duo spent months trying to perfect “I Can’t
Make You Love Me,” first envisioning it as a brisk bluegrass song.
“Ricky Skaggs was having hits at the time and I thought, ‘That
sounds like a Ricky Skaggs idea,’” Reid told Stereogum. Lyrical-
ly, the song grew from a newspaper article in the Tennessean
about a man whose alcohol dependence issues led to him getting
divorced. As quoted in the article, his response was: “You can’t
make a damn woman love you if she don’t.”
Drawing on that quip, the songwriters developed the two
main chorus lines but had trouble finishing it. “It’s interesting,
because no matter what we did, we couldn’t get it any further
than that,” Reid told Stereogum. “So, we would stop and move
on to another song. But we would always come back to it.” As it
turns out, Reid’s piano background came into play as “I Can’t
Make You Love Me” came together. “One day, he said, ‘Come
up to the living room,’ where his piano was,” Shamblin told the
Tennessean. “He sat down and started playing this melody, and
it was one of the most moving pieces of music I’d heard.”
Indeed, as “I Can’t Make You Love Me” starts, the melody imme-
diately cascades downward—the aural equivalent of feeling glum
and downtrodden—and unfolds with subtle moments of sighing
hesitation. The melody continues to languish in this gloomy state,
drawing listeners into the melancholy in a visceral, profound way.
It’s no wonder Raitt wanted to record the song upon hearing just
a demo: “I knew it was a really special song and the most special
one I was going to be able to record.”
D espite such specific origins, some artists saw the message
of “I Can’t Make You Love Me” as a challenge. For example,
Prince recorded a cover in 1996, retitled “ Can’t Make U Love
Me” and reimagined as a sultry slow jam with extra lyrics refer-
encing romance and sex. Rather than a final goodbye, his version
envisions one last seduction that might lead to reconciliation.
Prince is an outlier, however, as Bonnie Raitt’s soulful take on
“I Can’t Make You Love Me” hews closely to the lyrical themes. A
Top 20 pop hit upon release in 1991, this version regularly makes
lists of the greatest songs of all time and is in the Grammy Hall
of Fame. The appeal is easy to see: Raitt sounds both somber and
reverential, as if she’s sending off the relationship with a loving
eulogy. Fittingly, her vocals were done in one take. “I didn’t have
a rule about it being one take, it’s just that we put so much into
making that moment very special that there wasn’t any reason to
do it again,” she told Stereogum. “Plus, I [sic] took me a minute to
recover from how sad it was.” The song’s piano accompaniment,
from Virginia native Bruce Hornsby, is evocative and elegiac,
threading through the despair with sensitivity.
Raitt’s unadorned approach became a blueprint for a sparse,
folky 2011 version by the indie artist Bon Iver and an equally
moving 2023 take by Iam Tongi, the winner of American Idol’s
Season 21. A 2011 live version by Adele also exudes seriousness.
Although known for her vocal power, she honors Raitt’s original
by employing a more nuanced, smoky delivery; in her telling
of the song, the sadness is overwhelming and numbing. When
Carrie Underwood tried out for American Idol, she also wowed
the judges with a more understated take on the song, bringing
a hint of gospel to an a cappella performance.
Several r&b versions of the song also amplify the melancholy at
the song’s core. George Michael released a meditative version in
1997 that became a massive UK hit, reaching No. 3 on the singles
chart, while Tank cut an equally ruminative solo piano version in
2010. Both versions are particularly meaningful: Each man’s voice
shoulders the song’s sadness. Michael especially emphasizes the
line “You can’t make your heart feel something it won’t,” bringing
another meaning to the lyric: He’s not imagining saying this to his
partner but to himself. Tank, meanwhile, often slips into delicate
falsetto, lending fragility to the scenario described in the lyrics.
But it’s the lesser-known versions of “I Can’t Make You Love Me”
that offer even more nuance. Elysia Crampton, who has also re-
corded as E+E, interpreted the song in a deconstructed way under
the title “Fire Gut.” She takes contributions from the Houston-based
vocalist Lashay—who sings the lyrics with a keening ache—and
shrouds her voice in a disorienting sound tornado: dreamy guitar,
shimmering percussion, disorienting found sounds, electronic
diffraction. The song sounds like it’s slowly burning up in a crack-
ling house fire, as it disintegrates and becomes submerged in the
noise as it progresses. It’s a rather literal interpretation of the split
described in “I Can’t Make You Love Me”—but it’s as emotional
and enduring as the versions representing a clean break.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 87
 Smile with the Sad
The hopeful melancholy of Project Pat’s “Life We Live”
by Ben Dandridge-Lemco
nyone who follows Patrick Houston, bet-
ter known as Project Pat, on Instagram
will know that the Memphis rapper has
spent the last few years visiting jails and
prisons to preach the Gospel to the incar-
cerated. Best known in popular culture
for his often-sampled and interpolated
2001 single “Chickenhead”—and for his
visceral tales of street life in North Memphis—Pat began his path
into prison ministry by asking God for guidance.
“People say, ‘God got something for everybody to do but, if
you don’t seek Him out, you’ll never know,’” he explained in a
2021 interview with a Memphis pastor. “The Lord told me: ‘Go
back in there.’”
Pat had already served three years of a nine-year sentence for
aggravated robbery by the time he released his debut album,
Ghetty Green, in 1999. But many years before that, he was saved at
his father’s church on Jackson Avenue. His father, an evangelical
Baptist pastor, instilled in him a belief in heaven and hell. In the
church, he saw members of his father’s congregation putting
blocks of government cheese on the offering plate. Outside, in
the Hollywood neighborhood of North Memphis, he saw poverty
and desperation, but he also saw the money some of the men
around him were making through crack sales: the Lexus cars
they drove and the gold chains they wore. Faced with a pious
life of going without and the perilous road of something more,
88 WINTER 2023 Project Pat performing at the Beale Street Music Festival, May 2022 © Patrick Lantrip/The Daily Memphian
he made an easy choice.
It was Pat’s younger brother, Three 6 Mafia’s Juicy J, who
showed him a third route. Driving J around one day in the early
’90s, dropping off his brother’s mixtapes at stereo stores around
the city, Pat watched as J collected more than $20,000 in a
matter of hours. Pat has never been shy about saying he got into
the rap game for the money—he’s said as much in nearly every
interview he’s ever done. It’s tempting to feel disappointed at this
admission, as if every artist’s craft should come from a divine
spark of inspiration. But this point of view has always been part
of Pat’s appeal; he was at once an everyman and a neighborhood
superstar. He taught himself how to rap by listening to nursery
rhyme CDs and replacing the words. He took sayings from the
pimps around the city and infused his music with their ism and
their cadence. He told the story of his robbery arrest, and the
revenge fantasies it evoked, on Ghetty Green’s “528-CASH.” When
he rapped, he was to be believed.
As he told one interviewer: “I’m gonna either rap about some-
thing I know, something I been through, or something I know
that happened.”
In his 2003 book Stagolee Shot Billy, author and educator
Cecil Brown traces the lineage of one of America’s most popular
and enduring ballads: the story of a St. Louis pimp who shot and
killed another man in a barroom argument. The ballad has been
present in nearly every form of American music, from jazz to rock
& roll to rap. Among the folksong’s multitude of influences on
rap, Brown notes, are its creation of an archetypical Black folk
hero (one that the ballad initially imprinted in Black cinema of
the ’70s) and—in a shift that took place during its performance in
the 1960s and ’70s—a change in narration from the third person
to the first person, which would become the genre’s staple. “The
audience sees through the eyes of the character the rapper cre-
ates,” Brown writes. “It is the ‘I’ that makes the bridge between
the ‘I’ of the rapper and the ‘I’ of the character.”
Project Pat’s first-person perspective brought his listeners onto
the streets of a city where it seemed like death and betrayal lurked
around every corner. The details of his stories, and the details of
his own life, were part of a larger shift in rap’s narration toward
a singular “I” of perceived authenticity. In a 2013 interview, he
credited the success of his Ghetty Green follow-up Mista Don’t
Play: Everythangs Workin, released in 2001, to the fact that he
had left his past behind him. “I spoke in more details, because
stuff had been over with and I was coming out of that street life
and leaving it alone,” he said.
In this way, Pat helped advance a rap archetype that persists
and pervades today—one that extends through Gucci Mane, the
progenitor of Southern rap’s stylistic dominance
throughout the 2010s, who has cited Pat as one
of his main inspirations: the rapper who’s not
really a rapper, who puts their experiences over
a beat in the hopes of immediately changing the
circumstances they find themselves in.
M ista Don’t Play: Everythangs Workin is
the pinnacle of Project Pat’s catalog. By
his second album, he had mastered the sylla-
ble-extending flow and cinematic storytelling
that made him stand out even among Three 6
Mafia’s dark world of rappers and affiliates. There
are buoyant, set-claiming chants; vivid details of
licks gone awry; pimp anthems; weed homages;
and some of the most ominous and forceful beats that DJ Paul
and Juicy J ever produced. Pat balances out his hard edges, and
his creative descriptions of causing bodily harm, with his sense
of humor; the violence of “Gorilla Pimp” is somewhat offset by
the back-and-forth playfulness of “Chickenhead.” Only Pat could
make yelling “Bawk, bawk, chicken, chicken” sound as glorious
as it does.
And then there’s “Life We Live,” the thirteenth song on the
album, which strikes a noticeably different tone than the rest
of Mista Don’t Play. As the strings and bells rise and fall, Pat
wonders how he was able to “survive all this foolishness off in
the street” and reflects on the recent death of his cousin, who
Pat says was judged unfairly during his life. He makes more ex-
plicit references to God—the “only one who I’m fearing”—and
the Bible than he does anywhere else in his catalog, offering the
story of Lazarus’s resurrection as a counterpoint to those who
think they’re invincible in the streets.
In the vast majority of his songs, Pat is always on the front
foot, even when confronted with treachery and the confines of
prison. On “Life We Live,” however, he allows for small moments
Photo courtesy Patrick Houston and Go Foundation
of vulnerability that permeate the song. It’s not that Pat breaks
character, but, alongside aggression and confidence, there are
other emotions: pangs of regret, extensions of gratitude, words
of encouragement. The simple truth of the hook—“This life we
live / See it’s oh so beautiful”—is revealed through the plaintive
chord progression: Often, this world is anything but beautiful,
yet there’s so much in it that makes life worth living.
L istening to Project Pat may have granted voyeuristic
access to a sinister side of Memphis, but it also brought the
city’s language into a tradition where it could be repeated and
repurposed. His early-aughts ascent led to more than a few go-go
versions of his songs in the D.C. area. In recent years, Pat’s lyrics
and cadences have shown up in songs by some of rap’s biggest
names: J. Cole, Drake, and Cardi B. In true contextless fashion
of the 2020s internet, samples from his verses and hooks can be
heard as the backbone to an electronic subgenre coming out of
Eastern Europe known as “phonk.”
“Life We Live” is not one of Pat’s storytelling raps—“We Can
Get Gangsta” is his premier example of that strain—and it’s not
one of his often-sampled or interpolated classics.
But the song might have hinted at a nuanced “I”
that was part of Pat’s lineage from the beginning.
In Pat’s verses, we’re taken out of the cunning
internal monologue that characterizes so much
of his music. The tempo slows slightly, the sounds
of the melody are softer, and reactionary actions
are replaced with emotions. Pat asks us to have
some faith in ourselves and, when we don’t know
the way, in a higher power.
The song’s melody and chorus are lifted from
“Oh So Beautiful,” the last song on the last album
Curtis Mayfield ever made. Paralyzed from the
neck down after he was hit by a falling lighting
rig during a 1990 performance in Brooklyn, May-
field recorded 1996’s New World Order one line at a time, lying
on his back so air could more easily flow into his lungs. Like
“Life We Live,” the original song dwells in the ups, downs, and
in-betweens. There’s an overarching melancholy and a feeling
of hope. As Mayfield sings, “To see the sun do shine / You gotta
come out sometimes.”
On the third verse of “Life We Live,” Pat expresses a similar
idea: “Gotta take the good with the bad, smile with the sad / Love
what you got and remember what you had.”
A Google search of these lyrics brings up digital versions of
inspirational quote posters, the kind you might find on the walls
of a schoolteacher’s classroom. Some of them place plain white
text over images of a wide-open road or horses riding off into
the distance. Many of these images present the source of the
quote as “unknown.” It’s possible the rhyme is something Pat
heard from his grandmother or in church growing up, that it’s
a saying that’s been floating around for decades, but it’s more
fun to think that the seekers of meaning out there online, those
scrolling by and looking for some inspiration, are being led to
the words of Project Pat.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 89
 The Only
Exception
On Paramore and forgiving past selves
by Maggie Boyd Hare

n the year 2009, Hayley Williams of the band

Paramore was in love, and I was in youth group. At
the time, the Nashville-based band was known for
I n youth group in the
evangelical South, there
were rules about the body
their bracing, teen-angst-ridden pop-punk. And I and the mind. Some came
was fourteen, sitting quietly in a church pew in a directly, some of it was in
northern Kentucky suburb, known for being the the air. I spent most Sunday
pastor’s kid. nights gathered with other
When Paramore wrote about love, it was dark, teens in an upstairs room,
cynical, and it went hard—their fierce lyrics intensi- filled with ping-pong tables
fied by Hayley’s dynamic and passionate delivery. In and shelves of old books
her twenty years, she hadn’t seen a love that lasted, and CDs, to sing worship
but she was with someone new, and it felt real. “The songs, have Bible study,
Only Exception,” a slow single from the band’s 2009 and play games. This was
release Brand New Eyes, is an ode to these feelings; most of my social life. Once
she was on her “way to believing.” The song—which a year, there was a retreat
spent twenty weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 and called Discipleship Now!
was eventually nominated for a Grammy—comes quietly, a depar- where volunteer leaders
ture for Paramore musically as much as lyrically. It opens with a divided the boys and girls.
three-chord progression and a worship band strum pattern, like They let us settle on our
something I wanted a crush to sit down and play for me. Hayley mildewed couches in our
sings about the past that taught her to stay guarded—when I was separate rooms and said
younger, I saw my daddy cry, she sings, he broke his own heart to the boys, do not look at porn, do not want sex, do not touch
and I watched, her voice controlled as always, but softer than yourself, and repent when any of this crosses your mind. To the
usual, almost sweet. Still, you can sense the power behind it. Even girls they said, guard your heart. And it meant: You don’t need
as she crests to a high note like on the line I’ve always lived like rules about sex because you are not sexual, but do not cause your
this, hard emotion tugs beneath the surface. She lets this feeling brothers to stumble. What was in the air was this sense that there
through at one point, releases into a near scream, singing, I’ve got was a way you should be, a boundary you recognized when you
a tight grip on reality, but I can’t let go of what’s in front of me came up against it. There were values that came this way—what to
here. All of Hayley’s music has this commanding quality—there wear, how to vote, what to think about abortion. But it got subtler,
is a world of emotional vocal range at her fingertips, but you can and there were limits to what emotions were allowed—feeling
feel the precision, and the possibility surrounding it. too sad, too angry, or any desire was beyond the line.

90 WINTER 2023
H ayley was with that someone new for ten years. They were
both musicians, so their life revolved around album and
tour cycles; they were together for almost three of Paramore’s.
Their relationship began two years before the release of “The
Only Exception”—he was married, she was a teenager. She
internalized the shame of that beginning for their entire re-
lationship. The end of their decade together was punctuated
with an engagement, a marriage. Hayley wore combat boots
with her Vera Wang wedding dress, part of her punk aesthetic,
but they were heavy—she says she sounded like “doom, doom
Photo by Zachary Gray
coming down the aisle.” Shortly after, her body turned against
her: She stopped eating for days at a time and got inexplicable
welts up her wrists. She listened to this. Sixteen months after
the wedding, she moved out of their Nashville home and asked
for a divorce. She went on tour with Paramore, removing “The
Only Exception” from their set list for the first time in eight
years. When she returned from the road, she entered intensive
therapy. She said in an interview, two years into the process,
“I realized as I was kind of untangling a lot of knots in myself
that there are so many ways that I learned how to love that are
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 91
 just not right, and unlearning something that you’re thirty-one
years in on is tough.”
I was a wide-eyed teen, earnest and romantic. I felt a lot, wanted
so much—friends, a boyfriend, to belong and be understood—
normal teenage things. I also wanted to be good. I kindly, and often
without realizing it, minded the lines. I snipped off or crammed
down anything that reached outside them: feeling, desire, musical
taste. I listened to film scores from my favorite movies (Hugo,
Chocolat, Finding Neverland), singer-songwriter CCM (Christian
Contemporary Music), and the rock band BarlowGirl (Paramore
for Christian girls). I know I also listened to “The Only Excep-
tion” regularly as a teen; Paramore was known to have Christian
roots, so I felt safe soaking in the song’s rich emotional sweep.
I rarely allowed anyone to be my “only exception,” even in my
mind, but as each chorus unfolded—Hayley repeating simply,
you are the only exception, with growing conviction—the music
swelled, and I was washed in a flood of feeling that gave way to
the same surrender I felt singing at youth group, hands to my
chest, eyes closed.
Looking on my Facebook profile for any evidence of these
transportive moments, I come across this status in a sea of similar
proclamations: “Is there any teenager in the world that would
rather listen to Rich Mullins than rock...other than me?” The
benign status declaring my love for this melancholy Christian
musician, beloved in the ’90s, and all the statuses surrounding
it—“Maggie Boyd is in love with the one who first loved her (not
a boy Jesus),” “Maggie Boyd is about to sit down with her family
to watch ‘Return of the King.’ Does the fact that I’ve been looking
forward to this all day make me a nerd?” “Love came down at
Christmas. ... seriously think about the depth of that”—fill me
with visceral shame: neck prickling, skin cold. I can sense in
every sentence my calculating lips, my need to keep the rules. I
have said for years that I resented the restriction itself, and I do.
But this is new: I resent the self that negotiated it. I can recognize
how many factors were at play for my younger self. I’ve got a
tight grip on reality. Resentment, shame, and even sadness are
difficult emotions for me, and my reflex against them is a litany
of logic: So many teenagers assemble an odd self out of whatever
is in reach to feel like they’re okay and like maybe someone will
like them; You were doing your best; You had a strange system of
But there can be healing,
I think, in a momentary release
of logic. I have to experience
what’s there—in this case,
self-loathing—without
rushing in to do better.
92 WINTER 2023
tools. But there can be healing, I think, in a momentary release of
logic. I have to experience what’s there—in this case, self-loath-
ing—without rushing in to do better.
I’ve been listening to “The Only Exception” on repeat. I still
feel a catch in my throat from the first notes of the second cho-
rus—the melody gets so big, electric guitar twinkling like light
on water, and Hayley’s voice carries me through an old and open
door to surrender. Permission for that teenage self to exist as she
is—lonely and trying—blooms in that place.
T here are a handful of articles and podcasts in which Hayley
is candid about her healing process, the work that she’s
doing to make art and a life. Recognition stirs in me when I listen
to these. Our paths are different, but we both came up in the air
of the evangelical South, learning to negotiate those invisible
boundaries. I see the inner work she’s doing for liberation—caring
for young, tender versions of herself, examining generational
trauma, exorcising internalized systemic bullshit, and I recognize
the path I’ve only started walking down toward my own healing. I
sometimes cry when I watch her recent live performances because
she looks free: genuinely happy, surrounded by the people she
loves, dancing around the stage in whatever clothes make her
feel good, beaming, belting out the words she’s written year after
year to find herself. I feel in so many ways like I’m only beginning
to heal, am only beginning to find my way into the person that I
am, with space for my full range of emotion and real, multifaceted
love for every self I contain. Witnessing Hayley is like a window
into a possible future.
At the time of this writing, “The Only Exception” is back
on the setlist for Paramore’s world tour. Hayley often gives
the song an introduction. She talks about why she’s wanted
to leave it off—she was embarrassed because her feelings and
perspective changed, she was worried she’d feel like a liar. She
says they brought it back to reclaim it. She reclaims it over and
over. She says, “it’s a love song…think of the good parts,” she
says, “you fall in love with other things, other people, friends,
even best friends, it doesn’t even have to be romantic love,” she
dedicates it to the fans, “it’s been a pleasure and a true honor to
grow up alongside you,” she dedicates it to “our queer family…
for not being ashamed of who we are, and for loving who the
fuck we love.” I watch video after video of her spinning in a
shower of silver sparks while a
crowd of thousands waves their
cellphones. She gives her all
on the last chorus, sings high
notes that aren’t on the original
recording, bends her body to
let them out. Then she says,
“just you and me now,” the
band drops out, and she kneels
at the edge of the stage, turn-
ing the mic out to pick up the
thousands of voices in whatever
vast room singing, I’m on my
way to believing.
 DISCOVER THE HEARTBEAT OF ACADIANA

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 Death, ponies, and the Local Honeys
by Madeline Weinfield

94 WINTER 2023 Mistigri, 2021, acrylic gouache on watercolor paper, by Judy Koo. Courtesy the artist
W
hat do you do with something large and save. His name was Zippy and he was anything but. I loved him
dead? for what I now realize was what I saw in him of myself: an in-
That’s not something I thought much between-age, awkward, lanky, black-haired, and thin-limbed
about before hearing “Dead Horses.” The as if our legs might crack if we ran too fast. He had once been
haunting, echoing ballad by the Local a racehorse—registered as Maximum Zip—but by the time he
Honeys, a Kentucky-based country-folk duo, arrived in my life found his way to me, eight years old and wild with love, a slow
last summer like a knife; a stab from nowhere. Or maybe, more canter was his fastest speed.
aptly, like a finger picking at an old wound that had been festering One day, years into loving Zippy, I was told he had moved
beneath the skin. away. “Retired,” they told me, to a nice little farm. It wasn’t until
By the time I first heard the song and its plaintive, delicately I heard “Dead Horses” that I thought of this long-buried memory.
harmonized chorus—I never got used to watching horses die—be- Brought into the spotlight of years lived, I saw it for what it was,
gan to wedge itself in my brain, horses hadn’t been alive in my life what it always had been, the opposite of what I had at the time
for nearly twenty years. They belonged to the memory box of my accepted as the truth. And with the first listen of the song, I was
childhood, confined to a young passion that had occupied a dozen a little girl again, mourning the loss of something large and dead.
years of weekends and a summer of camp. But the memory of Of course, there had never been a farm. And there had not been
them, like a first love, had branded me, and burns sometimes still. a greener pasture for Maximum Zip.
Every line of the poetry Linda Jean Stokley and Montana Hobbs
write for their songs is a layered contradiction—moody but Suppose we’re all just animals with slightly different hides.
not whining, country but not
corny, full of death yet sung by
voices fully, wholly alive. In the
pared-down, bone-scratching
F or those not on farms, for
those of us listening to
“Dead Horses” in the tiny cav-
songwriting of their self-titled erns of our rented apartments,
debut album, they deliver the death of horses isn’t some-
songs that are searingly per- thing we are bound to encoun-
sonal, reflecting the realities ter. In the urban wilderness of
of farm life on “Dead Horses,” an American city, animal death
and the pain of the opioid epi- is a rat flattened on the road, a
demic in “Dying to Make a Liv- baby bird fallen from the nest
ing.” In writing these songs, in early spring. These deaths
in singing these songs, Linda are small and meek, ubiquitous
Jean and Montana are writing yet ignorable. A squirrel died
and singing for themselves but in the attic of my rowhouse in
also seemingly for you, and for Washington, D.C. An extermi-
me. nator told me to leave it, let
My life with horses had cer- it decompose naturally over
tainly been softer than the one time, wait for the smell to pass,
the Local Honeys sing of. Certainly, I never watched a mare lying to expect just a small pile of bones. Below the eaves of the attic,
dead underneath a tarp out in the rain, or listened to her foal I slept peacefully removed from the work of dealing with the
whinnying from its stall. Yet I keep listening to “Dead Horses,” to squirrel and its death. But, even if I had had to bury the squirrel,
Linda Jean and Montana singing of the horses they loved and lost, I would have needed a small garden shovel, not a neighbor with
of burying them in Kentucky farmland, of crying outside their a Bobcat, like the Local Honeys sing about.
barns. It’s Linda Jean’s voice that leads the melody. It’s soft and Maybe something so large, so dead, is easier to swallow than
round, with a little fringe on the edges, like a fraying cuff on a the things that die without us knowing. I wonder if it would have
pair of jeans. Together, with their close harmonies, finger-picked somehow been easier to see Zippy, black mane poking out from
guitar, and clawhammer banjo, the Local Honeys pour out work under a tarp, dead out in the rain. Or maybe we tell ourselves
that flows with sweetness and sting. The no-nonsense tradition that lie in order to survive.
of the bluegrass of Appalachia fills the jar, and you can still taste In “Dead Horses,” Linda Jean sings as if horses dying is more
the remnants of the rich Kentucky soil. beautiful than it is painful—an inevitability in life, like the leaves
changing color in the fall and the snow melting in the spring.
This little girl inside me is chomping at the bit. She cannot Montana backs her up, crooning in agreement. We grow older,
save them all, a truth hard to admit. they seem to say. Our mothers’ hair turns gray. Our hair turns
gray; we are no longer little girls. Our horses die.

L istening to the insistent refrains of “Dead Horses” throws me

out of the saddle and into the memory of the one I couldn’t
But we’re still chomping at the bit. Maybe that’s the truth
hardest to admit.

Photo by Lila Callie Simpson of Lila Callie Photography, Clay City, Kentucky. Courtesy the artist OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 95
 Aretha Franklin’s gospel as heartache’s balm
by Noah T. Bfitton
remember the song he played the first time he kissed me,
which we recorded and sent to each other any time we heard
its love vows straining through a crowd or the span of a
street. How he set his alarm early to hold me in that golden
light, the soft velvet of our semi-consciousness. I loved the
pressure of his teeth, the days when kissing and smiling
were the same act, the rhythm of his laughter on my lips.
This tenderness lived alongside a muted hurt, and during
our months together, I stretched between extremes until
I reached a thinned stasis. I cataloged the good the same way I
did his razor and toothbrush and the pair of shoes he left at my
place, proof of his commitment. Archived all those texts. Let the
ashes from his joints gather on my nightstand, grit in the fabric
and human mess of my bedsheets. All these little altars to a love I
could never fully believe in, even as I tried to convince myself of us.
Piano rumbles like thunder, high notes scatter like lightning,
and I marveled at the ways I’d made a home out of the storm.
Aretha Franklin stirred the ache I’d buried with “You’ll Never
Walk Alone,” cast it against the gospel’s measure of divine love.
She promised the kind of refuge I’d hoped to find in the spaces
where he drew out my name, all vowels, the corners of his mouth
upturned. When I didn’t yet want better, the song sized up this
chaos, asked me about myself through the wind and rain.
F rom the pulpit of New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, the
Reverend James Cleveland introduced “one of the greatest
sounds in the world…the sound of gospel.” Miss Aretha Franklin
appeared, backlit and shimmering as if she were heaven-sent,
and the crowd reached for her the way they might the hem of
Jesus’s robe, desperate for healing.
I wonder what solace Franklin found in another preacher’s
kid when she split the veil with Marvin Gaye’s “Wholy Holy.”
96 WINTER 2023
Gaye, who’d fled his father’s D.C. church to sing about love,
which sometimes meant singing about God and sometimes the
women he slept with, often confusing the two. Who, at that time,
was breaking with Motown’s dulcet grip with an LP that paired
self-styled hymns with dirges on war and violence, going on to
scale Billboard’s pop, soul, and Hot 100 charts. “Wholy Holy”
eases the mounting tempo of What’s Going On, unfolds with
the slow-burn hope that might have sustained Gaye through his
brother’s accounts of Vietnam, through the shattering loss of his
music partner, Tammi Terrell, to cancer. Gaye takes stock of the
loss around him and sees its magnitude reflected in a distant God.
Even as he reclaims his sound, the Prince of Soul can’t shake the
gospel in his music or his conscience; in every way he is looking
for a father’s love.
Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “Wholy Holy” climbs where
Gaye’s coasts. It was praise that preceded the altar call of “You’ll
Never Walk Alone,” itself a cover of a 1945 Broadway hit written
by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the same duo be-
hind Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music. Kentucky native Christine
Johnson debuted the song as Nettie Fowler in Carousel, garnering
a Tony nomination for her performance as the aunt of a lovelorn
Julie Jordan (Jan Clayton).
Johnson’s original recording of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” sits
in the aftermath of violence as Jordan mourns the man who beat
her, a man she loved against all reason. Franklin takes the laic
sweetness of the original and teases it toward triumph. Still, she
leads with the conviction of her humanity, Lady and Sister Soul
beside the church howls of her origins. There’s the echo of 1968’s
“Ain’t No Way” in her opening trinity of words, When you walk
stretched out like a sleepless night.
Franklin accompanies herself on piano for the song’s first half,
resting on the tenor of her testimony as she conjures a storm.
A Night Off, 2023, acrylic on panel, 30" x 24", by Kyle Dunn. Courtesy the artist and P·P·O·W, New York OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 97
 She revels in her chest voice here, deep in your ear with a shared
truth, before she draws back, the sage vantage of her falsetto.
The full range of her register allows for the intimacy the song
promises, you’ll never walk alone in the way Franklin’s voice is
both beside and before you. Although your dreams be tossed / I
know sometimes they get tossed. And maybe Franklin does know
what it means to imagine waking up to someone, to linger in early
morning innocence at the expense of nighttime hurt. Franklin re-
sisted any public comment
on the reports of abuse
that trailed her seven-year
marriage to Ted White, and
I want to preserve any peace
she cultivated through her
chosen silence. There’s a
willful tenderness in the
whisper that shapes those
first few lines, a sound that
draws your gaze upward at
the same time it expels some
deep place.
“You’ll Never Walk
Alone” is the hard-earned
rejoinder to Franklin’s ear-
lier tracks on heartbreak.
It’s the grandeur of a ballad
skewed testimony, witness to the more corrosive grief of staying,
of being stuck. Franklin sings with the sureness of the other side
of sorrow, churched in the way she wants you to trust what the
narrator in many of her prior songs couldn’t. As she promises
golden skies, Franklin imbues the word with an airiness that
comes like sweet relief, doubles back in case you don’t believe
her. Gospel’s constancy becomes a backdrop for the kind of love
that brings you to the edge of yourself, the rupture lamented
in standard ballads. Maybe this is what I resisted in songs that
lingered in anguish, contoured by the easy before-and-after of a
break-up: I anticipated the sadness about which they were singing,
knew it in the ways I mourned this new distance from myself. The
psychic split of our time together, when I wanted him despite.
Franklin meets us at our lowest and guides us back to this prom-
ise of God’s love, a template for care that soothes and sustains.
What I needed was this assurance of a hope I could not yet feel,
the conviction of someone who had seen new life spring from
the certainty of loss—gospel’s trademark, as it was for Gaye. And
what is a ballad if not this story of grief? Something has died; the
Gospel says something can be resurrected.
When she finally hits the climax, singing Walk on, it’s with
all the dramatics of the resurrection story, the impossibility of
someone literally walking from an empty grave. It comes just past
the song’s halfway mark—the eye of the storm, when you’ve seen
enough of the wreckage to know that the worst is not yet behind
you. It’s the few seconds of clarity, the startling awareness of I
can’t do this anymore, a shaky first stand.
The choir joins Franklin for the first time since the song’s
intro, and you feel those angels right beside you. The audience
98 WINTER 2023
claps, compelled to their feet with a strength you remember, and
the band begins its percussive testimony, organ splayed in the
background. Gospel’s call-and-response, absent in the original,
makes heavenly host and witness of the chorus; everywhere you
turn, what felt like loss is already filled with the sound of victory,
a collective overcoming.
The song’s back end meets crescendo with moments of quiet,
and there’s grace in the way Franklin’s production mirrors the
variance of grief, feigns an
end before she rallies once
more against the days when
a blur of dark hair can still
knock me over on the bus.
When the doubt accumulat-
ed over our months together
blurs reality. “Contemplat-
ing death…leads me back
to love,” bell hooks writes,
and there’s labor in decid-
ing what it means to love
and be loved in the face of
something that has fallen
short. Maybe this is the
faith Franklin sings about:
the bravery of returning to
yourself, of finally acknowl-
edging a broken thing and wanting better. We work toward
conviction along the way, she reminds us, in the mere act of
moving forward.
W hen Aretha Franklin sings about a storm, I understand
the static rain of this confusion. When the clouds press
in, gray and dense, and you lose all sense of self, can’t see the
hand held out in front of you.
I’m writing in the kitchen next to flowers that we picked out
for my new place, which he had started to call “our apartment.”
In the couple of months I’ve been here, they have already died
and begun to sprout new blooms, bright petals there next to
their faded kin. In pictures I’ve seen of him since I left, he looks
different somehow—more human—and I think this is the world
coming into sharper focus.
I can feel the sun through the window, can see couples on the
street below sweating and swaying like you do in August heat.
There are clouds on the horizon, where I imagine they will linger
for a while, and I take in the newness of their shape from this
angle, all these signs of life around me.
I take a step, and I take another step.
Listen to “Church Girl,” a playlist by Noah Britton, while you read.
Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit
Oxford American Magazine on Spotify to stream the playlist.
A still from Amazing Grace, 2018 © Neon. Courtesy Everett Collection
 Madvillain’s “Accordion”
and the double-bind of making it
by Harmony Holiday

A
s a ballad rigged with allegory, “Accordi- Keep your glory gold
on” by Madvillain courts the dread and and glitter, for half, half of
exhilaration of getting on—a pound and his niggas’ll take him out
a compliment at a time. Getting on as in the picture, he continues
making it, arriving, breaking in—to the later. He’s afraid of being
industry, radio play, the club, the cypher, the studio. The al- envied; he wears his metal
ternative is the unspeakable obscurity and alienation of failed mask as a shield against
musicians. You might become a mall security guard, a devoted the inevitable evil eye that
husband with a gambling habit, a suicide risk. No matter what, comes with his facility with
you will come to regret it if you don’t do everything in your rhythm, language, and
power to become formidable, a star, one of the unfathomable flow. Getting on is just as
ones who will always be famous. Rapper Guru once advised to tedious as getting trapped
never smother your heroes after a performance, just walk up in one’s hometown wish-
like a G and offer a pound and compliment. MF DOOM adopts ing, he insinuates. And
this nonchalant code of reverence throughout his 2004 al- it’s this way because the
bum-long collaboration with producer Madlib, Madvillainy, attention that his success
and especially on “Accordion,” which unravels for just under brings is laced with the de-
two minutes like a dug-up psalm or lost black spiritual weighed viant and insincere gaze of
down and levitating with winged parables, heavy and longing those who think it should
for the intervention of the play and mirth that color the rest of be them and resent every reminder of their relative mediocrity
the album. There’s some lightheartedness present on “Accor- or unluckiness. “Accordion” is trying to unlock a trouble spell
dion,” but its lights are austere and withdrawn. The procession entrenched in the folklore of sudden empowerment through
of ideas throughout feels distinctly like one’s own heart center artistic celebrity. The lyrics resort to the lucid incoherence of
being expanded and compressed as if played like the instrument speaking in tongues on Sunday in a small black Pentecostal
being referenced and sampled. It’s delirious, intense, a little church in the South, and the pace is as if driving slowly and
exasperated with its own foreboding range of motion from alert through chitlin circuit backroads but almost wanting to
the first line on—living on borrowed time the clock tick faster, be detected, almost wishing some sly vigilante would step in
DOOM opens, matter-of-factly despondent. and deflect from your performed worry. Let’s be profoundly

100 WINTER 2023

hunted if that’s how it is, demonstrate it. Having willingly tak-
en that road proves you’re more worried about the danger of
stagnancy than the threat of race violence, or praise violence,
but decorum enforces caution and you act out your fears of the
invisible God cameras making sure you don’t get too cavalier
about fame, bookings, upward mobility. The accordion assumes
a melancholic drawl and wince, the most imperceptible tremble,
an ominous erotics of nowhere that becomes the metronome for
Doom’s assured stride between intrigue and ennui.
Quantum Conjuring, 2022, charcoal and Conté pastel on paper, by Robert Pruitt.
Courtesy the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles
This is the bleak testimony of the damned and blasphemed. It’s
sanctioned by the culture of self-aggrandizement. It’s at once one
of the great ballads in hip-hop and a manifesto about the insur-
mountable depravity of the industry. And he hold the mic and your
attention like two swords, DOOM gloats explicitly, but then slip
like Freudian / your first and last step to playin yourself like ac-
cordion. He’s being pursued by silent killers, he warns in a hushed
scowl. He celebrates escapism, afraid he may fall on his own sword
if he doesn’t. That jubilation is undermined by spectators—they’re
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 101
 hyper-critical of every contradiction, they threaten to cut emcees Ballads come to us as if on wind patterns from the gospels of
and producers whose skills they cannot best, they refuse to just the South and move north and west with the Great Migration,
surrender to the shadowy satisfaction of the music and testify over with jazzmen and bluesmen crying together on dry roads with no
it themselves, and when they cannot hijack the charisma of their tears and nothing sentimental but hope and borrowed time to kill
heroes, they go dark, disappear. They try to battle, and all the before it takes them. The addictiveness of a slow mournful song is
wounded egos come out like swords. The mic has two blades on its element of revenge. Ballads allow hip-hop, a genre known for
it. For the purposes of this psychoanalysis of a reluctant ballad, edge, to buckle with feeling and fall on its knees seeking mercy
let’s pretend the blades are the stark white smiles of Otis (Madlib) momentarily. By the end of “Accordion” DOOM is back to flip-
and Dumile (DOOM) together pant sexual innuendo, but for
in the studio working on the its brief duration, vulnerability
album. They worked while overrides that trope and he and
both on ’shrooms, and most- his friend contemplate their
ly in silence. Their socializing own impending obsolescence
happened at clubs, but during as timelessness, as so what.
studio sessions they ascended Now DOOM is dead and
into telepathic communion. not able to rest, his legacy is
Though it was O who found the plagued by controversy, the
sample on a Daedalus song and time he borrowed asks to be
isolated the zombie groan of paid back with interest. It’s like
the accordion that idyllically some terrible prophecy was re-
complements DOOM’s grit- alized, or a pact between jazz
ty rasp, it’s like they’re each and hip-hop to be so far ahead
playing one side of its disinte- of the rest of culture you get
grating sway. A kite falls in the bored and exit the stage to
sand when DOOM makes his save your soul from the onset
grand entrance, in living, the of bitterness. But we need it
true God. Their hearts race and most right as it’s leaving, we
swell, they hallucinate, come- need it to reinvent itself and re-
down, and invent mundane fuse to go gently into the night
settings where they’ll have to of social capital. I’ve been at
translate this nameless magic shows with Otis when he plays
to crowds, some hostile, some “Accordion” like a love note to
so awestruck it’s invasive. You his friend who isn’t there. I used
can’t think straight around to dismiss it as a crowd favorite,
fanatics. like one of his standards he just
One on one, these creative had to work into a set. Now I
soulmates manage to retrieve get how sentimental these
and bend time for one anoth- men are, how alone together,
er, they reach toward the sa- how trapped in the future they
cred, and without traveling on invented and reaching for the
the roads jazzmen traveled to scripture that might release
small halls and jukes, they en- them from their contract with
ter those spaces, imposters and the myth of themselves. No one
then transformed to the prima- wants to end up like a verse
ry heirs of jazz rigor by the will in this perfectly wrenching
of their gallant ensemble, their searchlight of a song, full of
imposing happenstance that petty, inevitable danger, but
becomes a blues epic unmasked by collective improvisation. The everyone wants the adventurous, heartstrong, strung-out feeling
groove of “Accordion,” which the moment it drops moves you to it gives you when it comes on, and you look it in the eye, when
trance, is almost too seductive in that subdued way where you you’re just about to get on stage, or on purpose, when you reach
don’t know what happened, but you find yourself in another time that precipice between the virtue of the dream and the curse
with another set of visions and desires, or fall through it like a of the nightmare and it pulls you back and forth alongside the
quantum trapdoor. They must have fallen through it together like will of its endless, senselessly aligned vibration, until you’ve
black swans pretending to be hard in public, swooping down to become its perfect instrument and you’re playing yourself, like
giggle and huddle in their secret language near the kite’s sad wing. an accordion.

102 WINTER 2023 Photo of MF Doom courtesy Possan. Bottom: Photo of Madlib courtesy Carl Pocket. Both via Wikimedia Commons
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106 The Veil of an Intimate Whisper, 2023, oil and glitter on canvas, by London Pierre Williams. Courtesy the artist
 T H E QU E E R
A LC H E M Y
OF
M E LV I N L I N DS EY ’ S
Q U I ET STO R M

by Craig Seymour
107
It happened at that
“golden time of day,”
as Frankie Beverly & Maze
once sang, “when you
find who you are.”
Weeknights at seven P.M., thousands of D.C.-area residents tuned
their radios to WHUR-FM, Howard University’s commercial sta-
tion, for the Quiet Storm, which consisted of mostly r&b ballads
representing a kaleidoscope of emotions, from raw longing to
cool resolve. This local program became a nationally duplicat-
ed format, with wide regional variations, and ultimately took
such acts as Luther Vandross, Anita Baker, and Sade on a 450
SL Benz-ride to “Black famous” superstardom. But what’s lost
in most accounts of the genre—which has become synonymous
with formulaic “baby-making” slow jams—is the particularity of
the original Quiet Storm and how it developed from the specific
perspective of DJ/host Melvin Lindsey, a Black gay man.
I was seven when the Quiet Storm debuted in 1976. It began as the
sound of the adults who controlled the stereo. But it soon allowed
me to experience what neuroscientist Susan Rogers considers to
be an essential purpose of music, how it allows us to experiment
with identity. As she writes in This Is What It Sounds Like: What
the Music You Love Says About You, songs allow us to “feel as if we
are experiencing life through another person’s eyes.” Listening to
the Quiet Storm, I could be a road-weary soul man ready for life-
time love (the Ebonys’ “It’s Forever”), a sophisticate narrating her
husband’s betrayal (Nancy Wilson’s “Guess Who I Saw Today”), or
a diehard race woman who’s finally had it up to here with her vain,
no ’count boyfriend and his “Afro Sheen,” “afro clean,” “afro fluid,”
and “afro do-it-to-it” (Marlena Shaw’s “Yu-Ma/Go Away Little Boy”).
The Quiet Storm also taught me that songs have a life beyond their
108 WINTER 2023
original context. By putting different tracks in conversation with
each other, a song that seems trite as an album cut might suddenly
become a profound meditation on the human condition. It taught
me about something else Rogers discusses: how individual listeners,
and curators like DJs, are musical creatives in their own right. She
says, “By perceiving, feeling, and reacting to the many dimensions
of a song, a listener closes the creative circle and completes the
musical experience.” Miles Davis even once told her: “Some of the
best musicians I know aren’t musicians.”
As I grew older, many Quiet Storm songs spoke to my burgeoning
awareness that I was different from guys like Billy Paul, who sang
the passionate Black power love anthem “Let’s Make a Baby.” I had
a secret, one I was scared to reveal to anyone, including myself: I
was gay. Suddenly, songs I’d heard Melvin play for years acquired
visceral new relevance. I fantasized about the escape of Randy
Crawford’s “One Day I’ll Fly Away.” But I knew that wouldn’t solve
my problems. Eleanor Mills told me, on a song by curatorial genius
Norman Connors, “This is your life / not a game that you play.” I
felt the urgency of Phyllis Hyman’s “Gonna Make Changes” and a
push from Seawind to “Follow Your Road.” In time, I developed
the strength to answer the call of Stephanie Mills to “Be a Lion.” I
experienced this without knowing Melvin was gay. It now strikes
me as odd that in all the historical accounts and celebrations of the
Quiet Storm I’ve read, not one has considered how Melvin’s expe-
riences as a gay man informed the songs he chose to play and how
he put them together, crafting an aesthetic that has transcended
generations and become part of the Faith Ringgold–style quilt of
African American life.
STORM TRACKING
hough Melvin Lindsey is the name most associated
with the Quiet Storm, he didn’t create it. That credit
goes to media visionary Cathy Hughes, then WHUR’s
general manager, now owner of Radio One, the parent
company of TV One. She was inspired by her study of
“psychographic” radio at the University of Chicago.
“You learn who your audience is and what they are doing, and you
fit your programming to fit their lifestyle,” Hughes says. “I had an
overpopulation of unattached Black women who would love to be
serenaded even if it’s just on the radio.”
Initially, the program, which took its name from the Smokey
Robinson ballad that served as the show’s theme, was supposed to
feature a rotating DJ lineup of Howard University communications
students needing commercial on-air experience. But Hughes gave
twenty-one-year-old freshman Melvin—a D.C. native who grew up
listening to his father’s Frank Sinatra records and being a Beatles
“fanatic,” as well as a disciple of Diana Ross—a shot as a fill-in for
the Quiet Storm. She trusted him, not because he showed any par-
Melvin Lindsey at WHUR with Teena Marie, by Oggi Ogburn © The artist
ticular talent at radio, but because he was already her paid assistant,
picking up her son from school and bringing him to the station,
where together, they’d all eat dinner, which Hughes prepped in
advance each weekend.
In these earliest days, Melvin worked with fellow student Jack
Shuler, a sound engineer responsible for steadily putting the needle
on the vinyl and ensuring there was no “dead air.” The two were
also, as Shuler describes it, “the best of friends.” It took awhile for
them to get the Quiet Storm formula down. If they couldn’t think of
what to play, they’d take requests. They also knew there were two
acts that would always connect with the D.C. audience. He says, “We
could always play The Isley Brothers and Phyllis Hyman.”
Melvin became known for his unobtrusive delivery, as he played
multiple songs before breaking in with his steady, butter-roll-warm
tone, reminding listeners they weren’t alone in the night. “The
music spoke and then when he spoke, it fit,” says Dyana Williams,
the radio legend once known as Ebony Moonbeams, who was a
mentor to Melvin. “It was almost like he was part of the verses and
the chorus and the melody and the harmony.” But Shuler says the
lowkey approach that Melvin leveled-up to an art stemmed from
the timidity of a twenty-one-year-old trying to find his way in life.
“Melvin had nothing to say,” laughs Shuler, who returned to his
Florida hometown after Melvin began helming the Quiet Storm
on his own. “There was nothing loquacious about him at the time.”
Melvin’s popularity with listeners scored him a full-time slot,
and the Quiet Storm with Melvin Lindsey became the sound of
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 109
nighttime D.C., attracting fans across the social spectrum. “I got a
letter from Lorton [Correctional Complex] signed by 196 inmates,
saying how much they liked the program,” Melvin said. “It really
touched me.” He promoted the work of hometown artists such as
Parris, responsible for the gripping, soap-opera-like “Can’t Let Go”;
Starpoint, a Maryland group that balanced electro-funk with lush
ballads such as “This Is So Right” and “Till the End of Time”; and
the Howard University Jazz Ensemble, which produced the almost
operatic declaration “Loving You Has Been an Ecstasy.”
The Quiet Storm hit D.C. when Black people were asserting a
new political voice focused on self-governance in the nation’s cap-
ital, which had been controlled by Congress until the Home Rule
Act passed in 1973. Particularly significant was the 1979 mayoral
election of Marion Barry, the son of Mississippi sharecroppers who
came to D.C. to fundraise for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC).
Barry’s campaign was linked to the growing political power of
D.C.’s gay community, which played a significant role in his victory.
He pledged in 1982: “Some people claim that San Francisco is the
capital city for gays. Well, we’re going to change that and make
Washington, D.C., number one.”
The Washington Star called D.C. the “Emerald City of live-and-let-
live tolerance for homosexuals,” and the Quiet Storm was accepted
into the most intimate spheres of gay life. A columnist in the gay
weekly the Washington Blade noted in 1979: “Most singles I know can
be found at home…weeknights, listening to WHUR.” The program
even made its way into personal ads. A white man wanted to “create
a quiet storm” with a white or Black man, 35–56, who loves “movies,
theater, short travel trips, swimming, and more.” And a woman of
unspecified race sought a Black gay woman, “cocoa-colored (or close
enough); drug, alcohol & child free; gainfully employed; w/ a sense
of humor, some wit, common sense;…a DC resident; reasonably
discreet but willing to return a quick kiss; a light-to-non-smoker;
[and] an avid Quiet Storm fan…”
One gay listener wrote to the Washington Post that the Quiet
Storm helped him cope while his lover was ailing: “In 1985, when my
companion was living with AIDS, it was Melvin Lindsey’s program…
that helped us deal with our own quiet storm.”
Gay people heard things in Melvin’s music that wouldn’t neces-
sarily be evident to those unfamiliar with the codes of being “in the
life.” “Chile, you know he was playing those songs that had double
meanings,” says lifelong Washingtonian and LGBTQ+ activist Rayceen
Pendarvis. “He was giving, ‘I'm gonna tell y’all a story, and the gays
will perfectly understand what I’m talking about.’”
MELVIN’S MELODIES
have to prepare for each show,” Melvin told the Post.
“I go through my older record collection and pick out
tunes I think would be appropriate for that evening.
Then for the next five hours, I sort of spontaneously
play records, taking requests from the audience and
using my own judgment.” His selections reflected his
moods. “My listeners at this point know that, say, Melvin’s feeling
good today, or Melvin had a bad day.”
While he seldom discussed his sexuality publicly, it wasn’t much
of a secret to those around him. “Melvin was a private person,” says
Dyana Williams. “It wasn’t that he was denying his sexuality, because
his friends knew.” Melvin was also accepted within Black lesbian and
gay circles. “He didn’t have to have a rainbow flag on,” says Pendarvis.
“He represented us in his excellence. And the community covered
and protected him.”
The details Melvin did reveal about his personal life suggest ways
to understand the music he offered each night to his fans. “It was
the ’70s and early ’80s…and [I was] running around, and just doing
whatever,” he said. “From the period of 1985 on, I bought condoms
every time I went to the grocery store.” Many Quiet Storm staples
reflect the lure of fleeting encounters and the yearning for some-
thing more. Chaka Khan, with the band Rufus, pleads, “Send me

Nocturnal Bliss: A Quiet Storm Playlist

BY RAYCEEN PENDARVIS
I created this playlist as a celebration of
the legacy of Melvin Lindsey and the im-
pact of the Quiet Storm. By showcasing
the sultry grooves that helped so many
of us to find our melodic nocturnal bliss,
Melvin created something that until then
didn’t exist on the radio. He highlighted
soulful ballads that told stories, and pro-
vided the soundtrack for falling in love,
falling out of love, and falling in love all
over again. Melvin enabled us to discover
singers and musicians who were not top- our memories remain vivid. I am thankful
ping the charts nor in regular rotation on to have been able to tune in for Melvin
the airwaves. He helped to create new Lindsey and the Quiet Storm experience.
fans who would often develop a desire to Love,
explore these recording artists’ catalogs Rayceen Pendarvis
and experience them live in concert. The
sonic ambiance he curated during those
late hours motivated us to listen every
night with our cassette tapes ready to
record. While those homemade recordings
Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit
have faded or gotten lost over the years, Oxford American Magazine on Spotify to stream the playlist.

110 WINTER 2023

a stranger to love.” Brenda Russell propositions, “Let me hold you
tight / If only for one night.” The Isley Brothers, on “Love Put Me on
the Corner,” testify about sleepless nights, “walkin’ up and down the
streets / My heart is aching down, down to my feet / I’m looking for
someone to love.” And on “Daybreak (Storybook Children),” Cheryl
Lynn sings of the heartbreak that sometimes comes after an evening
of pleasure and connection: “How can I ever leave this place beside
you? / You were the only one I ever cried to / The night is through.”
These sentiments “hit different” for lesbians and gay men who are
often pressured to live their entire romantic lives in secret, who
feel the sting of 21st Century’s “Does Your Mama Know About Me?”
and the ache of Patti Austin singing on Quincy Jones’s “Love Me by
Name.” They hit especially different for the generation that came
of age at a time when the dreams of the Gay Liberation Movement
were often deferred by the realities of the day-to-day straight world.
Black writer Hilton Als, who came into gay life around the same time
as Melvin, described his friends as “romantics who never loved.”
Indeed, there’s something “queer” about the whole nighttime
world that Melvin orchestrated with his music. I’m using “queer”
in the way it developed in academic and activist circles in the ’90s
as a way to refer to a range of sexual expressions that don’t neatly
conform to the conventions of “lesbian” and “gay” (which historically
have been associated with whiteness) and don’t necessarily relate
to mainstream prescriptions of lifetime companionship. Melvin em-
pathized with the “Children of the Night” that the Jones Girls sang
about, those who “walk the shadows…looking for some company.”
He understood the “Night Games” that troubled Stephanie Mills,
because “searchin’ to find someone new isn’t easy.” And I can’t help
but think he was revealing a bit of himself, sitting alone each evening
in the radio booth, when he played Norman Connors’s “You Bring
Me Joy,” sung by Adarita (Ada Dyer), with its lyrics, “I’m so lonely
at night / And I’m mixed up again…”
IT’S SO HARD TO SAY
GOODBYE TO YESTERDAY
elvin’s father knew something was wrong with his
child. Each afternoon, William Lindsey stopped by
Melvin’s place to chat about this and that. But on a
spring day in 1990, he could tell his son, on the verge
of turning thirty-five, “was very upset,” though he
wouldn’t learn why for some time. William remem-
bered: “He said it was the worst day of his whole life.…I could see
the change.” Shortly before his father’s arrival, Melvin received news
that a biopsy done on a purplish spot on his nose showed he had
Kaposi sarcoma, a form of skin cancer that can result from a weak-
ened immune system. He understood exactly what this meant, as he
called a friend and confessed amidst a squall of tears: “I have AIDS.”
The news came as Melvin was at a career peak. His smooth style
and suave looks helped him score a gig co-hosting (with Angela
Stribling) BET’s entertainment magazine series Screen Scene. He was
also making one million dollars over five years at WHUR competitor
WKYS. But things began to change once people around town started
noticing the discolored patches on his face and arms. In November,
his contract wasn’t renewed with WKYS after negotiations went
stagnant. One year later, he got a gig hosting a Saturday morning
show on another D.C. “urban contemporary” station, WPGC, for a
sum the Post reported as $100/week.
By this point, Melvin’s health struggles were an open secret in
D.C., and on March 18, 1992, the Post profiled him on the front page
of its acclaimed “Style” section, where he discussed being gay and
revealed how AIDS had brought him closer to his family. He told his
brother and sister first that he had AIDS, sitting out on the porch
after he’d returned home from being hospitalized for a high fever.
“It was a big shock,” said his older sister, Brenda Lindsey, “but we
were just all there for him.”
He made plans to tell his parents the following day. But he wasn’t
expecting what happened once they arrived. “This is the most im-
portant moment of my life,” Melvin said, “and my mother comes in
here with all these delicatessen meats: pastrami, corned beef, ham.”
He told her, “Momma, let’s sit down and talk.…Momma, I have AIDS.”
She responded: “Oh, baby,…they told me already.”
His father approached caregiving by way of scripture: “Embrace
a person with a holy kiss.” He would press his lips against Melvin’s
forehead and on his son’s folded hands. Melvin welcomed this ten-
derness: “I don’t remember him kissing me as a kid at all, or even
spanking me as a kid. His sensitivity makes me feel good.”
Following the article, Melvin returned to WHUR for one more
show. He broadcast from his bed at D.C.’s Sibley Memorial Hospital.
He showed gratitude to his devout listeners, as he’d done when he
left the station in 1985. Then, his last song was Gladys Knight and
the Pips’ “Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me.”
Melvin died, at thirty-six, on March 26, 1992, four days after D.C.
heard his voice live on air for the last time. His homegoing took place
the following week at the Howard University Law School Chapel.
Fans across the D.C. metropolitan area came out to show love and
say goodbye. “I remember his funeral,” says Pendarvis. “First of all,
I had to get up two hours early because I knew it was going to be
packed. I had to get a seat. I was not going to be standing up. But I
knew that I had to pay respect to a man who created a legacy, who
touched my life and touched so many other people’s lives.”
One of the singers offering musical tribute to Melvin was Jean Carne,
who epitomizes Melvin’s Quiet Storm aesthetic for the way she moved
from making avant-garde jazz with her ex-husband, Doug Carn, to
crafting “grown,” reflective soul. She performed a medley of some of
Melvin’s favorite songs, including Donny Hathaway’s “Someday We’ll
All Be Free” and “For All We Know” and the Cooley High tearjerker
by G. C. Cameron, “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday.”
In the years since Melvin’s death, the term “Quiet Storm” has
become used so widely throughout criticism and social media and
radio that it’s almost lost its meaning. Revolt once, in a head-scratch-
ing move, called rapper/singer Drake “a game-changer of the Quiet
Storm genre.” But more bothersome to me—a Black gay man whose
deepest longings were expressed in Melvin’s selections—is the way
people mention his work and sexuality without considering how
the two are inseparable. Melvin’s coded musical choices are no less
related to his identity as a Black gay man than Aretha Franklin’s
anthems about emotional equity are related to her identity as a
Black woman. Also, by being early adopters of certain songs that
have become widely cherished totems of Black love, Melvin—and his
queer listeners—show how queerness has helped shape Blackness.
To riff off the O’Jays, there’s a message in the music.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 111
112
 HO W BE YO NC É’ S “ LIS TE N”
BECAME THE PHILIPPINES’
UNOFFICIAL NATIONAL ANTHEM

by Gaby Wilson

shroud (dancer of reinvention and light), 2023, acrylic and gesso on canvas, by Marigold Santos.
Photographed by Blaine Campbell. Courtesy the artist and Patel Brown 113
EVEN AFTER
SUNSET,
IT’S
NINETY-THREE
DEGREES
IN HOUSTON.
With humidity, it feels closer to one hundred. I’ve been chugging
water, hoping to replace the fluids I’ve sweated out all day, but
also, because I’m anxious. The shock of ice cubes grounds me
as I scroll through the karaoke song catalog, torn over what to
enter into the queue. I’m so nervous I forgot how uncomfortable
it can be to sing on a full stomach, how a meal can obstruct the
diaphragm and inhibit vocal control. But Giovan, who runs this
restaurant with his friend Mark, ordered half the menu for me,
and I really can’t imagine where I’d get longganisa tots and bris-
ket kare kare back home in New York.
The air is charged with that restless August feeling, the one that
follows when you realize there are only so many Saturday nights left
in a summer. To my right, a couple shares a cocktail the size of a
fishbowl. To my left, cheers and Top 40 song fragments from a pair
of lively private party rooms occasionally spill out into the rest of
the space. Flecks of colored light dance on the frosted glass partition
that separates the revelers from the rest of the dining room. But
the main event tonight at Be More Pacific, one of Houston’s buzzy
new Filipino restaurants, is open mic karaoke. The participation of
everyone within earshot is encouraged.
Giovan, who was born and raised in Houston, introduces me to
his sister Regina and at least seven of their cousins. Their mom is
Ilocano, which means she’s from the same region of the Philippines
as mine, though they tell me a bit sheepishly that they haven’t vis-
ited as much as they’d like. We start trading stories about the VH1
Divas Live anthems our relatives pressured us to sing as children.
We talk about cotillions and debuts and other performance rituals
that follow you from youth into adulthood. We hardly notice when
the house DJ (another cousin) officially kicks things off. Suddenly,
a voice slices through our conversation. My eyes search the room,
then land on the source: a young man, tucked unassumingly into a
corner high top, who is effortlessly belting the final chorus of “Just
the Way You Are” (Bruno Mars, not Billy Joel).
“Oh, that’s a real person!” Regina exclaims. “Oh my god! To me,
that was the radio!”
We’re speechless—mouths agape with stupid smiles, eyes shiny
with delight—until her friend leans in.
“We’re not following him, that’s for sure.”
114 WINTER 2023
“Just a couple more drinks in you, and you’ll be good!” Regina
chirps back.
I scan a curated list in the song catalog called “Easy for Women”
and take a long swill of the cocktail Giovan’s just put in front of
me, opting for its rum afterburn in lieu of a proper vocal warm-up.
Despite a lifetime of performing in talent shows, choirs, and cover
bands, I remain intimidated by public karaoke, but when the haunt-
ing arpeggiated synth intro of my pick—“Separate Ways (Worlds
Apart)” by Journey—kicks in, I muster the nerve for my first notes.
T here’s a suite of American pop songs you’re almost guaranteed
to hear at any Filipino karaoke gathering. Dramatic, syrupy
ballads, warbling with big, messy emotions, as impassioned as they
are technically challenging. The list includes most anything by Bruno
Mars, Journey, Whitney Houston, Céline Dion, Mariah Carey, and
ABBA. Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” has near-holy status—to perform it
poorly is blasphemy—and at one point became notorious because of
a spate of murders authorities presumed were related to unpopular
karaoke renditions. More recently, Beyoncé’s “Listen,” from the 2006
movie musical Dreamgirls, has become so ubiquitous and intertwined
with a perception of Filipino identity that it’s been dubbed in certain
corners of the internet as the country’s national anthem. Somehow,
this peculiar piece of Beyoncé’s catalog—not chart-topping “Halo,”
not Diane Warren–penned “I Was Here,” not any of the ballads that
open her Renaissance World Tour stadium extravaganza—has, in
this very specific context, eclipsed all others, more than a decade
and a half after its initial release.
For months, my feeds have been littered with memes making this
claim in jest:
I’m convinced the Philippines national anthem is listen by
beyonce
I bet when you wanna become a citizen of the Philippines they
make you sing “Listen” by Beyoncé as the test
what’s the national anthem of the philippines and why is it
listen by beyoncé?
The assertion originates primarily with American observers—some
Filipino American, some not—but it has been reinforced giddily by
Filipinos throughout the global diaspora, who have festooned the
replies with countless supporting examples from the last fifteen
years: eyewitness accounts of its performance at birthdays, funer-
als, and random Tuesdays; clips of Sunshine Corazon’s audition on
Glee and of Morissette Amon nailing an arrangement that Beyoncé
performed live only once on the Dreamgirls press tour during the
2007 Oscars race.
When Dreamgirls—which is loosely based on the rise of Diana
Ross and the Supremes and Motown Records—premiered in 1981
on Broadway, “Listen” wasn’t part of the original production. For
decades, the musical’s lone showstopper was “And I Am Telling You
I’m Not Going,” the gut-wrenching signature song of Dreamgirl Effie
White. It grabs audiences, then hurtles them along on a rollercoaster
synced to her breaking heart and transcendent voice. Its enormity
has never once failed to close the first act with a thunderous standing
ovation. It imbues the role of Effie with an emotional heft and gos- the songwriting team, which included the musical’s original com-
pel-rooted power that helped to clinch a Tony Award in 1982 for poser Henry Kreiger and later Beyoncé herself, crafted “Listen,” a
Jennifer Holliday. Holliday’s “And I Am Telling You” isn’t just the rafter-raising breakup anthem that crescendos relentlessly to its
original, it set the standard, laying daunting expectations for all final emphatic note, blending r&b soul with orchestral theatrics,
future renditions. It was the final scene Jennifer Hudson filmed for arena pop with ecstatic gospel. The result of a meticulous process
her turn as Effie in the 2006 screen adaptation—so critical to the that, according to musical supervisor Randy Spendlove, involved no
overall performance that production maximized the time she would less than thirty-five different renditions before finally landing on the
have to inhabit the role before tackling it. Hudson’s didn’t match one featured in the film. Beyoncé was so inspired by her time with
Holliday’s, but it was strong enough to earn her an Academy Award. Deena, she penned several more songs for her sophomore album
While director Bill Condon was writing the adaptation, he felt that B’Day from the Dreamgirl’s perspective.
without another big number to anchor the end of Act II, the movie “Listen” is a hard-working song that rises to tremendous expec-
seemed, as he told the New York Times, like it was “almost over” at tations, and though this kind of melodramatic track has all but
intermission. Plus, despite the story’s messages of empowerment, evaporated from music charts over the last twenty years, it endures
only one of the three as a rare, beloved,
young Black female post-Y2K power
protagonists had ballad, especially
any meaningful in the Philippines.
space to express her Not long after its
feelings about how release, Jake Zyrus,
their career aspi- then fifteen years
rations were rear- old, started per-
ranging their lives, forming “Listen” at
leaving the other local singing com-
two, oddly, singers petition circuits
without voices. in his hometown
One of these of Cabuyao, an in-
voiceless vocalists, dustrial city about
the plain but pret- thirty miles south
ty Deena Jones, of Manila, adding
Dreamgirls’ ap- it to an already im-
proximation of pressive repertoire
Diana Ross, was of note-perfect
under contract diva anthems like
to be played by Whitney Houston’s
multi-platinum “I Will Always Love
recording artist You,” Céline Dion’s
Beyoncé Knowles. “Because You Loved
Deena was a role Be- Me,” and the Jenni-
yoncé seemed fated fer Holliday sig-
to play, her career nature “And I Am
to that point almost Telling You.” Town
an exact mirror: girl fiestas quickly led to
group beginnings, regional television
turbulent lineup broadcasts, and a
changes, the solo growing fanbase
breakaway, the swing toward Hollywood. By 2005, her work, both started uploading the videos to YouTube. Eventually, these clips
as a solo artist and with Destiny’s Child, had earned her a combined captured the attention of Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah Winfrey, David
eight Grammys, six number-one hit singles, and a Pepsi sponsorship, Foster, and Céline Dion, all of whom were so taken by his winsome
but there was so much the Beyoncé who signed on to play Deena combination of talent and humility, they each invited Zyrus to per-
Jones had yet to do. This was before “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on form on their stages. On the evening of the 2009 Academy Awards, he
It),” before “Run the World (Girls),” before the surprise visual album flitted about Los Angeles singing “Listen” at Oscar parties crowded
and Lemonade and the blackout Super Bowl halftime show. That with celebrities. The next year, he performed it as a cast member
Beyoncé was just coming off the final Destiny’s Child tour. She was on the internationally broadcast season two premiere of Glee. His
doing Crystal Geyser bottled water commercials in Japan. She still cover debuted higher on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 than the original.
did interviews. In certain circles, it was even fashionable to hate her. As Zyrus’s star ascended, “Listen” developed a reputation in the
Condon’s grand idea was to inject the final act with a new song, Philippines as a star-maker, and more videos of homegrown talents
written just for the film—an opportunity to further develop Deena’s cropped up online. In one particularly influential clip from a 2017
interiority, to demonstrate her struggle to be heard. To that end, episode of the Filipino late-night show Gandang Gabi, Vice!, host

shroud holding sampaguita, 2020, acrylic, pigment, and gesso on canvas, by Marigold Santos.
Photographed by LF Documentation. Courtesy the artist and Patel Brown OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 115
Vice Ganda directs a trio of boys in a sing-off set to “Listen.” The
boys, Francis Concepcion, Mackie Empuerto, and Keifer Sanchez,
were connected by a shared story: They had each narrowly lost a
national singing contest for kids the night before, and each already
had separate renditions of “Listen” uploaded to the internet. During
their TV battle, each boy, not one older than twelve, adds a new,
well-timed growl or punctuating melisma during their respective
turn. The result is more astonishing than if any one of them had
performed it on their own. Their powerful shared rendition launched
the boys’ professional singing careers—they now tour together as the
TNT Boys—and inspired the viral Listen Challenge, wherein groups
of friends and family line up and attempt the song together, passing
the karaoke microphone to the next singer at different intervals,
decentralizing the performance as an ensemble effort. This, perhaps
more than anything else, seems to have solidified “Listen” into the
rarefied status of national anthem, because in each video, every
person who steps to the mic is clearly familiar with it—its lyrics, its
melody, the exact placement of each flourishing adlib.
I t’s cliché to note the bigness of anything in Texas, but driving
around Houston, I’m stunned by the size of every flag I see. So
large they wave in slow motion, as if “The Star-Spangled Banner”
might start playing at any moment. Texas was my introduction to
America. Because my father was in the military, I had a peripatetic
upbringing, moving from base to base, country to country. After I
was born (in Australia), San Angelo, Texas, was my family’s first U.S.
assignment, and thus, I formed my first memories and impressions
of American life in Texas. I loved the idea of being Texan. Searching
for fallen pecans in our backyard. Singing loudly along with Selena
on the radio. During our first visit to the Philippines after moving
to San Angelo, I wore a little red cowboy hat every day—refused to
take it off, really. On FaceTimes with my lola, she still notes the funny
way I pronounced “Tang” at that age, wedging an extra “y” into the
middle with a nascent twang. And yet, I still said other words, like
“candy” or “orange,” with a Filipino accent.
Sometimes the history that binds these scattered geographies
feels so personal, like it’s the history of my body. My parents, who
grew up on either side of the Pacific Ocean, met while my father, a
wind surfer from Southern California, was assigned to Wallace Air
Station, a U.S. Air Force installation in the province of La Union
that had existed essentially in my mother’s backyard since before
her grandmother was born. While they were dating, my mother
would emcee beauty pageants on base for what was then known as
Philippine-American Friendship Day, formerly Independence Day
and now Philippine Republic Day. Three angles on commemorating
one date: July 4, 1946, when the United States officially recognized
the Philippines as an independent nation.
Until that date, the Philippines was one of America’s longest-held
colonies, since the signing of the Treaty of Paris of 1898, when Spain
ceded more than 300 years of control over the islands to the United
States. Under this colonial project, Filipinos found themselves cleaved
by the paradoxical desires of the ruling U.S. powers. On one hand,
they were given a mandate to imitate American modes of public
and private life, a formal policy proclaimed by President William
McKinley in 1898 as “benevolent assimilation.” On the other, Filipinos
suffered obsessive criticism that Filipino culture lacked “authentic-
116 WINTER 2023
ity.” The latter was spurred by Americans’ political investment in
distancing themselves from the Philippines’ previous Spanish rulers,
and an inability to find anything they felt they could productize
as exotic and sell back in the States. Literature from the United
States–helmed Philippine Bureau of Education fixates on this idea,
insisting “there must be introduced into the commercial product
something distinctly Philippine in makeup and design.” Education
director Frank L. Crone’s solution: develop an industrial approach
to design and craftwork through the public school system. “The
ultimate aim is not merely the teaching of the making and selling
of an object,” a 1915 report on the project reads, “the child educated
as a citizen…and trained as an agriculturist or a skilled craftsman is
the real product.” A few pages later, it outlines the profits possible
from the items those child craftsmen make. The specter of this
definition of identity through commodification and labor haunts
both nations to this day.
Industry gave way to mass media and pop culture, and radio
introduced American music to the boondocks. By 1969, there were
1.5 million radio sets in the islands, with the advent of sing-along
cassettes not far behind. Local Filipino singers like Eddie Mesa and
Norma Ledesma started recording their own covers of Motown
songs, and suddenly a cottage industry was born. Now, karaoke is
a national pastime in Filipino homes and businesses throughout the
world, a regular activity at anniversaries and baptisms, shopping
malls, sleepy lunch spots, even on public transit.
Giovan and Regina grew up doing karaoke at home with their
extended family. Their dad “was always the one that brought the
Minus One machine to parties,” Regina remembers—the family’s
karaoke steward. During the open mic, I watch her and Giovan take
on the role of stage managers, quizzing other customers—When is
your song up? What did you put in?—lightly nudging them toward
participation. At family-only functions, Regina tells me, it’s another
story. “My brother and I hog it a lot.”
On that long ago visit from San Angelo, the one when I wore
the little red cowboy hat, I’d spend hours with my grandparents’
boombox and corded microphone. I don’t even remember playing
any cassettes, only turning the volume dial up as far as it would go
and freestyling “A Whole New World” and “Achy Breaky Heart.”
T hough the Broadway show is set in Chicago and its inspiration,
the Supremes, came together in Detroit, the city of Houston
has played an outsized role in defining the sound of Dreamgirls.
The Bayou City’s gospel choirs raised not only Beyoncé but Jen-
nifer Holliday, too—as well as Loretta Devine (the original Lorell
Robinson) and Phylicia Rashad (understudy for the original Deena,
Sheryl Lee Ralph).
Even if you avoid the sprawling ten-lane highways that stitch
the city together, the Houston sites most formative to Beyoncé’s
upbringing are within a fifteen-minute drive of one another. The
Methodist parish where she grew up in the original power ballad
forum, the Black Church. The childhood home in Riverside Terrace
where her father Mathew Knowles held performance clinics—mod-
eled after Berry Gordy’s cultivation of the Supremes—for her early
singing group Girl’s Tyme. The popular and profitable Headliners
Salon owned by her mother Tina Knowles, where Beyoncé cut her
teeth dancing for its see-and-be-seen clientele—who were held
captive under dryer hoods—and made her first dollars sweeping
hair off the floor. The neighborhood park she eventually named her
entertainment company after.
In the morning, sluggish from my night at Be More Pacific, I trace
these paths, tailing Ford F-150s around curves, awed by every oak
canopy that gently interrupts the sun. The church is flanked now
by two buildings bearing the Knowles name—a youth center and
an apartment building that provides housing for Houston’s low-in-
come and undomiciled residents. The two-story brick home is sweet
and appears to be well-kept, nestled in a quiet Third Ward suburb
staving off gentrification. It’s not at all the six-bedroom McMansion
I watched Beyoncé tour with Kelly Rowland, Michelle Williams, and
her sister Solange on MTV Cribs in 2000. The salon has since closed.
Every other song on the radio is “CUFF IT.”
Leaving the former parking lot of Headliners, I head six minutes
due east toward Hermann Park, an expansive 445-acre public park
within the city’s Inner Loop. At its northernmost point, a large
bust of Filipino national hero Dr.
Jose P. Rizal guards the entrance
to a sculpture walk studded with
historical figures significant to
Houston’s large immigrant com-
“LISTEN” IS
munities. On the opposite side of A FORMIDABLE
me to speak what little Tagalog I know. Rather than open karaoke,
the singer, whose name is Jean, functions as host and entertainer for
the dining room. She takes requests, sometimes sharing the stage
with customers, but mostly, she is a one-woman band, running her
own sound system, moving through her setlist of tender Filipino
and American hits like “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer and
Ronan Keating’s “When You Say Nothing at All.” At one point, she
relinquishes the stage to a man I noticed earlier bussing tables and
refilling plates at the buffet station. He sings a song I don’t recognize
in a rich, velvet baritone that somehow sounds like Texas. I learn
later that his name is Tony and he’s one of the owners.
Tony moved to Houston by way of Laredo in 2001 for his wife’s
job—a nurse at the Texas Children’s Hospital—but when he was
younger, he tells me, he was a musician in the Philippines, and for two
years, before he got married, he performed as a cover artist in Japan.
“I worked in a bar,” he says. “I don’t know if you call that profes-
sional, but they were paying me.”
A late bloomer, he only discov-
ered he could sing around age
sixteen, when a spontaneous El-
vis Presley impression earned him
a more glowing reaction than he
expected.

SONG TO COVER,
the park, along its southwest bor- Whether via karaoke, singing
der, sits a 2.1-square-mile stretch contests, or overseas employment
of hospitals, schools, and research
institutions—the world-class Texas
EMPHATICALLY arrangements, vocal ability is un-
derstood by many Filipinos as a
Medical Center, the largest medi- NOT FOR THE MEEK, cogent pathway to financial pos-
cal complex in the world. After the
center was established in 1945, it BUT IF DONE sibility in a national economy that
relies heavily on remittances. But
actively recruited Philippine-born
nurses to allay a growing health
WELL, IT CAN BE even Filipino vocalists who have
managed to capture the world’s
worker shortage after World War AN IMPRESSIVE attention, like Jake Zyrus, still
II, precipitating the first substan-
tial wave of Filipino immigrants CANVAS ON WHICH struggle to drum up interest in their
original music, so an emphasis on
to the city.
From there, I drive about fifteen
TO SHOWCASE covers persists.
Tony’s voice is far too low for
miles south to Pearland, a large RARE ABILITY. “Listen,” so I submit my request
Filipino enclave on the southern to Jean, who I hope is game to belt
outskirts of Houston, where a buf- through its key change before
fet joint called TJ Filipino Cuisine lunch. “Listen” is a formidable
holds court in a cozy strip mall next to a dry cleaner and two hotels. song to cover, emphatically not for the meek, but if done well, it
It’s still over one hundred degrees outside, so the blinds are drawn can be an impressive canvas on which to showcase rare ability. I had
while five ceiling fans whirr overhead at top speed. The counter is asked about it at Be More Pacific, too, but all the friendly strangers
stocked with home-cooking staples—fried talong, monggo, lechon I spoke with became quite shy whenever I brought it up, which is a
paksiw. Steam billows up, catching the light as it swirls in the draft. In completely understandable response. (I’m not confident enough in
the corner, a woman with a bright, gentle voice sings “You” by Basil my upper belt to perform it outside of the shower.)
Valdez in front of a backdrop that reads “Kamusta Y’all,” a bilingual “Listen” tests singers’ physical limits, their stamina, breath sup-
approximation of “Howdy.” Before it became the Lone Star State, port, melismatic dexterity, and range, which has made it a favorite
the immense stretch of land from Galveston and the Gulf of Mexico for a class of singer known in the Philippines as “biritera,” largely
to as far west as Odessa was known to the Spanish colonial empire defined by a propensity toward all of the above. The word “birit”
as New Philippines. Now, Houston is home to the largest Filipino was first introduced in the early 1990s on a long-running after-
American population in the South, with Dallas not far behind. noon variety show called Eat Bulaga!, which regularly airs singing
contests with specific themes, like “shy singing” (judged blind) or
“love singing” (duets). Birit emerged functionally at first, as a way
to categorize songs like “Listen” that are prohibitively challenging,

I t’s a quieter, after-church crowd here at TJ, and something about

it—the clatter of flatware, the warm smell of cooked rice—coaxes
but for better or worse, always elicit a reaction. Eventually, though,
it grew to take on greater significance.

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 117
 While researching birit, James Gabrillo, a musicology scholar
and assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Butler
School of Music, conducted interviews with people instrumental
to its genesis—Eat Bulaga!’s production crew and hosts, the New
Manila Sound band Aegis, audience members, critics, and cultural
officials—over a combined twelve months in Manila. His studies and
fieldwork revealed birit’s formation as a cultural reaction “due to a
collective need to reclaim power that had been lost as a society” in
the aftermath of more than five hundred years of foreign imperialism
and nearly fifteen years of homegrown dictatorship. Swinging away
from the earnest protest folk that came before it, birit’s emphasis
on spectacle and sensation over disciplined ability, Gabrillo argued,
signaled a turn against the authoritarian snobbery of upper-class
tastes and toward working-class Filipinos “assert[ing] their Filipi-
no-ness through a form of mass culture that embodied their hopes
and insecurities, their strengths and flaws, as a people.” Perhaps less
rash populism and more subversive tackiness.
Jean informs me after her set that many of TJ’s patrons, like
me, request those big, showy ballads, full of vocal pyrotechnics. “I
want to sing Whitney Houston, I want to
sing Céline Dion,” she says, “but my voice,
I feel, is not meant for those songs.” She
confesses that her vocal range is “one of
[her] biggest insecurities,” that it even kept “OH WOW,
her from entering singing contests in the
Philippines. For every punchy testimonial
THAT’S A
about the last time someone bodied “Listen” NICE SONG,”
at karaoke, there is another wistful admis-
sion in the comments section that reads HE REPLIES,
something like, “I’m Filipino but didn’t get
the singing gene.” A reminder that these
SINGING IT
videos and memes, while entertaining and QUIETLY TO
even at times empowering, when taken as
bald fact, can promote a stereotype that all HIMSELF.
Filipinos can sing. Contrary to that belief,
vocal ability is not some sort of essentialized
“THEY WILL
Filipino trait. BE HAPPY.”
“Maybe you can sing?” Tony asks me,
and I offer that I know exactly one Tagalog
song: “Sana’y Wala Nang Wakas” by Filipina
megastar Sharon Cuneta, which I usually reserve for family parties.
“Oh wow, that’s a nice song,” he replies, singing it quietly to
himself. “They will be happy.”
Before I can back out, he flags down a server named Rebecca, who
whisks me over to the stage. As Jean hands me the microphone, I
become acutely aware of my heart throbbing behind my ribs and
into my throat.
Sana’y wala nang wakas
Kung pag-ibig ay wagas
The first lines come out dry and shaky as I acclimate to the moni-
tor levels in real time and avoid eye contact with a table of thirteen
that I overheard was gathered to celebrate a thirty-eighth wedding
anniversary. I know this song well enough to coast on autopilot for
a few bars as I gain composure, converting the idea of performing
impromptu for a dining room full of strangers into something free-
ing, fleeting, and rare.
118 WINTER 2023
Paglalambing sa ‘yong piling
Ay ligaya kong walang kahambing
My nerves settling, I slip into the story of the song—a schmaltzy
plea for a love without end. It’s nowhere near as strenuous as “Lis-
ten,” but “Sana’y Wala Nang Wakas” is, funnily enough, the eleven
o’clock number for a 1986 Filipino movie musical about a trio of
singers whose friendship is tested by their pursuit of fame. I wasn’t
thinking about the parallels to Dreamgirls at the time; it’s just the
song I know that materialized in the situation.
T he original version of the Philippines’ actual national anthem,
“Lupang Hinirang,” had no lyrics. It was composed in 1898,
during the last months of the Spanish-American War, and there have
been at least six variations since. A romantic Spanish version with
mandolins. An English version that sounds militant and rushed—the
one my lola sang in school. Meanwhile, the
current Filipino lyrics, written in 1956 and
only codified as law as recently as 1998, play
up the composition’s theatrical potential
with bold dynamic variations and Wall of
Sound harmonies.
“The Star-Spangled Banner” has a similar
history. Its tune was cribbed from an existing
British drinking song and wasn’t adopted
as the official U.S. anthem until 1931, well
over a century after the country’s founding.
Before that, it was just one of many patriotic
songs in popular rotation, like “America the
Beautiful” and “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,”
albeit markedly more difficult to sing. It
wasn’t until artists like José Feliciano and
Jimi Hendrix dared to unsettle its stodgy,
standardized arrangement in favor of some-
thing more soulful and unorthodox—in some
cases, at great personal cost—that the song
exploded into the canvas for exemplary pa-
triotism that many consider it to be today.
Most national anthems earn their status many years after their
country’s formation. Usually, they’re popular songs that citizens
already know, but they’re declared official at pivotal moments,
ones that demand patriotic cohesion, such as in times of war. This
joking designation of “Listen” as the Philippines’ national anthem
is, of course, quite different. Unofficial, unserious, and conferred
by one country onto another. And yet, its proliferation alongside
current expanding U.S. military presence in the Philippines hardly
feels insignificant.
On the phone with Christine Bacareza Balance, author of the book
Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America,
she pulls out specific lyrics from “Listen”—I’m more than what
you made of me, I’m not at home in my own home—which present
a deeper reading of the song, not just as a national anthem, but as
a post-colonial anthem. She reminds me about an archival image of
Dean Conant Worcester, an American zoologist and pro-imperialist
who was influential in depicting Filipinos to an American audience
during U.S. colonial rule. The ethnographic photo, titled Entertaining
the Kalingas, pictures Worcester at the center of a scene, playing
back recorded audio for a large group of rural Filipinos. It’s evocative,
perhaps deliberately, of the Francis Barraud painting His Master’s
Voice. In a post-colonial framework, the “Listen” memes, Balance
says, feel “almost like a late 20th, early 21st century [perspective]
talking back to that image.”
The narrative arc of the song follows Deena’s push toward inde-
pendence. Manipulated, commodified, confused, and fed up, she
conjures a revolutionary rage, willing a change in her circumstances.
“Listen” finds its ideal originating voice in Beyoncé, herself a girl
group breakout whose manager-father’s cutthroat business decisions,
which often privileged his daughter, routinely made tabloid headlines
in the early aughts (she cut professional ties with her father in 2011).
And while she’s been careful to distance her reality from Deena’s in
public acknowledgements, it’s not hard to see how Beyoncé might
identify with many of the character’s circumstances and channel
those feelings into her evocative interpretation of the lyric.
Through attention to the meaning rooted in Deena’s words, “Lis-
ten” forms a siphon for each singer’s own latent indignation. Like
Deena manifesting her autonomy from within her manager-husband
Curtis’s recording booth, when Filipinos perform “Listen”—absorb-
ing, gestating, and proffering it as their own on global stages—they
live out the song’s rallying cry of self-determination and demand
an audience for themselves. They claim the microphone and insist
that everyone else listen.
P erhaps if I’d had more time in Houston, I might have stum-
bled on a performance of “Listen” or found the mettle to do
it myself. Instead, I spend the flight home to New York wondering
if perhaps I had overblown its pervasiveness in Filipino spaces. Or
at least Filipino American ones. Over the ensuing month, I watch
hours of YouTube clips—compilations of Filipino singers covering
the song, American vloggers reacting to the performances—and
resign myself to the idea that this digital approximation might be
as close as I get.
Then, on a recent Saturday night, my partner and I decide
to deviate from the same neighborhood Filipino restaurant we
always frequent in Queens (because I know it prepares chicken
adobo with the same proportions of vinegar and soy sauce as my
grandmother’s recipe) and opt for a new-ish place on Roosevelt
Avenue called Kabayan Bistro Lounge and Banquet, open since
2021. The restaurant has none of the hallmarks I’ve come to expect
of local mom-and-pop joints—no buffet counter, no capiz shell
lights, no TVs blaring The Filipino Channel. Rather, it’s awash in
white, quilted leather seating and Lucite chandeliers, like an early
2010s episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The sounds
of sizzling lumpia and heated tsismis ripple through the dining
room, amplified by the marble floors. On the far wall, a flat screen
broadcasts an endless YouTube playlist of aerial b-roll over beaches
in Hawaii and the Philippines, and the house band settles down in
a corner near the entrance.
The lead singer, a petite middle-aged woman with kind eyes and a
cropped haircut, introduces the group as the “Cross My Heart Band”
(stylized, I learn later from an Instagram flyer, “X Mai <3 Band,” a
play on her name, Mai). Her belt is brassy. She doesn’t shy away from
high notes, rendering Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”
more vehement than the original. Mai’s lead guitarist, Jaz, is about
ten years her junior. He’s dressed in a flat-brim hat, Hawaiian print
t-shirt, and cargo shorts, and for the first three songs, I can’t decide
if he is effortlessly talented, wildly flippant, or both. During sound
check, the drummer occasionally vies for his attention, pointing a
finger up and angling his head and chin with it—universal musicians’
shorthand for “you’re flat”—and yet, seconds later, Jaz’s harmonies
on Deniece Williams’s “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” are flawless.
Mai and Jaz have only been playing together for a year, but their
stories are eerily similar. Both emigrated from Manila by way of brief
stints performing with agencies in Japan. Both are now full-time
healthcare workers who spend their free Saturdays hosting their
neighbors’ nostalgic sing-alongs. Both are blissfully unashamed about
never rehearsing. Hopeful about their combination of nonchalance
and ability, I decide to give requesting another shot. I write on the
back of a kitchen check—Listen by Beyoncé, please! Not celebrating
anything, just love the song—and watch intently as a server shuttles
it to the band. Immediately, Mai and Jaz laugh and visibly brace
themselves for what’s next.
The keyboard, which seems permanently set to “new wave,” lays
out the song’s sparkling synth backbone, and it becomes instantly
apparent that Mai does not have the same muscle memory for “Listen”
as she does for “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me).”
Still, she soldiers through. Then, something unexpected. Accompa-
nying voices start piping up throughout the dining room, helping
her stay on melody and rhythm. At the end of the first chorus, Jaz
sweeps in with a crystalline falsetto.
I’m more than what you made of me
I followed the voice you gave to me
For the rest of the song, Jaz and Mai cycle in and out every other
measure, battling their way through the song’s upper register, trying
desperately to stay afloat, but the voices in the dining room don’t
let up. The moment echoes the viral performances of the TNT Boys
and TikTok’s Listen Challenge. I recall, too, that in stage revivals
of Dreamgirls since the movie’s premiere, the show has adopted
“Listen” as a duet between Deena and Effie. Perhaps it’s most itself
when sung together.
I don’t know where I belong
But I’ll be moving on
If you don’t, if you won’t
Listen
It’s a messier performance than the band would like for an audi-
ence request. When it’s over, Jaz quips, “And that was Beyoncé from
Walmart!” which, in online parlance, signifies a shopping fail. But the
truth is, I loved it. After that performance, everything becomes more
participatory. There is line-dancing. Patrons lean into crowd work.
At one point, a cross-generational duet of “Faithfully,” sung by two
men who were strangers only an hour before, unfurls throughout
the dining room and blooms into an exuberant company number.
All of us waving our arms and shouting whoa-oa-oa-oa in unison.
That plucky, rudderless cover of “Listen” pierced the boundary
between performer and audience, collapsing the space between
spectacle and crowd as we sway toward midnight.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 119
120
 A S EA RC H F OR T H E M E M ORY OF

R. E. M. I N AT H E N S, G EORG I A

by Ben Hedin

Outtakes from the cover shoot for R.E.M.’s Murmur, 1983 © Sandra-Lee Phipps 121
It is a truth universally acknowledged,
A.E. Stallings and I agreed, that
things were cooler before you got there.
This seemingly incontrovertible fact came up as we were discuss-
ing her college days. Stallings, the author of four books of poetry,
including the recently published selection This Afterlife, was
raised in Atlanta and moved to Athens to study at the University
of Georgia in the fall of 1986. Athens, back then, prided itself on
its status as a bohemian outpost in the Deep South of the Reagan
years, a place where indie rock, folk art, and camp fashion col-
lided. “There wasn’t a feeling,” as Stallings put it, “that art was
being made elsewhere. You didn’t feel like you had to move to
New York. You were in Athens, Georgia.”
The consensus darlings of the scene—not that they would ever
be labeled as such—since the hipster code of Athens demanded an
aloofness from things like celebrity, were the members of R.E.M.:
Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe. By 1986, R.E.M.,
who had formed in Athens and played their first gig in a church in
April of 1980, had acquired a national following, and would soon
leave their small independent label, I.R.S., to sign with Warner
Bros. But there were several other accomplished acts in Athens at
the time, like Love Tractor, Squalls, and Dreams So Real. As well as
fledgling ones. Stallings can remember attending song swaps with
Vic Chesnutt, and on Tuesdays she and her friends would wander
over to the Uptown Lounge, one of the venues downtown, pay three
quarters for a beer and listen to a group that had just been given a
residency at the club: Widespread Panic.
Which sounds pretty good, only a slight exaggeration needed to
call it paradise. And paradise, as we all know, is by definition lost,
unrecoverable. When I asked Stallings if there was any trace left
of the world she was telling me about, or whether it had totally
vanished, I was surprised by her answer. She said, “I think it was
already on the verge of vanishing when I was there.”
By this she meant the freewheeling ethic of creativity and play
that defined Athens was starting to fade, overwhelmed by hipster
self-consciousness on the one hand and mass popularity on the
other. When members of sororities and fraternities started dressing
up for an R.E.M. show, she said, you knew it was over. Yet we also
recognized the structural or ritual quality of this lament. It doesn’t
matter where or who you are, things were always cooler before.
Stallings had friends who said no, you should have been here two
years ago; they, in turn, had friends who said the same thing, and so
on, back to some distant and prelapsarian point of origin. Whereas
for me—I am about a decade younger and knew R.E.M. only when
they were the lodestars of MTV and Rolling Stone—Stallings’s time
in Athens sounds incomparably vivid. I chose to attend a school in
Virginia in part because Athens, in 1996, didn’t resemble what I
imagined it to have been in 1986, and even now I would still trade in
my undergraduate experience for a seventy-five-cent Rolling Rock
and an early look at Widespread Panic.
The storybook, in other words, didn’t match up, hers and mine.
They had the same title—“Once Upon a Time, in Athens, Georgia”—
122 WINTER 2023
and the same point-of-view, in that neither of us was around to
witness it. Yet they differed in chronology and in tone, as mine was
a largely celebratory projection and Stallings’s version contained
the hint, the specter, of loss.
After our meeting, I decided to make a series of trips to Athens. I
wanted to learn more about the world R.E.M. came out of, the one
Stallings said had vanished, and along the way I figured I’d also see
how the band is being remembered or commemorated there. I spoke
with Mike Mills and Michael Stipe and told them what I was up to,
even though I felt they had already given their blessing to such a
project. For it’s one of the great fixations of R.E.M. and their work,
the conjurings we make of the past—and the mythic value they tend
inevitably to assume.
R
evisiting that time, as I quickly discovered, it can
be fun trying to sort out what is fact and what
isn’t. Stallings told me, for example, that by 1986,
R.E.M. was so popular that if they wanted to play
at one of the clubs downtown they would have to
do so incognito, under an assumed name. Scanning the week’s flyers,
she would look for a band she hadn’t heard of. That was the tell, she
said, the giveaway of which one might be R.E.M. in disguise. Often,
however, “if you went out to see an unknown band called Beast
Penis, it would end up being Beast Penis.”
It’s a good yarn, with lots of romance, and is neatly instructive
of the town’s covenant with R.E.M., the futility of them trying to
do anything in Athens without everyone immediately hearing of
it. Maybe it’s too neat. As Stallings told it to me, I wondered if the
story was a piece of local apocrypha, the kind that is fashioned ex
post facto, and slowly, through multiple retellings, gets hardened
into scripture.
But Mills told me it was true. “We didn’t do it very often,” the
bassist for R.E.M. said when we spoke in August, “just a few times,
if you didn’t want to play a real show, just get up there, goof off
and have fun.” Once, he recalled, R.E.M. performed under a name
gleaned from a newspaper headline: “Hornets Attack Victor Mature.”
I met Mills at the 40 Watt, the last of the smaller clubs from that
era still in existence. It began as a rehearsal space for the band Py-
lon—a second-floor apartment lit by a single bulb—and though the
40 Watt has changed locations a number of times before settling
into its current digs on Washington Street, it does a good job of
holding on to these austere roots and remaining happily resistant to
improvements or frippery. There are bars on both sides of the floor,
in front of the stage, and that’s about it. The only notable piece of
decoration is a sign hanging over the exit. TYRONE’S O.C., it reads,
in tribute to another of Athens’s great clubs, Tyrone’s on Foundry
Street, destroyed by fire in January of 1982.

Mills, who had grown up in Macon, relocated to Athens in 1978.
Rent in those days was cheap. Stallings can remember “a lot of
old Victorian houses that had been chopped up into apartments,
though they might be vermin-infested and the plumbing might not
work very well,” and Mills, along with his friend Bill Berry, soon to
become the rhythm section for R.E.M., were able to find rooms in a
house for forty dollars each.
Stipe got there a year later—much to his dissatisfaction. He had
been living with a punk band in St. Louis and moved to Athens,
where his parents had retired, only because he ran out of money. “I
always thought it was this hippie cow-town,” he said recently, “and
I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”
When talking about the person he was forty-plus years ago,
Stipe can be endearingly honest, particularly when it comes to
the immodesty of his teenage ambition. “My intention in 1979,” he
told me matter-of-factly, “was to start a band and become world
famous.” It didn’t seem like you could do that in Athens, though
after entering the Arts School at the University of Georgia, Stipe
was able to locate and attach himself to what was brewing in town.
“The Athens scene was very small,” he said, “thirty people, maybe
R.E.M. Barber Street, Athens, GA, 1982 © Sandra-Lee Phipps
thirty-five people, when I arrived in ’79. It was
so underground I didn’t know about it for the
first six months I was here.”
There may have been no one else in that set
who dared to covet world fame. As the calendar
switched to a new decade and R.E.M. and other
bands got together, there was a lot of punk, and
post-punk, to be heard in Athens. But some
of the music also demonstrated a streak of
the avant-garde, a willingness to embrace the
antic and outré. There were groups, like Pylon
or Limbo District, that did not even consider
themselves bands in the ordinary or conven-
tional sense, but saw their music as one piece
in a larger, more abstract field of expression.
Michael Lachowski, the bassist for Pylon, who
like Stipe was a student in the Arts School,
said the group was not interested in writing
songs but “assembling things with sound and
instruments.” Play was the objective, in itself,
not garnering mass appeal, which seemed too
farfetched to consider in any case.
I asked Mills what downtown was like, circa
1980 or 1981. “Was it hopping?”
“No,” he said, “it was not hopping in any
way.” Clubs like the Uptown had yet to open.
There was a small array of shops, locally owned,
but only a few establishments with a liquor
license, and they all closed early on the week-
ends anyway. This meant the crucible of Athens
became the house party, the Saturday night
salons where bands could rehearse and artists
and filmmakers could meet. In those years be-
fore social media, Mills said, there was even a
number to call. A voice would answer, “Hello,
you’ve reached the Athens party hotline,” and
give the appropriate address for the evening.
I told Mills it was very hard to connect the place he was describ-
ing with the streets and neighborhoods I had spent the morning
driving through. If you live in Georgia, you hear a lot nowadays that
being in Athens can feel like being in Atlanta. And it’s true. It could
be Atlanta. Or Durham or Nashville or any number of places. The
downtown is constantly ringed by cranes and construction zones
and road closings, a result of all the new apartment complexes going
up, and the franchises, which used to prefer the mall on the Atlanta
highway, have moved into the blocks surrounding campus. Most
days, the busiest point of commerce is the Chick-fil-A at the corner
of College and Broad, and many of the vintage clothing stores, once
prized for their bargains, have shuttered, replaced by trendier shops
with signs in the door that read “By Appointment Only.”
Mills, who lives up the street from the 40 Watt, said there is still
a vital and close-knit music community to be found in Athens. And
I know how much dwelling on the 1980s bothers longtime residents
of the town, who rightly see in all the fascination or nostalgia an
implicit criticism of Athens as it is now. For them, to glorify the
house parties and cheap rent is to indulge in a sentimental fantasy,
and some people will roll their eyes when you ask if they ever went
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 123
to Tyrone’s. What is it you want to know, their glazed expression
seems to ask, if things were cooler back then?
At the same time, it was becoming clear to me that things do
disappear. We forget this can happen in the South, where the past
tends to outstay its welcome, yet it’s a view that Mills was willing
to sponsor. He told me the heyday, the most blissful part of being
in Athens, was almost impossibly evanescent, lasting only about a
year or two, and was effectively over by the time R.E.M.’s first record
came out in 1983. What ended it? Knowledge, naturally: the forbidden
fruit, the ancient enemy. People started moving there to take part in
whatever it was that was happening, and the media took notice. “O
Little Town of Rock ‘n’ Roll” ran a 1984 headline in the Washington
Post, above an article comparing Athens to Beatles-era Liverpool
and Grateful Dead–era San Francisco. There was a narrative now, a
national focusing. Two years later, filming commenced on a docu-
mentary, Athens, Georgia: Inside/Out, that featured R.E.M., Pylon,
Love Tractor, and others. It was as if a giant mirror had been set
down in front of the town.
“They say about a certain kind of particle that the act of observing
them makes them different,” Mills said. “Same thing with a scene.
Once you start observing it and coming here to see it, then it’s very
different. The scene’s probably over at that point.”
Here it was again, the sense of a vanishing, the same Stallings had
noticed. Moreover, and somewhat uncomfortably, I was realizing how
this band I have listened to and taken for granted my whole life was in
fact a very delicate and contingent entity. “Back then we didn’t know
what we were doing,” said Mills, who stressed how vital of an agent
this lack of self-awareness was, how crucial to R.E.M.’s development.
And what if it had been otherwise? A question, of course, nobody can
answer, yet one that kept presenting itself to me as I drove around the
streets of Athens, trying to reconstruct the town as it was. If Athens
had already been “Athens” in 1980, would there still be an R.E.M.?
A
t one point, my conversation with Mills drifted
into the subject of memory. He had been telling
me about some of the clowning around that went
on in the clubs, where it was common for one
member of a band to join another’s set, and I
brought up the last track on Green, R.E.M.’s sixth album and their
debut for Warner Bros. It’s a song that was hidden from the album
sleeve and so appears as “Untitled” in streaming platforms, and
when it came time to record it Bill Berry and Peter Buck switched
positions, with Berry playing guitar and Buck the drums.
“Swapping instruments is something we did just to change things,”
Mills said. “We’re all capable of playing multiple instruments. So
why not do it?”
“Untitled” is sung by Mills and Stipe together, in call-and-response,
the lines about leaving home, as the song seems written to contain
all those messages we can’t bring ourselves to deliver to our parents
on such an occasion. “I made a list of things to say,” they confide,
“When all I want to say / All I really want to say is / Hold her, and
keep him strong / While I’m away from here.”
“It’s a very sweet song,” Mills said, “about family and remembrance,
and I think there’s a Southern element in that song, in the sense of
part of being from the South is that you remember. The history of
your family is very important. I can find chunks of my relatives in
124 WINTER 2023
five or six towns across Georgia. Way, way back. That sort of con-
nection to the past is, for better or worse, a very important part of
being from the South.
“And the fact that not only do we have that connection, but we
talk about it, we have stories about it, families sit around and the
grandparents tell the grandkids: This is where you come from, this
is who you come from.”
People are sometimes surprised to discover R.E.M. is from Georgia.
They are almost never identified as a Southern band, not in the way
the Allman Brothers, for instance, are. Which is understandable.
Musically, their influences point not to the South and its vernacular
traditions but to New York, to the Velvet Underground, the Ramones,
and Patti Smith. And then there is the range of their catalog, the
power it has to exhaust all rubrics, the songs moving freely from
one kind of style to the next, from more classical or anthemic forms
(think “Stand” or “Shiny Happy People”) to the bizarre, ludic, and
experimental (“Country Feedback,” “Oddfellows Local 151”). In the
end, with R.E.M., all the descriptors fall away. Indie rock, college
radio, these won’t do the job, either. Listening to them, you’re where
you want to be: in a land of irreducibility.
For all that, though, as Mills indicated, their work betrays a recur-
rent concern with Southern places and Southern themes, especially
in the attitude displayed toward the past, or memory, which is pre-
sented as the site of both catastrophe and wonder. In 1985, for their
third album, R.E.M. released a song cycle of the American South,
Fables of the Reconstruction. Its title sounds like some anthology
of Southern fiction, a compendium of weird and tragic tales pieced
together in the last century by a professor who had fallen under the
spell of New Agrarianism. And the lyrics do limn a kind of Gothic
dreamscape, a Southern underworld of desperation and thinly muted
hysteria, peopled by eccentrics, runaways, and drifters.
“Fables was me pulling from real life,” said Stipe, “attaching these
more mythic characteristics to real people.” “Life and How to Live
It,” for instance, is based on Athens recluse Brivs Mekis, who built
a wall in his house, dividing it into separate apartments so he could
live alternately on one side, then the other. And R.E.M. took the name
Wendell Gee from a car dealer outside Athens, appropriating it to
write, in the album’s last song, of a man “reared to give respect” but
who chooses that ultimate act of apostasy, suicide.
The songs all move swiftly toward some tragic outcome. They
contain snapshots of an older, preindustrial South, a time when trains
were the dominant form of travel and farms the cornerstone of the
economy, though it’s no pastoral idyll that is being summoned but
instead a land of attenuation, of greed and menace. In “Green Grow
the Rushes” Stipe invokes the refrain of an old Scottish ballad, con-
trasting its promise of renewal with the South’s reliance on peonage.
“Pay for your freedom,” he sings—the line is about migrant crews
but could just as easily be about sharecroppers—“Or find another
gate / Guilt by associate / The rushes wilted a long time ago.”
In these works, as in the later political ballads “Cuyahoga,”
“Exhuming McCarthy,” and “Orange Crush,” historical memory is
freighted, tinged with foreboding and premonition. “Sometimes I
feel like I can’t even sing, I’m very scared for this world,” Stipe says
in the first line of “You Are the Everything,” another song on Green.
Yet R.E.M.’s corpus is also full of countless scenes of the kind
Mills was describing, personal, more intimate strophes that testify
to the importance of kinship and the durability of remembrance.
Alongside the larger, public myths of history, their work records
the smaller ones, more crooked, localized, and uniquely our own,
that we invent and inherit. We need to do this, their music asserts,
ruffle through the back pages of our lives until we have found the
centering. After that opening confession, for instance, “You Are the
Everything” begins to relate ordinary scenes from youth: riding in a
car with the windows down, a family reunion, the sound of “voices
talking somewhere in the house,” and suddenly we’re in a clearer,
changed realm. “I am in this kitchen, everything is beautiful,” Stipe
sings, and the verse ends with a powerful backward genuflection:
“You are here with me, you are here with me, you have been here,
and you are everything.”
In writing the lyrics to Fables of the Reconstruction, Stipe said he
hoped to trace an arc “from real life to fantastic,” and ultimately, I
think, this could apply to many of R.E.M.’s songs, songs like “You Are
the Everything” that depict so finely the way remembered incidents
take on a fabulist aspect of their own. When I said this to Stipe, he
didn’t disagree necessarily, but wanted to make sure I understood
those lines of his were composed. As opposed to confessed. “I’m
not an autobiographic writer,” he said. “I never was. I can count on
one and a half hands the number of songs over thirty years that are
truly autobiographic.”
It is, naturally, an unintentional byproduct of writing in the first
person that people will hear it as a memoirist outpouring and assume
that in “You Are the Everything” Stipe is singing about his kitchen,
or his family. Recalling what Mills had said about stories that get
told across the generations, I mentioned “Try Not to Breathe,” off
1992’s Automatic for the People. One of Stipe’s most affecting lyrics, it
captures the moment when an ailing elder submits to death, though
not before offering these closing words: “I want you to remember.”
The song, Stipe told me, was inspired by his grandmother, who “was
approaching the end of her life when that record was being made.
But there’s nothing about it that’s directly about her. I just used the
experience of being around someone at that point in their life to
try to imagine what it feels like to be inside that body, while you’re
trying to navigate the inevitable.”
Often, Stipe said, these second selves and invented voices emerge
when he is stuck, when the draft won’t move and he is looking for
a way to circumvent the stock formulas and clichés of songwriting.
“I’m writing in the medium of pop lyrics,” he said. “There’s decades
of love songs, let’s say—that’s the easiest one to shoot out of the
sky—that follow a certain kind of imprint. Adding a personal touch
to a song that feels very general, or very plain, throws it into a whole
different area.”
Stipe’s process of songwriting, then and now—he is about to release
his first solo album—seems to be one of slowness and deliberation,
even agony. It is not uncommon for him to spend two or three years
completing a lyric, and the effect I noted earlier, of how R.E.M.’s songs
testify to our need to retrieve and enshrine what would otherwise be
lost, was not incidental, and not easily arrived at. It was a carefully
wrought construction.
E
ntering Athens from the southeast, as people do if
they’re driving on Highway 78, a curious sight awaits:
as you cross the North Oconee River and start up
the hill to downtown, on your left, tucked amid a
shopping plaza and grid of condos, is a steeple, taken
down from its former height and set on a small pedestal of rocks.
Why it’s there is not apparent, since there’s no sign, no nameplate,
and to those who have just moved to Athens or come to tour one
of the condos, it must appear strange, this church tower taking up
a parking space, with its peeling sections of paint and door that
ironically invites you to enter. It could easily be mistaken for a piece
of sculpture or some urban installation. In fact, this is what remains
of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, where R.E.M. first played in front of
the public on April 5, 1980.
I’ve always loved this, the way the band seems to greet you as
soon as you get to town, and in the sort of offbeat or humble fash-
ion R.E.M. would probably desire should there ever be an official
monument to their work. But there’s not. In Athens you will find
no Paisley Park or Graceland, no votary temple where you can
fork over fifty dollars to view a sheaf of handwritten lyric drafts
or one of Stipe’s cameras, then buy a plush doll of Peter Buck on
your way out. Certainly, there could be—not far from downtown
is a warehouse where R.E.M. stores their old tour sets and other
artifacts and memorabilia—and it is easy enough to envision a
museum being built in the future, though as Stallings reminded
me, any sort of monolithic capitalist shrine “would not be cool” and
therefore would represent a transgressing of the spirit of Athens
as much as an honoring of it.
In the meantime, R.E.M. on their native ground seems poised
at an odd midpoint, both omnipresent and slipping from view,
glossed over the way Civil War cannons are, and eroded statues
and historical markers. More than two generations have passed,
after all, since they ruled the town. One afternoon I was in line
at Weaver D’s, the venerable soul food eatery on Broad Street, a
few blocks north of the steeple. Someone behind me, noticing the
concert posters and photographs of R.E.M. that adorn the walls,
asked, “Did R.E.M. eat here a lot, or what?” The other people in line
shrugged. For a moment I felt the urge to interject, but what was
I going to say? Things were cooler back then? Another customer
mentioned that Kate Pierson of the B-52’s sang backup on “Shiny
Happy People.” And there the conversation ended. The whole time,
meanwhile, the answer to the question could be glimpsed through
the window, on the marquee of the restaurant where, below the
name Weaver D’s, reads its motto: AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE.
Certainly, R.E.M. could do more to keep their name current—or
at least they could try, the way so many others do, and make a
few million along the way. But they are comfortable in the past
tense. More than comfortable; it’s where they want to be. “We
kind of grew up in public,” Stipe said, “and I’m just as proud
of the disasters and the times that we fell on our face as I am of
the triumphs.” The group disbanded in 2011, after the release of
their final record, Collapse Into Now, and there has not been the
breath of a credible rumor since about a possible reunion. There
is dignity in this, a restraint seldom offered in today’s era of the
farewell tour, of ticket-and-cruise packages with prices that top
four and five figures. R.E.M. wanted their career to have a formal
roundedness, a logical shape, so when they stopped making music,
they stopped being a band. There was no longer any reason for the
story to continue. They are content, then, to retreat, to become
less a living presence than “almost mythological,” in Stallings’s
words, at least around Athens. Having chronicled the progression
in so many of their songs, they, too, are now passing from real
life to the fantastic.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 125
126 Shirley Horn in an early publicity shot, 1960
Following the rhythm
of Shirley Horn

by Lauren Du Graf
127
There’s slow,
and then
there’s
Shirley Horn
slow.
To some, the very mention of her name is a tempo, thickened and
decelerated to an opioid-induced crawl, stretched to the brink of
nothingness.
Shirley was a gifted pianist and a jazz singer, a master interpreter
of ballads that, in her hands, achieved magnificent gravity through
the point-counterpoint of dusky-timbred vocals and spare, sophisti-
cated accompaniment, imbued with the impressionistic colors of the
Debussy and Rachmaninoff she had devoted herself to in her youth.
But mostly, it was tempo that distinguished Shirley, a sense of
time so elastic, so languorous that the white spaces in between the
notes constituted canvases of their own. Listen to her version of “If
I Should Lose You” from At the Gaslight Square, a live recording
made in St. Louis in 1961. As many standards do, the song teeters
on eye-rolling, codependent excess:
If I should lose you
The stars would fall from the skies
If I should lose you
The leaves would wither and die
Her version clocks in at just over thirty BPM—a rate that, were
you to set your pulse to it, might cause you to faint. Her phrasing
is unhurried, casual to the point of inwardness. She sings so far
behind the beat that when she begins a phrase, there’s something
like the subtle shock of a near miss, like a champagne flute caught
right before it shatters on a granite floor. Her use of space—ellipses,
commas, and periods—loads each phrase with suspense and subtext,
128 WINTER 2023
luring the listener into a dimension of language and time in which
meaning unfurls not as a series of words strung together, but as a
study in how words can hang in the air, developing over time like a
photograph in a darkroom.
I have spent many hours getting lost inside of Shirley Horn’s pauses,
staring into the void, tuning in to echoes of the past. I have learned
not to listen to too much Shirley, or I might succumb to an afternoon
in bed, a sentiment invited by songs like “A Lazy Afternoon.”
It’s a lazy afternoon
And the beetle bugs are zooming
And the tulip trees are blooming
And there’s not another human in view,
But us two.
S hirley’s life unfolded like one of her ballads, set to her own
gradual rhythm. Born May 1, 1934, in Washington, D.C., Shirley
was a shy child, reluctant to leave the house despite her mother’s
exhortations. She spent most of her years in the Woodridge neigh-
borhood in the northeast area of the city, settling a ten-minute drive
from the house in which she was raised, not far from the Ivy City
home in which her own mother grew up. A lifelong homebody, for
many of her prime career years, she stayed in D.C., all but disap-
pearing from major stages on the jazz circuit, focused on being a
present mother to her daughter. For a time, Baltimore was about “One day she’ll make you proud.” (Years later, Shirley would describe
the limit. She could drive back home after a gig. She had a strong Dr. Hughes as the “number one lady in my life.”)
rubber band, she said. Around that time, Shirley also discovered Erroll Garner. She
D.C. is an extraordinarily fertile town for jazz, and was especially so described her first encounter with his song “Penthouse Serenade”
as Shirley came of age in her early twenties, when, in 1957, it became in synesthetic terms: “I had a porch off of my bedroom, and I would
the first U.S. city with a majority black population, earning it the see the flowers, and I’d hear him. He was caressing the flowers. It was
nickname “Chocolate City.” A constellation of clubs—both white- and just, baby, it was stroke the pussy willow.” Soon, Oscar Peterson and
black-owned—drew national acts and cultivated local talent. There Ahmad Jamal replaced the classical masters she studied in school.
was Olivia Davis’s Patio Lounge on Seventh and T around the corner “Oscar Peterson became my Rachmaninoff and Ahmad Jamal became
from the Howard Theater; the Pigfoot in Brookland; the Spotlitle my Debussy,” she said.
on Rhode Island, where Miles Davis and Ahmad Jamal recorded live Her lessons at Howard continued until she was eighteen, when
albums; and Bohemian Caverns on U Street, an underground club her uncle passed away. (“I was eighteen; Uncle I. B. died. And that
whose predecessor, Crystal Caverns, was one of the first jazz clubs was the end.”) Dr. Hughes had lobbied for Shirley’s admission to
in the country, sited on D.C.’s famed U Street corridor, referred to as Juilliard, but Shirley declined the offer, ostensibly because her family
“Black Broadway” for its profusion of black-owned businesses. Duke couldn’t afford to send her there. But Shirley’s musical attention had
Ellington, Dr. Billy Taylor, and the great
drummers Jimmy Cobb and Billy Hart
had all grown up in the capital but had
all made their careers beyond it. It was
(and remains) unheard of for a musician
of Shirley’s stature to reside in D.C.,
avoiding the pull of Los Angeles and
New York for as long as she did. Perhaps
the same sensitivity that disposed her
to find the marrow of a song that made
it necessary for her to insulate herself
from the tempests of the business.
It was Shirley’s grandmother, an or-
ganist at a nearby Baptist church, who
first noticed Shirley’s attraction to the
piano, which surfaced before she could
read or write. At her grandmother’s
urging, Shirley began piano lessons at
age four. At age twelve, she began to
study classical piano at Howard Uni-
versity, as one of the first students in its
junior division, supported by her uncle
I. B. Horn, who funded Shirley’s studies.
(“My uncle, who was a very rich doctor
here in town, went to Howard University
and started the junior school of music
because there were no teachers left who
could teach me anything,” said Shirley.
“I went to school and then I went to
Howard University every day.”)
At Howard, she was taught by Dr.
Frances Hughes, who recalled being
intimidated by Shirley’s preternatural
musical aptitude. “Everything at all that
I asked her to do, or that I tested her
in, she did it, still with that innocent
look on her face. And it really made me
nervous.” Dr. Hughes called up Madeline
Coleman, a widely admired teacher and
then the head of the theory department
at Howard’s School of Music, thinking
Shirley might be better in her hands.
“You keep her,” replied Dr. Coleman.

Shirley Horn, 1960 © Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 129

already begun to drift, her feeling for jazz tearing at the seams of her
classical education. Although Howard would eventually emerge as
a leading school for jazz education, in the 1950s, playing jazz could
be grounds for expulsion. Already, she had been warned that her
playing was “too avant-garde.”
Unbeknownst to her parents, Shirley had begun to play in local
clubs, including Abart’s on 9th. Olivia’s Patio Lounge, and the Mer-
ry-Land Club, a small storefront bar near 14th and L that had once
hosted Pearl Bailey, Earl “Fatha” Hines, and Art Tatum. Billy Hart,
who first met her as a teenager, recalls saving up his allowance every
week to see her perform, captivated by her presence. “I thought she
was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen,” he said. By all accounts,
Shirley mesmerized on the bandstand. In a yearbook photo, she is
chicly accessorized, her complexion light like Lena Horne, her face
framed by bangs and a chin-length bob.
One patron at the Merry-Land Club was an older gentleman who
would come in, tip his hat, and leave. He arrived one night with a
giant turquoise stuffed bear, passing along a note to ask if she knew
the song “Melancholy Baby.” The bear was hers to keep if she would
sing it. And so she did.
Come to me my melancholy baby
Cuddle up and don’t be blue
All your fears are foolish fancy, maybe
You know dear that I’m in love with you
Before that night, Shirley had sung some at church, but performed
only as a pianist. After she sang that evening, her boss told her she
could earn more money as a singer. So singing became a permanent
part of her act. She kept the bear in her attic for years.
T hroughout her career, Shirley would often be thought of as a
vocalist, a slight that would cause her to feel like an essential
aspect of her artistry was rendered invisible. It wasn’t uncommon for
singers to accompany themselves on piano. But Shirley’s seamless
integration of voice and piano was a marvel to the practitioners
Shirley’s seamless
integration of voice and
piano was a marvel
to the practitioners
who understood what
she was up to.
130 WINTER 2023
who understood what she was up to. Like Nat King Cole, Shirley’s
piano playing dazzled as much as—if not more than—her singing.
“It’s almost as if when Shirley plays, she has two brains,” said Johnny
Mandel, who scored the arrangements on her best-known album,
Here’s to Life, which earned him a Grammy. “I don’t know how she
can play what she plays and sing what she sings….Playing piano like
that is a very complex undertaking, and singing with that amount of
sensitivity and concentration—she sounds like Siamese twins.” The
piano was so integral to her sense of herself as a performer that, in
later years when she was called upon to sing without a piano, she
liked being near one just so she could touch her hands to it, even
when she wasn’t playing it. “You know, just to be able to put my
hands somewhere. It’s kind of strange, isn’t it?”
At the piano, Shirley could exert control, conducting the pace,
delivering spare, spacious harmonies that perfectly suited her vision.
“Nobody knows how to play for me except me,” she said. “I need
to hear my own chords and set my own tempo.” Rather than sheet
music, she carried around half a dozen spiral notebooks with lyrics
and chords written out by the letter. Without a time signature staring
her down, she could approach a song with a more flexible sense of
time and delve more deeply into lyrics.
To play with Shirley, you had to follow her lead absolutely, in-
tuiting the faintest hint of a downbeat or pause for however many
heaving commas she might insert into a phrase. She needed players
who were flexible, able to both swing hard and go as slowly as she
wanted without dragging or racing ahead, which is more difficult
than it sounds. “I’ve never known anyone who could do a ballad that
slowly and keep it musical, keep it happening,” said pianist Marian
McPartland of Shirley’s exceptional ability to keep the energy inside
of a song that moved at a snail’s pace. The singer Carmen McRae
esteemed Shirley’s connection with her bassist Charles Ables and
drummer Steve Williams so much that she hired the trio to serve as
the rhythm section on one of her own albums, employing Shirley
just as a pianist, not as a vocalist.
As for Shirley’s voice, it didn’t dazzle by fireworks. She wasn’t a
bluesy belter like Dinah, a scatting acrobat like Ella or Sarah. You
might compare her capacity for emotion and unruly sense of time
to Billie Holiday, her spare rhythmic syncopation to Peggy Lee, her
behind-the-beat phrasing to Jimmy Scott.
But the magic of Shirley’s voice disclosed
itself in its own, distinctly intimate way, as
if revealing a secret. “She doesn’t sound
like any of our great women singers. She
sounds like Shirley,” said Dr. Hughes.
B y the mid-to-late 1950s, Shirley’s
solo career was well established
in D.C. Her trio was one of the first acts
to regularly feature when Bohemian Cav-
erns rebranded. (The basement jazz club
closed for good in 2019.) Its promoter
Tony Taylor, then co-owner of the club,
felt it was time for Shirley to take the next
step and encouraged her to go to New
York City and cut a record. But Shirley
was reluctant.
 “He says, ‘You ought to be recording.’ I said, ‘I’m not going to do any-
thing. Whoever wants to see me will come to Washington.’ And I really
didn’t think about recording ’cause I was happy playing the music.”
Her debut studio album Embers and Ashes: Songs of Lost Love
Sung by Shirley Horn appeared in 1960, when Shirley was twenty-six.
The record found its way to Miles Davis, whose Kind of Blue had
just been released in the summer of 1959. Miles had always had an
ear for singers, developing his style of phrasing by studying them.
“Singers: they get the most out of a melody,” he said. His own tone
on the trumpet, especially in the upper register, could resemble a
female voice.
To hear him tell it, Miles Davis loved women. But he wasn’t always
kind to them. It was uncommon for him to back a singer—especially
a female singer. “I told him I didn’t play behind no girl singer,” he
recalled of the time Max Gordon, owner of the Village Vanguard,
asked him to play behind a young Barbra Streisand.
But Shirley could hardly be dismissed as a girl singer, and Miles
knew it. “Shirley Horn, I want you to come to New York,” said Miles,
calling her out of the blue at her mother-in-law’s house in Virginia.
She recalled a sense of irritatation at the interruption to her dinner
of fried chicken, red-eye gravy, and buttermilk biscuits, thinking
the call must be a prank, perhaps somebody pretending to be Miles
Davis. But it was Miles, and he was serious. “There’s some people I
think you should meet,” he said. He invited her to his house in New
York City. To show he was serious, he prompted his children to sing
songs off of Embers and Ashes, proof that the album was in rotation
at the Davis home.
He had aesthetic reasons for admiring Shirley; he liked her chord
voicings and the way she could play and sing together (he respected
singers who could accompany themselves well, like Leontyne Price).
He especially loved her use of space, which mirrored his own airy
style that he had begun to develop in the 1950s, when he had grown
to favor melodic understatement, lyricism, and the light, spacious
touch of musicians like Ahmad Jamal rather than the rapid arpeg-
giating of his bebop mentors, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
Their roots were also entwined in East St. Louis, where Miles grew
up. Shirley’s father’s people were from the city, and Shirley’s Aunt
Cleo had been Miles’s teacher; he described her as “the roughest
bitch in the world.” (“She was not mean,” said Shirley, who grew up
visiting Aunt Cleo in the summers. “She was factual, you know.”)
In 1961, Miles insisted that Shirley join him as an opening act for
a multi-week run (“I worked six days a week, I don’t remember how
many weeks,” she recalled) at the Village Vanguard. Max Gordon,
the owner of the Vanguard, had never heard of her before. But Miles
was adamant. “If she don’t play, I ain’t gonna play,” he told Gordon.
At the Vanguard, Miles guarded Shirley carefully. He told her not
to talk to certain individuals and forbade her from sitting at the bar.
She loved to smoke cigarettes and drink beer, but there would be
only one cigarette a night and no beer, he said. Concerned that she
was gaining weight, he insisted that she forgo fatty foods and eat
veal instead. He instructed her to work out using exercise equipment
in his basement.
“I was so excited and nervous,” she later recalled. It was one of
those star-making moments, being anointed by Miles and playing
with him at the Vanguard. “It was like being in a fantasyland be-
cause every night there was something to look forward to: seeing
another person’s face I had on a record. Miles would introduce me
to all these people.”
The famous faces in the crowd included Lena Horne, Claudia
McNeil, and Sidney Poitier. “I was passing the bar and Sidney Poitier
stopped me and asked, ‘Miss Horn, would you like to have a drink?’
I was so thrilled, I almost fainted.”
She even sat in with Miles’s band, although she had to be tricked
into doing it, given her nerves. “Wynton [Kelly] said ‘I hurt my hand!
Sit in with me for a minute.’ He was playing a blues. I’m sitting right
in front and he fooled me. So, I went up there and got behind the
guys. And everybody applauded. ‘Oh Lord, what am I going to do?’
But I finally brightened up. Miles wanted me to do the second tune
and then I had to come off. There was nobody against me, but I was
scared, simple as that. Everybody on the stage was a giant. Every-
body in the audience, I know from records. I felt too much pressure.”
Quincy Jones, then an executive at Mercury Records, was in the
audience at the Vanguard, too. The following year, he signed her
to her first major label contract, producing albums for her and
weaving lush arrangements to frame her vocals in soundtracks,
including A Dandy in Aspic and For Love of Ivy, a film that starred
Poitier. Quincy also produced a few albums for Shirley that were
released on Mercury (although John Levy, Shirley’s manager at the
time, reported that Quincy himself didn’t show up for the sessions).
Soon, she had gigs lined up all over the country.
If Shirley’s music was taking her places, she was not a fan of change.
She was drawn to the comfortable, an adjective that, for her, was
synonymous with good. Her world was defined by habits and rituals
that helped her clarify her context, giving her maximum control. She
loved Pall Mall cigarettes and Heineken over ice with Drambuie on the
side. (“I like the sweet stuff,” said Shirley, who developed diabetes,
resulting in amputation of part of her right leg, and her eventual
death.) The hotels she preferred were the ones that had good TV
reception and understood that she traveled with a pressure cooker
to make greens wherever she went. As the years wore on, she grew
accustomed to her “stories”: the soap operas (The Young and the
Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful, Guiding Light, As the World
Turns) and old movies she kept on TV late at night. Sometimes a
song from an old movie would work its way into her shows.
On occasion, she was asked to record with an all-star rhythm
section (“politicking,” she called it). Some recordings featured lush
orchestration, the pinnacle of which was her 1992 album Here’s to
Life, named for the title track, a sprawling carpe diem ode that winks
at mortality. But she preferred musicians she was familiar with,
many of whom were from D.C. There was Buck Hill, a tenor saxo-
phonist who never quit his day job as a postal worker. He had been
one of the first musicians to let Shirley sit in when she was getting
going on the scene, and she never forgot it. Over the course of four
decades, she played and recorded with drummer Billy Hart, whom
she first encountered as a neighbor, when his grandmother lived
across the hall from Shirley’s apartment. He would go on to be one
of the most in-demand jazz drummers of his generation, appearing
on Miles Davis’s seminal On the Corner and becoming an integral
member of Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band. She had been one
of the first to take a chance on him, letting him sit in with her band
when he was just getting started on the D.C. scene, bringing him
on the road when he was still in college. (He would describe her as
“my most important teacher”; “The lessons she provided me were
non pareil,” he said. “It was like playing with three different people,
somewhere between Langston Hughes and William Shakespeare and
Duke Ellington. It was like a big band.”)
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 131
 She played with the same trio for decades, with Steve Williams on
drums and Charles Ables on bass, her deepest and most enduring
collaboration. Ables, a D.C. native who was first a guitarist before
learning electric bass just so he could take a position in her trio,
stayed with her for more than thirty years, until his death. Williams,
who remained part of her trio for twenty-three years, described
his connection to Shirley in the deepest of terms. “We’re definitely
soulmates, if you can describe the experience or the relationship
between two, three people, whatever, where there is very little
conversation about why you’re doing what you’re doing,” he said.
“You just know, you understand.”
S hirley had married young and remained married for nearly
fifty years to Sheppard “Shep” Deering, a mechanic for the
Metropolitan Transit Authority. He was the first man she dated. In
interviews, he surfaces as a quiet, supportive presence, refilling a
drink, lighting a cigarette, picking her up from a gig. (“I never met
him,” said Billy, noting how she seemed to keep that part of her life
separate.)
Married though she was, she never pretended to deny herself the
varied pleasures and intimacies furnished by music. When Shirley
talked about the feeling of her trio in the highest form, she spoke of
sex. Nothing pornographic or vulgar, not even lustful. What she was
after was an intuitive connection, the experience of beings merging,
dissolving into each other. She described the feeling of “melt[ing]
together musically” as “like the best sex ever.”
To push the emotional or romantic limits of sound, erotically
transgressing boundaries of the individual, is not a terribly con-
troversial aim for a musician, particularly in group improvisation,
where players regularly plumb their depths to dig up something
raw and naked, intuiting what the moment needs. Miles Davis once
compared playing with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker to having
an orgasm. Such statements have since fallen out of fashion. Con-
sider, for example, the outrage provoked by Robert Glasper’s 2017
metaphorical evocation of the “musical clitoris” in his discussion of
a perceived female preference for groove music over soloing. “When
you hit that one groove and stay there, it’s like a musical clitoris,” he
told pianist Ethan Iverson. “You’re there, you stay on that groove,
and the women’s eyes close and they start to sway, going into a
trance.” Glasper’s remarks went viral, widely regarded as sexist,
an underhanded denigration of the female ability to understand
complex music and a “one-sided construction of female eroticism,”
wrote Michelle Mercer.
But Shirley’s evocation of sex was absent of gendered norms, even
absent of a physical body. It was a way to describe how she got to
the wordless, non-corporeal place where she could lose herself:
“Sometimes when it’s really good, it’s like having sex, you know.
We breathe together. We move as one. And that’s when you get the
goose pimples and you don’t know how to get out of a song. You step
inside.” To Shirley, “stepping inside” could dissolve time: “It’s hard
to explain but we’re oblivious,” she said. “We’re three people playing
as one, and sometimes it’s like a sexual experience. I get completely
lost and I can go on and on and not realize what time is all about.”
As for Shirley’s connection to Miles, “He loved me and I loved
him.” She described their relationship as very close spiritually. Was
she attracted to him? Yes, she told an interviewer in a documentary,
132 WINTER 2023
although she brushed off another journalist’s suggestion that she
and Miles were intimate. “One woman wanted to know ‘Did you and
Miles Davis have an affair?’ Can you believe it? I wanted to tell her
yes, you know? It was stupid, so I just smiled at her.”
I n the sixties, the tides of popular music were rapidly shifting, and
there was perhaps no artist evolving as quickly as Miles, who had
begun to go off in new directions musically, in dialogue with the
free jazz of Ornette Coleman, the rock & roll of Jimi Hendrix, and
the funk of Sly Stone. He sought out younger musicians like Tony
Williams, Herbie Hancock, and Wayne Shorter to be in his band. The
popular magnitude of Kind of Blue had been eclipsed by Motown,
the Beatles, and James Brown.
For Shirley, this was the “beginning of bad times.” Her heart
wasn’t in it anymore. Mercury let her contract lapse. In 1964, her
grandmother passed away and she returned to Washington for good.
Life on the road had proved to be too much. “It got kind of airy when
she walked out on a New Year’s Eve gig in Pittsburgh,” recalled her
former manager John Levy. “She just picked up and went home. Did
the same thing in California, when she had a six-week engagement
and did only four before heading home.”
“I got married, had a baby. I tried to make the scene, but I was
torn between my love for my child and, not what you call duty…but
I came from a very old-fashioned family where a woman’s place was
in the home.…I never got out of music, but I got more into working
around the house, and the time wasn’t right for my kind of music.
There were different tugs, directions, depression. The music wasn’t
always right when I did play.”
She settled on a leafy residential street of single-family homes
with big yards. She focused on raising her daughter and continued
to perform locally, in the smaller intimate settings she preferred,
like The Place Where Louis Dwells, One Step Down, and Pigfoot, a
club that was owned by her neighbor, guitarist Bill Harris. In fifteen
years, she recorded only two albums.
Her career very well could have faded out quietly. But one Friday
in the late 1970s, she got a call from Billy, who asked if she’d consider
making a record for the Danish label Steeplechase. By Sunday, Shep
was driving her up I-95 to New York for a session with Billy and the
bassist Buster Williams, another one of Miles’s former collaborators
and one of Billy’s best friends. On the way there, she asked Shep to
drive slowly so she could figure out what songs to record.
The resulting album, A Lazy Afternoon (1979), earned five stars in
Downbeat. A few years later, she caught another lucky break when
someone spotted Shirley, her bassist, and her drummer in the crowd
at a JazzTimes convention in D.C., and invited them to give an im-
promptu performance. A promoter for the North Sea Jazz Festival
happened to be in the audience and invited her overseas on the spot.
Her trip to The Hague ignited her European fan base. “Even though
I had faithful friends here, I had to go to Europe to see how great
it is to be loved and admired, appreciated and respected,” she said.
“I think it comes at a good time in my life. I realize now that music
is a hard business. I’m not full of wide-eyed enthusiasm like I was a
few years back. Everybody asks, ‘Are you ready for it?’ No, I’m not.
But I’m grateful. I’m happy that the time is right for me.”
In 1988, at age fifty-four, she finally got the attention of Verve,
recording her first major label album in more than twenty years.
No longer a young woman, she cut a more mature profile on album
covers and in press photos (“She kind of looks like a stern auntie,”
observed my friend Faith), though her sly smile and discerning
gaze remained.
A string of critically acclaimed albums followed, including 1991’s
You Won’t Forget Me, which garnered a rare guest appearance from
Miles, who, despite his demanding schedule and health problems,
found the time to make her studio date, appearing on the album’s
title track. He had not appeared on a singer’s album in decades.
You won’t forget me, though you may try
I’m part of memories, too wonderful to die
And it will happen, that now and then
You’ll fall to wonderin’ if we shouldn’t have tried again
Miles died later that year. “Part of me was gone when he died; he
was so dear. We loved each other. We loved the person in the music.
And he left me! Jive turkey. Did you know he was going to record
some more songs with me?”
Three of her records for Verve in the 1990s hit number one on
the Billboard jazz charts, with Here’s to Life spending sixteen
weeks on top. In 1998, at age sixty-four, she took home her first
and only Grammy for I Remember Miles, a tribute album to Miles
Drummer Steve Williams, Shirley Horn, and bassist Charles Ables. Courtesy Library of Congress
Davis. Shortly before her death in 2005, she was recognized as a
Jazz Master by the National Endowment of the Arts and was toast-
ed at a gala at the Kennedy Center, institutions that had come to
define the city’s cultural infrastructure, a far cry from the D.C. of
her youth, when she had to keep her jazz chords hidden from her
teachers at Howard.
I ended my reporting in front of Shirley’s home on Lawrence
Street, a quiet, tree-lined stretch of comfortably scaled, single-family
homes. She used the money that flowed in during her later years
to build several additions to the house, undertaking much of the
construction herself, having picked up some carpentry skills from
her uncles. Her house tripled in size to nearly four thousand square
feet, and she joked that the D.C. government was threatening to
deny her any more permits. She finally had enough space for a
grand piano. You can hear it on one of her last albums, The Main
Ingredient, which she recorded at home. She gathered her favorite
musicians— including Billy Hart, Buck Hill, and her trio partners
Steve Williams and Charles Ables—to play, cooking in between takes.
Driving up to the house, I beheld the spacious yard, noting the
sycamore trees and crepe myrtles gracefully providing shade. I
wondered which features of the home were additions that Shirley
built herself. Perhaps I could knock on the door and get a look at
it from the inside. But it was time to go; I was late on a deadline.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 133
 The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley, 1934, oil, tempera, canvas, aluminum, by Thomas Hart Benton © T.H. and R.P. Benton Trusts/
134 Artists Rights Society, New York/Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Museum purchase: Elizabeth M. Watkins Fund, 1958.0055
 THE
FA R-F LU N G
TA L E
OF A
M U R DE R
SONG

by David Ramsey

135
My Bloody Fact I Still Denied
Shropshire, England, 1684
They went
for a
walk in the
meadow.
It was a cold February evening, still light, and the greenness of
the grass and its motion in the wind seemed peculiar and perfect.
Anne Nichols could be prone to whimsy. She thought, in spite of
herself, that perhaps the color and the motion were reminders.
Of the glory and the gift of Creation. The Lord, she thought, was
always close.
Francis Cooper had his hand on the small of her back as they
walked, just as he had done the first time they took this stroll, when
he had walked with her through the meadow to the riverside after he
finished his day at the mill and they held each other close beneath
the willow tree. He told her that the dark softness in her eyes left
him staggered. He told her that he loved her, and the rushing sound
of the river seemed to accent his words and make them sound true.
The first night she felt the quickening, it made her think of the
particular wobble of a blade of grass on a windy day, and also of the
water and its rush. She could be prone to whimsy.
His child. Their child. He had promised her father that he would
marry her, and they were both thinking of that promise as they
walked, his hand on her back. A bird flew overhead, a large black
bird she had never seen before, and Anne pointed and said that the
bird was watching them. The bird, he told her, knew the measure
of their love.
Underneath the willow tree, there was no one to hear the lovers, or
to see them. He touched her cheek and kissed her lips and his familiar
hand ran up the length of her arm—and then he hit her, hard, across
her face. He hit her again. She screamed. At first in confusion and
then about marriage and their child. She pleaded with a shocking
kind of sweetness, but he found himself overcome by a blank white
heat and he could hardly hear her. He knew only that he was young
and that his freedom was the only thing he owned in the world
and that he did not trust her—he did not trust her because she had
trusted him. He drew his knife and thrust it into a patch of soft flesh
just below her ear. And he could not hear her scream, he could not
hear the river, he could not hear anything, as he felt his hand pull
the knife across her cheek and along her mouth to the other ear, as
136 WINTER 2023
he found more softness to penetrate, as he stabbed her wildly until
the silence that had overwhelmed him was real. The silence was hers.
It was done. He wiped his face and felt blood. He thought, at first,
that it was her blood. But it was his own. His nose was bleeding. He
thought nothing of it. He could not know that later, his nose would
bleed again at trial, and the balladeers would place this detail into
meter. He had suffered from nosebleeds since he was a child. But
they did not know that. And so in song, the nosebleed was a signal
of his guilt, or a portent—a marker of the evil he had done.
Droplets fell from his nose and made a pattern in the dirt. He
looked at her body a final time and walked away and did not look
back. He licked the blood from his lip. It tasted like nothing so much
as nothing at all.
To Cover The Foul Sin
London, England, 1720 or thereabouts
T here once was a man, literate, unkempt, of little account and
a dubious moral reputation, but a familiar face in the London
printshops. His name is lost to history, but perhaps he wouldn’t
mind. His motivation was a speedy payday, not posterity. A ballad
that stirred the passions could sell for a penny. Sometimes he sold
his work directly to the printshops, but he often took to the streets
himself. He borrowed tunes from familiar songs, and had a talent for
singing his work that helped him draw a crowd and sell his broadsides.
One winter, he wrote a ballad to prepare for the hanging of John
Mauge, a miller who would soon be executed in Reading. As was the
custom, the ballad would be described as the miller’s “last dying
words and confession.” The crime: “the barbarous murder of Anne
Knite, his sweet-heart.”
Our modern notion of a songwriter would have been nonsensical
to him, of course. His trade was partly creative, but his task was
also to record and remember the familiar songs already sung, and
re-shape them for new events and local happenings. He was a kind
of tabloid journalist in his time. Today, we might think of him as a
historian of oral traditions, a cataloger of folkways.
But that’s not quite right. He was no mere archivist, no passive
documentarian. He shaped and reshaped these traditions. Writing
was an astonishing technology, and the reach of the printing press
gave it newfound power. Oral traditions were chaotic, unfixed, un-
wieldy—stories forever in revision, never complete. Versions would
branch without end, and older branches would be lost with time.
How did the lyrics go? Well, that would depend. You could say a song
existed in superposition, until someone sang it in their particular way.
The printing press didn’t end the flowering variety of the oral
tradition, but as soon as a shop printed what he wrote, it fixed a
version of the song in documented history.
And so we have it still: “The Berkshire Tragedy.” We can trace
countless songs that took his work as template and bred countless
new songs in turn. We can speculate that perhaps he may have
cribbed a bit from “The Bloody Miller,” an earlier tale of a miller
killing a sweetheart named Anne (Nichols in that case). But we are
only making an educated guess; we cannot know for certain.
 “The Bloody Miller,” dating back at least
to 1684, was sung to the tune of “Alack for
my Love I dye,” an earlier song that is lost
to us but might have been known to him. We
can imagine that, though he is not a violent
man himself, he writes his brutal lines with a
certain kind of glee. That he feels warmth in
his body, a bit like mead, or a woman’s touch,
as he conjures the murder in the patter of
meter. But we are only imagining; we cannot
know for certain.
If “The Bloody Miller” was indeed an
antecedent for his new ballad, the murder
weapon was changed, along with other de-
tails.
“From ear to ear I slit her mouth, and
stabbed her in the head,” the narrator con-
fesses in the older song; in “The Berkshire
Tragedy,” he “took a stick out of the hedge,
and struck her in the face.” Also, this time,
he throws her body into the river.
The bloody nose remained.
But Little Did This
Fair Maid Know
1,000 kilometers from the
Port of Philadelphia, 1801
“C an we still see the village from
here?” his sister asked. “If we look
hard enough?” She was seven years younger
than him, just six years old, and frightened.
They were more than four thousand kilo-
meters from Belfast Harbor; another fifty or
so kilometers from Tandragee, their village,
the only place they’d ever known. He did not
know these measurements and couldn’t have
guessed at what they meant. He knew only
that when they were allowed up on the deck
as the sun set, the sea was a field of black that
stretched to the ends of the Earth.
That night, down below in steerage, she
asked him to sing the song.
“Bow down thine ear, O Lord, hear me: for
I am poor and needy,” he moaned, in just the
hint of a tune.
“That’s not the song I mean,” she said.
And so he sang her another song, the song
she meant, a song he had known at least
since he was her age. A song that stuck with
him, that seemed to creep into his body as
he sang the tale. It was, he knew, wicked. His
"The Bloody Miller,” from The Pepys Ballads, Volume III, p. 119. Harvard University Press, 1930, via Internet Archive
A (speculative, partial, oversimplified)
Murder Ballad Family Tree
“The Bloody Miller”
( a ro u n d 1 6 8 4)
Shares a number of key aspects of the story in this
family of ballads and some cite it as the originator;
other scholars convincingly regard it as a different
ballad altogether, but it could still plausibly have been
a key source or inspiration for what follows.
“The Berkshire Tragedy”
(p os s i bly d at ing b a c k to aro und 1 70 0; sti l l
being printe d as late as early 180 0 s)
The first known undisputed progenitor of the ballads that
followed. These popular broadsides, likely first printed
in London, were forty-four stanzas or more, presumably
too long and convoluted for singers to memorize, leading
to the shorter revisions that followed. Despite the name,
“The Berkshire Tragedy” is set in a town near Oxford, and
the song references an “Oxford lass” and “Oxford Town.”
“The Wexford Tragedy”
(i n p r int by 1 81 8, a rch a ic for ms i n tra d i t i on
p ote nt i a l l y f i r st e st a b l i s h e d b et we e n t h e l ate
170 0s to ver y early 180 0 s)
Under various names, many scholars speculate this
was an Irish variation, though evidence is scant and no
print version in Ireland has yet been found. The Wexford
tradition was likely a crucial thread ultimately leading
to “The Knoxville Girl.” New variations of “The Wexford
Girl” continued to flower in tradition in America, often
through Irish immigrants.
“The Butcher Boy”
( p ote nt i a l l y f i r st e st a b l i s h e d i n t ra d i t i o n
b et we e n t h e l ate 1 70 0 s to ve r y e a r l y 1 80 0s)
A Scottish tradition that derived from the “Berkshire”
ballad and presumably its offshoots. The miller or mill-
er’s apprentice in other versions is instead a butcher’s
apprentice in these variations. In the Scottish tradition,
the killer tended to be named “Willie,” which became
common in the North in America, as opposed to the
Irish or Irish American “Johnny,” which often showed
up in the American South (though “The Knoxville Girl”
typically wound up with Willie).
“The Cruel Miller”
(printe d roughly early ninete enth centur y)
Printed British broadsides under various names that
shortened the “Berkshire” template to eighteen stan-
zas. In circulation by 1820, they typically mention “Wex-
ford.” It’s hard to know for certain to what extent these
broadsides reflected tradition, influenced it, or both.
“The Lexington Miller”
( b ro a d s i d e p r i nte d i n B o sto n b et we e n
1 8 2 9 -1 8 31 , p e r h a p s i nf l u e n c e d by a n
eighte enth-centur y “Lexington” tradition)
Earliest known version printed in America, though the
ballad itself must have arrived much earlier. Similar to
“Berkshire” but cut roughly in half, as well as alterations
such as nixing the mention of the pregnancy (perhaps
because of New England mores). Presumably brought
from England either by text or tradition, possibly in
the late 1700s, but often considered a new American
strand of the tradition, distinctive from the “Wexford”
and “Butcher” traditions.
“The Oxford Girl”
( p ote nt i a l l y in tradition in America
at least back to the early 180 0 s)
One of the most popular variations in American tra-
dition. Perhaps the name could be a hint of influence
from the original English “Berkshire” broadsides or very
early traditions. But for the most part, these variations
seem to have arisen alongside (or perhaps even derived
from) the “Wexford” tradition, flourishing in America.
Lots of similar ballads with distinctive place names
then bloomed, including “The Export Girl,” “The Waco
Girl,” and “The Knoxville Girl.”
“The Knoxville Girl”
(likely in tradition by the mid-180 0 s)
The classic American murder ballad was widespread in
tradition in many forms when Arthur Tanner recorded
the song in 1925. A number of others also recorded it,
including the Blue Sky Boys in 1937 and the Louvin
Brothers in 1956, whose version made a splash three
years later on the country charts.
“Noel Girl”
and other American traditions
While “The Knoxville Girl” eventually came to dom-
inate, a number of variations on the basic template
emerged in the early twentieth century, such as “Nell
Cropsey” and “Noel Girl,” which used the ballad to
describe real-life local murders. The Carter Family
recorded “Never Let the Devil Get the Upper Hand of
You” in 1937, a rare recording of a variation that seems
to come from the Lexington tradition. At least a couple
of American traditional songs—like “Oxfordshire Lass,”
collected by Jean Ritchie in Kentucky in 1949—have
unique elements from the original “Berkshire” broad-
side not found in other branches, perhaps a glimmer
of the oldest traditional versions.
A n d f u r t h e r af i e l d :
“Maria Martini”
Despite the name, an apparent descendant of the “Berk-
shire” ballad found in Tristan da Cunha— a very remote
volcanic island in the south Atlantic Ocean—presumably
brought after the island became a British colony in 1816
For a very deep dive into these tangled
roots, see Richard Matteson’s research at
BluegrassMessengers.com.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 137
mother did not approve. But though it was not
a godly song, it had the same effect on him,
the weight and wonder of a psalm. Sometimes
late at night, sharing the bed with his sister,
he sang it as a lullaby. The song had many
names, but they called it “The Wexford Girl.”
And this was how he sang it to her now—
like a lullaby—as the ship bobbed in the nev-
er-ending black sea. “Down on bended knees
she fell, and for mercy she did cry,” he sang.
“I’m innocent, don’t murder me, for I’m not
prepar’d to die.” And the ship bobbed, up
and down, and there was a gentle depth in
his voice, a hint of the older register to come,
and his sister pressed her head tightly against
his chest—the two of them lying together
on their single wooden bed, their parents on a single wooden bed who fell to corruption and deviance. He raised his voice to near a
above them, strangers in their own beds on either side close enough shout as he told them how the Lord grew angry and put a curse on
to touch, snoring and chattering. He had never been to Wexford, a the House of Eli. When the Philistines defeated Israel in a battle
town south of Dublin, but the song’s tale felt familiar. The air was near Eben-Ezer, Eli’s sons, the corrupted priests, were killed, and
heavy and moist and the tune seemed to hang there. the Ark of the Covenant was lost.
He sang on, verse after verse, in a kind of rhythm with the ocean, But this is not a story about them, the preacher said, leaning
and with his sister’s breath. “He took her by the yellow hair and forward on his heels.
dragged her along,” he sang, “and threw her in the river that ran One of the fallen priests had a wife who was pregnant. On that
both deep and strong,” and he felt her breathing grow slower and day, when she heard the news of her husband and the Ark, she went
heavier, and he kept singing still, even as she slept. into labor. Her pain was overwhelming. The ground around her was
soaked in blood. (This detail of her blood was not, strictly speaking,
in the scripture, but the preacher knew that sometimes the Spirit
could provide him vivid fillings when the story had blank spaces.)
The woman was dying. Her midwives told her not to despair. You
have given birth to a son, they said. But there could be no glory for

Come All You Men

her. The Ark was lost, her husband dead. As she died, she gave the
boy his name, Ichabod, which meant no glory—which meant the

And Maidens Dear,

glory has departed from Israel.
As the preacher continued, allowing the Spirit to guide him so

To You I Will Relate

that he might use this simple story to convey the stakes—to convey
the urgency—and to issue a warning, a woman who had stopped to
Boston, Massachusetts, 1829 listen decided she should be on her way. She walked a few blocks
and stopped to buy a broadside. She had a weakness for these

T he preacher was an urgent man.This urgency was his message.

He must, he knew, find the urgency of the carpenter two
thousand years ago, the urgency of the fisherman on the day of
stories, particularly the gory tales, which this one promised to be:
“The Lexington Miller.” The preacher had warned of the danger
of demons. The ballad, she saw, offered a warning of its own: “The
Pentecost, the urgency of the tentmaker in the wake of Damascus. devil put it into my heart to take her life away.”
The true church was founded on this urgency, and so the ancients
were gifted with the powers of the Spirit and of healing. Earthly cor-
ruption had led the Roman Church, and then the Anglican Church
in turn, astray. This was why the preacher’s grandfather had made
the journey across the sea to Boston: to dissent from this wickedness.

I’m Unprepared To Die

As he stood outside the Park Street Church downtown, with twenty
souls gathered to hear him and others passing by, he did not mind
the heat of the summer day. He had been preaching for some time, Pineville, Missouri, 1892
and he tongued his upper lip to clear the sweat that had rolled
down and gathered there. He now told the story of Ichabod, from
the First Book of Samuel, a minor story that few would know—but
every word in the text was sacred, every word was a channel to the
A few weeks before Christmas, there was a knock at the door.
Mary Lula Noel, who was staying over at her sister Sydney
Holly’s house, went running. She knew who it was.
Spirit, available not just to the priests, not even just to those who Everyone called her Lula. She was beautiful, twenty-three years
could read, but to anyone. This was the miracle. old, “a favorite with all who knew her,” according to a local judge.
The preacher told them of the ancient city of Shiloh, and of priests One of ten children, she came from a prominent family in McDonald

138 WINTER 2023 The Age of Man, Displayed in the Feveral Changes of Human Life, 18th century. Courtesy Yale University Library
County in the Ozarks, not far from the Arkansas border. Her father
was the newly elected county assessor and a former deputy sheriff.
The nearby town of Noel had recently been founded by family
members who owned a sawmill in the area. The name later inspired
a gimmick: tens of thousands of Christmas cards still arrive every
year at the Noel post office.
It was frigid outside and they weren’t expecting any visitors, so
Lula concluded that knock could only mean one thing: Will had come
to see her. She opened the door and they embraced. Perhaps Lula’s
sister looked on with apprehension, or perhaps she only smiled. This
was Wednesday, December 7.
William Simmons lived in Joplin, thirty-five miles away, a significant
journey he made by train. It was not unusual for him to make the
trip because—here I am speculating, with some confidence—Will
and Lula were sweethearts.
Will stayed as a guest, along with Lula, at Sydney and her hus-
band’s farmhouse. The sleeping arrangements are lost to history.
We do not know how Lula and Will passed the time over the next
few days and nights.
We do know that on Saturday, Sydney and her husband planned
to journey to Sydney and Lula’s parents’ house, and then walk with
them to Noel and visit a relative. And we know that they asked Lula
and Will to come along, but Will declined, saying he was going to
walk to Lanagan to catch a train later that day to return to Joplin. We
know that Lula told her sister she would stay behind with him and
catch up with the family later (perhaps, but I am only speculating,
the lovers wanted some time alone).
And we know this: That was the last time Lula’s family saw her alive.
About A Mile From Town
Dacula, Georgia, 1923
G id Tanner, a chicken farmer who lived in Dacula, Georgia, was
one of the best fiddle players in the area. His wife tried to get
him to learn to read music, but it didn’t take. The story goes that
Gid could play around two thousand tunes. Notes on a page may
have been gibberish to him, but he had what he needed recorded
in his head.
Gid dominated local fiddle contests along with his friendly rival
Fiddlin’ John Carson. Gid always considered himself a farmer who
liked to fiddle, but his prowess made him a regional sensation. He
was a character, known as much for being a ham as for his chops
on the fiddle. He wore goofy hats, told cornball jokes, turned his
neck nearly all the way around like an owl, and could send his rangy
voice from thundering bass notes to quivering falsetto harmonies
that have been compared to “a crow on helium.” If Gid or Fiddlin’
John was going to play a fiddlers’ convention, the Atlanta Journal
would write it up. They were among the very first musicians we can
refer to as country stars.
Gid had a few regulars he played with—sometimes including his
little brother, Arthur Tanner—a rotating crew of band members
eventually known as the Skillet Lickers or similar names. Their
repertoire included traditional songs native to America as well as
ballads with origins stretching back a couple centuries or more to
England. One was a song called “The Knoxville Girl.” It is possible
that the version that Gid and his fellow players knew had qualities
distinctive to Georgia. The lyrics in their heads might have been
influenced by the peculiarities of local musicians who came before
them, or the spread of news like the killing of Lula Noel, or an al-
together different incident closer to home. They sang it their way,
by local gossip and taste.
How did the basic template get to them? The writer Paul Slade
tracked the development of “The Knoxville Girl” back to England
in his book Unprepared to Die. He argues that “The Bloody Miller”
helped to father “The Berkshire Tragedy,” which then became
“Oxford Girl” in England or “Wexford Girl” in Ireland, both of
which traveled to the United States to land as “Oxford” (like
Mississippi) or “Lexington” (like Massachusetts or Kentucky),
and finally “Knoxville Girl.” Slade and others hazard a guess that
as the song evolved, new locales were selected by the “X” sound
(also present in Berkshire given the British pronunciation). Other
scholars argue that “The Bloody Miller” should be viewed as an
altogether different ballad, though one that could have influenced
the later song. There’s no doubt that “The Berkshire Tragedy”
led to countless variations and revisions, and there are multiple
theories about just how and where they fostered new traditions in
America. Take your pick. It’s hard to trace such tangled threads.
Gid Tanner and his crew, like Carson, loved to square off in local
contests, or gather at the porch over at the fiddler Rob Stanley’s
place in Dacula for jam sessions. You could make some money playing
square dances or at local political campaign events. WSB in Atlanta,
one of the first radio stations in the South, went on the air in 1922,
and within the next few years, a number of the players on Stanley’s
porch were broadcasting there.
But these were still local players, singing songs they had heard
performed on other porches by older players who came before.
That was how you got to hear someone perform, for the most part:
You showed up. If someone passed through, you might hear their
rendition and then never hear it again. What about popular songs
with more widespread fame than local folk musics? In the first two
decades of the twentieth century, sheet music still substantially
outsold records. If you found out about a new song from somewhere
far away, it was probably because someone played it on the piano
in the home.
All of that was about to change.
I Took Her By Her
Golden Curls And I Drug Her
Round And Around
Nashville, Tennessee, 1956
A fter a series of singles for Capitol Records, nearly all gospel, the
Louvin Brothers went to Music Row in May 1956 to record their
full-length album debut, the aptly named Tragic Songs of Life. You
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 139
could think of it as a bleak concept album, featuring murder ballads,
heartbreakers, and tales of woe—mostly traditional secular songs
they had known from childhood or learned from other traditional
musicians they admired, like Bill Monroe. The song that would turn
out to be the biggest hit from that session was something their mother
had sung to them when they were little boys: “The Knoxville Girl.”
Ira and Charlie Loudermilk were born a little more than three years
apart and grew up on a farm on Sand Mountain in DeKalb County,
Alabama, where their family grew cotton and other crops. Their father,
Colonel Loudermilk, was a small man, but tough, and mean. He was
a teetotaler, and he wasn’t violent with his wife or his daughters. But
the boys were different. If they got into the regular sort of trouble,
he’d beat them with a hickory limb, which he called a “width.” If the
trouble was more severe, Colonel wouldn’t bother to find a branch,
he’d just grab firewood, furniture, or whatever he could find.
Ira got the worst of the beatings. His dad would beat him bloody,
at least one time continuing until the boy was unconscious and they
had to fetch the doctor. Once, when Ira was around ten years old,
he made a bet with his little brother: Charlie wouldn’t be able to hit
Ira’s hand with a hatchet. Ira would place his hand on the floor and
pull it away just in time. Finally Charlie timed it right. He was only
seven and didn’t have the strength for much force, but the blade
was sharp enough to cut Ira’s fingers to the bone. That incident
earned both boys a beating, with no pause to tend to Ira’s injuries.
“He beat the shit out of him,” Charlie recalled later in his memoir
Satan Is Real, “and Ira with his fingers damn near cut off.” It was
probably hard to tell which blood was from the cut and which blood
was from the whipping.
Colonel played banjo and enjoyed arranging jam sessions with
other musicians at their house, but the boys learned songs from
their mother, a preacher’s daughter named Georgie whose family
still sung folksongs from their roots in England.
“We learned songs from her that most children wouldn’t ever have
known,” Charlie wrote. Before the boys were old enough to help their
father on the farm, they would help their mother with housework
and she would sing—“those tragic songs,” as Charlie put it. She
might teach them the first verse while she got her sewing done, with
the machine clacking along in rhythm; then the second verse as she
carried water in from the well; then the next verse while they went to
fetch salted pork from the meat house, or pulled up sweet potatoes
from the holes she’d dug and lined with pine needles—continuing
verse after verse as she finished her chores.
This must have been a sweeter time than working in the fields for
Colonel, and there is something sweeter still about the way these
lessons from Georgie were centered on the tragedies of everyday
life. Consider: The family was trying desperately to eke out a living
growing cotton in the unforgiving hill country of Sand Mountain,
with the kids out in the fields as soon as they could do it, brutal
work with no reason for optimism on the return. For a life like that,
those tragic songs their mother gave them were honest, and decent.
The first one she taught them, “Mary of the Wild Moor,” told the
tale of a father turning away his daughter in the cold when she
arrives at his door with her child born out of wedlock. The next
morning, he finds her still at his door, frozen to death; the baby
has survived and is still “grasping his dead mother’s arm.” The
song was so unflinching in its mimesis that Charlie almost couldn’t
bear it when he grew older. “I can’t hardly sing it now,” he wrote,
“because it’s so possible.”
140 WINTER 2023
Once the Loudermilks had a song down to their mother’s satisfac-
tion, they sang it for their father, who was proud of the boys’ talent.
“A song that had been carried across an ocean by Mama’s people,”
Charlie wrote, “and passed down to us, just like it had been passed
down to her, almost like we were singing with all their ghosts down
the generations.”
And how they sang. Like kindred, like spirits, like ghosts.
When the Loudermilk boys grew up and went out on the road as
the Louvin Brothers, Ira sang high and Charlie sang low. But it was
more complicated than that.
“Every so often, in the middle of a song, some hidden signal
flashed and the brothers switched places—with Ira swooping down
from the heights, and Charlie angling upward—and even the most
careful listeners would lose track of which man was carrying the
lead,” Alex Abramovich wrote in the New York Times. “This was
more than close-harmony singing; each instance was an act of
transubstantiation.”
They did not get along. Ira had a violence in him he could not
contain, smashing mandolins when he was drunk, which was most of
the time. Whiskey would inevitably be followed by blood. A couple
years before he died, Ira allegedly wrapped a telephone cord around
his third wife’s neck, choking her in the bedroom while they hosted
a party. She shot him with his .22 six times, but he survived. “If he
ain’t dead, I’ll shoot him again,” she told police, a line that starts
out scanning in perfect meter.
Ira and Charlie spent their partnership fist-fighting and hollering
until they eventually broke up the band and went their separate ways.
But when they sang, the hidden signals always flashed.
The country music podcaster Tyler Mahan Coe has pointed out
that Charlie had “never known a time without the sound of his older
brother’s voice.” They had a language so intimate that it was as if
their subjectivities blurred—their harmony not two voices but a
complicated instrument they shared and played together.
There’s a term for this, when siblings sing together in this way:
Blood harmony.
I Met A Little Girl In Knoxville,
A Town We Know So Well
Fort Myers, Florida, 2023
T his morning I played the Louvin Brothers’ rendition of
“The Knoxville Girl” for my six-year-old daughter while
she ate her breakfast. I warned her that it might be scary. When she
heard the old-time country music begin, she smiled and let her head
bob back and forth like a doll, which I think is the way she dances
to something that sounds old fashioned.
“This isn’t scary,” she said.
She misheard “fair girl” for “fire girl,” and when I corrected her
she thought it was very funny. “Poor fire girl,” she laughed, choco-
late-chip pancake spilling out of her mouth.
At the end of the song, the brothers’ voices mingle and blend
for the final line. It is so menacing and spooky, but maybe it is the
 angelic quality to their harmony that guts me: “Because I murdered
that Knoxville girl, the girl I loved so well.”
My daughter and my wife said the same thing at the same time:

I Picked A Stick Up
“He didn’t love her well!”
My daughter asked me why the man had been so mean, and I said

Off The Ground

that this version of the song doesn’t really tell us why—it’s a mystery.
It all happens so fast. I started to tell her that there was a story, from

And Knocked
a much older version of the song, that does give a reason—but then
I stopped myself. She’s six.

That Fair Girl Down

The other day, I played my wife some macabre songs that Dolly
Parton wrote early in her career. This is probably not the first thing
you think of when you think of Dolly, but she penned a number of
ballads with dead babies, suicide, arson, throwing rocks at a bride
in lieu of rice, and so on. (“Dolly Darko,” my wife said.)
Not long ago, a reporter asked Dolly about this darker side. She
wanted to write about the real troubles in people’s lives, she said.
And as a songwriter, she said, “you gotta remember too that’s how I
grew up. All those old mountain songs and all those old songs from
the old world. All those old English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh ballads
about the Knoxville girl getting killed and throwed in the Knoxville
River. And I was very, you know, impressionable.”
There is something in us, perhaps, that is drawn to this sort of song.
While filming The Birds, which was not a pleasant experience for
actress Tippi Hedren, Alfred Hitchcock told a reporter, “I always
believe in following the advice of the playwright [Victorien] Sardou.
He said: ‘Torture the women!’…The trouble today is that we don’t
torture women enough.”
Maybe he was joking. But the other night, I was scrolling through
the offerings on Netflix with my wife, and who can deny that there
is something nasty in that menu, and in our choices: endless sto-
ries of girls in trouble that end in blood. We started a movie and
at a certain point, we realized there was someone behind us. Our
daughter had gotten up in the night and was secretly watching
over our shoulders. We weren’t sure how long she’d been there
and she wouldn’t say.
Here’s how Charlie Louvin thought about a violent ballad like “The
Knoxville Girl”: “[T]he greatest percentage of people who listen to
real country music, they dig those sad old songs. They always have.
There’s tragedy in life, I guess is the reason. Sometimes I think there’s
more tragedy than there is life.”
He said: “We need those old songs.”
Nashville, Tennessee, 1959
“T he Knoxville Girl” went to number nineteen on the country
charts for the Louvin Brothers, but what made it remark-
able was its staying power. They released it as a single three years
after Tragic Songs of Life came out because it was far and away
their most requested song.
The song had been in their repertoire from the beginning, helping
them win a contest in Chattanooga as teenagers to earn their first
radio spot. Their version, which tracks pretty closely with the record
released by Arthur Tanner in 1925, is much more stark and minimal
than its European antecedents. The song is stripped of narrative
context and the various twists and turns of plot. The moralizing has
been snipped (the Louvin Brothers’ version was twelve stanzas; ear-
lier versions were forty-four stanzas or more, with long digressions
devoted to the killer’s guilty conscience). And one of the most crucial
details—the pregnancy and the question of marriage—was gone.
The story is perhaps even more bleak for being spare: It only takes
until the eighth line for the man taking his lover on a walk to beat
her with a stick until she falls to the ground. There is a haunting void
in the wake of these revisions: We are left with clinical descriptions
of violence that we’ll have to make sense of on our own. A new kind
of horror emerges—evil effect devoid of cause. And mystery: Why
did he kill her?
Charlie said you could find the answer to the mystery in the lyrics:
She had “dark and roving eyes.” By Charlie’s lights, that was the story:
The Knoxville girl was unfaithful to her lover. I’m not going to tell
Charlie Louvin what his own song means, but I will say that prior
versions of the same ballad have lines like “dark and rolling eye” or
“black and rolling eye” or “dark and charming eye” or even “cast a
winning eye.” And the ballad that is its
earliest potential ancestor is explicit
that it’s the killer who has been cheat-
ing; others describe his “wanton eye.”
Maybe things just changed as time
went on, or maybe the story evolved
to match new tales and new crimes in
the new country, such as the murder
of Lula Noel. Who knows.
Oral tradition is a game of tele-
phone. Sometimes you can’t quite
make out what the ghosts are singing,
and spirits don’t keep records.
The murder ballads began with
minstrel shock jocks hamming for the
king, and flourished as literal gallows
humor, or vengeful moral hectoring.

A New Ballad of an Amorous Coachman, 1685-1688, Pepys Library, Pepys Ballads 4.96,
ID 21760, via English Broadside Ballad Archive at UC Santa Barbara OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 141
When they began hawking broadsides, ballad-mongers had a
sordid reputation (the “scandalous practice of ballad-singing”
was the “bane of all good manners and morals,” one English
letter writer complained in 1735). It was a time with more
everyday violence, more death, more young lives cut short.
And perhaps as progress plowed ahead, it was the places
that were hardest and most affixed to the old ways that held
fastest to the old songs.
Charlie Louvin kept playing that old song in his old age. He
took it very seriously. If, say, some young men were laughing
at a table while he played “The Knoxville Girl,” he would wag
his finger. Listen to what happened, he would say. This was
a sad song. We need those sad old songs.
And when I think of that, I think maybe there is something
else about these sad old songs—that they are not bloodthirsty
and cold, or at least they’re not only that. Communities that
dealt more frequently and closely with death perhaps had
more practice at a certain sort of holding each other up.
There’s tragedy in life, as Louvin says. We are all hurting
sometimes, sometimes badly, and all of us will die. Under
the circumstances, there may be something sacred in facing
the darkness together. Maybe that is why the way the Louvin
Brothers sing sounds not just spooky, but beautiful.
“You can talk about ‘Knoxville Girl’ being a tragic song,
but it only talks about the death of one person,” Charlie
Louvin wrote. “Today the death of just one person wouldn’t even Southern rural sides (“familiar tunes, old and new,” as the label’s
make the news.” catalog would describe this new genre).
I would like to think that is why he wagged his finger: that to meet All of this was happening in a time of transition in the music
the sadness of the song and to stare together into the darkness of industry. While they were rural artists, Gid and Riley were close
our tragic lives requires a certain sort of decency. This sad decency enough to Atlanta to be well aware of popular music and cosmopol-
is itself an old way, a tradition we can hold. I hope that I might gift itan trends. They were hardcore traditionalists, but their repertoire
it to my daughter, along with a song, knowing she will sing a version showed the possibility for fusion, playing ballads that were centuries
all her own. old alongside more recent popular songs written by professional
songwriters for a mass audience. Rural folk music was transitioning
from the front porch to mass media. The term “country music”
did not yet exist, but here was its beginning.
The recording process was in transition as well. It would still
be a couple years before record companies adopted new audio

She Never Spoke

technologies. They were still recording the very same way Thom-
as Edison had: A massive horn captured sound waves that were

Another Word
funneled into a diaphragm that would vibrate with the waves; the
apparatus was attached to a needle that then created grooves in
New York City, 1924; Atlanta, 1925 a wax cylinder.
Among the sides that Gid and Riley recorded was “The Knoxville

A round the same time that WSB in Atlanta started broadcast-

ing performances by Gid Tanner, Fiddlin’ John Carson, and
other old-time players, big-city talent scouts started showing up in
towns like Dacula.
Carson was the first to sign up, going to Atlanta in 1923 to record
“The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” for Okeh Records, what is
typically considered one of the very first country music records. It
was a surprise hit. The suits had an epiphany: Country people were
eager to buy records of songs from the country, by performers from
the country.
Eager to keep up with Okeh, Columbia Records wanted to find
their own Fiddlin’ John. Gid Tanner was invited up to New York, and
brought along frequent collaborator Riley Puckett, a blind banjo
player and singer. In March 1924, they recorded the label’s first
Girl”—as far as I can tell, the first recording of the song by a ma-
jor commercial record label (Riley sang, but I’ve seen conflicting
accounts on whether Gid accompanied him and got lead billing
or Riley did the number solo). The sessions were a big success and
made Gid and Riley stars, but for whatever reason, their recording
of “The Knoxville Girl” was never issued. If it’s available, I don’t
know how to find it.
The following year, Gid’s brother Arthur was also recruited
to Columbia. The label was particularly eager for a Southern
exploitation song with a ripped-from-the-headlines feel. Arthur
recorded “The Knoxville Girl” at a session in Atlanta in January
with Gid accompanying him, but this too was scrapped by the la-
bel. Arthur recorded the song a second time in June with different
backers, and this was the record that was finally released—the

142 WINTER 2023 Patient Grissel: an excellent ballad, circa 1750. Courtesy Yale University Library
general of the local militia for Hazard, the city Combs himself had
founded less than a decade ago.
When the preacher first arrived, Combs waved his arm at the craggy
nothing that surrounded them. “This,” he said, “is Hazard.” He had
deeded ten acres of his land to the town four years ago. He brought
the preacher inside his home, a two-story log cabin. “I call it the Old
Log Fort,” he said, and laughed from his belly. Until a couple years
ago, the cabin had served as a courthouse for the county, he said.
The general, who came from Virginia, told the preacher his story.
In 1795, he got a notion. When the weather got warm, he journeyed
into the frontier to the North Fork of the Kentucky River, not far
from where they were now, where he first built a temporary cabin.
Then he walked back to Virginia, married a girl named Sally Roark,
fetched the people he enslaved, and returned to start a new com-
munity. As he told the story, he tugged at his uniform with pride.
When the preacher explained his own mission, the general seemed
to lose interest in the conversation. Two enslaved people moved in
and out of the cabin as they spoke. Their names were Anne and Jake—
the preacher overheard the general’s wife addressing them. They
looked at the preacher with a fear he had never witnessed before.
The preacher had come from an old city, by American standards,
still deeply tied to the Old World, where English Dissenters had arrived
two centuries ago. Now he was in new country, with new men declaring
themselves generals in the new frontier. The preacher felt old.
After staying the night at the cabin, he walked along a trail the
next morning and found himself venturing into the mountains. His
mission had not even lasted forty days, he reminded himself. He was
looking for people to tell of the revival, but people were few and
far between. Even in New England, he felt that he had never seen
so many trees. On the mountainside, belts of folded rock that had
once been on the ocean floor were interrupted by seams of black.
Everything here looked like a warning.
After a time, he finally came upon a small cabin. Just outside, a man
was leaning against the wide trunk of a scarlet oak and singing to his
family, a story about a girl. The man had a loud and unruly way of
singing, like a woman in danger. The preacher stopped before he ap-
proached. In spite of himself, he smiled as the man sang. The preacher
had traveled so far to carry something, to bring a message. He had
no regrets, but he could grow melancholy sometimes. He missed his
home. And as he listened to this song, he realized that he had heard
it before. The song, like the preacher and his message, had traveled.
All In The Blood Of Innocence
Port of Phladelphia, 1801
T he boy held his sister’s hand, and her hand felt new somehow.
The snap of smell in his nostrils was new, the feel of the air
on his skin was new, the sounds of the voices were new. Unlike his
grandparents, his family spoke English, but this was a different
English that he heard. He pulled his sister along, to keep up with
their parents, who seemed to walk at a new pace. There was new
money; he could not see it, but it was there—it seemed to electrify
his vision. There was no rain outside, but out on the docks, he could
144 WINTER 2023
hear a sound like thunder. It was the same Creation, of the same
God, but it was a New World.
He could not know that he would re-tell this story later, to grand-
children in New York and Pittsburgh, to his sister’s grandchildren in
Haverford and Baltimore—who would listen closely but could only
halfway understand because they had only just the one world. They
would have grandchildren of their own, who lived in those places
and yet more places still, who would know roughly where he came
from but would not know his name. (His name, by the way, was Peter.
His sister’s name was Mary.) And these great-great-grandchildren
would have grandchildren, who lived in an America that was a little
older, but different: A new version of an old tune.
At a certain point, they would probably lose track of this lineage.
Memories are rickety; records have gaps; the archives have to be
dug up. The family branches become tangled and lost, until you
cannot find the root.
When the newness of the noise at the port became too much for
Peter, he sang familiar songs in his head. He held his sister Mary’s
hand tighter still as his family found the proper queue in the chaos,
and pulled at a snag on his linen shirt, a garment his mother had
sewn from what remained of an old shirt of his father’s. He had
worn it for the entirety of their journey. They had come with almost
nothing, save for songs.
And Dragged Her To The River
Side, And Threw Her Body In
London, England, 1720 or thereabouts
B ut she fell on bended knee,” he writes, “for mercy she did
cry.” The meter in his ear was not so much a constraint as a
companion that seemed to live inside him—the way the runner is
guided by the measure of his breath. It was a manner and rhythm he
would have known from English translations of the Holy Book from
more than a century before, perhaps from theatre troupes that had
returned after the Puritans’ ban was lifted, and certainly from the
other ballads he borrowed from to shape his own lines. But he had
no need to study scansion. The footfalls of syllables were deeper
than knowledge or influence. He put the stick in the killer’s hand
and the patterns and flows of language were like a river current. He
merely had to let it carry him.
His handiwork can be found in a Scottish chapbook dated 1744,
but it almost certainly dates back earlier. Some estimate that a ver-
sion of the song was first printed as far back as 1700; others date it
around 1720. There once may have been thousands of copies, but
broadsides were brittle and disposable, sometimes winding up as
makeshift wallpaper in the taverns.
The murderer John Mauge and his victim Anne Knite, mentioned
in an addendum in that 1744 chapbook, may not be the couple the
ballad writer had in mind. It could be a later crime that the song
was attached to, or it could be that the pair is entirely fictional. No
historical evidence of the existence of the killer John Mauge and his
victim Anne Knite has been found.

Though he would have been dismissed as a scabrous hack at the
time, the ballad writer has such a knack for poetic and efficient
depictions of monstrous violence that it can start to feel like he
is an artist, or a proto-artist, who is governed by a bloodthirsty
aesthetic. But the truth is, he may not be a single man—he may be
a composite, his single authorship an anachronism. Or he may be
merely a transcriber. The song’s structure and rhythm are so clean
that it suggests a writer’s hand, but it could be that the story and
its language were born entirely in song, from the community. Later,
scholars would bicker over what counts as folk tradition, but a song’s
evolutions in oral tradition and popular writing surely would have
crossed back and forth countless times.
The past is so foreign and strange that we should be left humble
when we write our histories. Whether he is one writer, or several
writers, or the people as a whole, the shape of his thoughts—his
entire manner of thinking—is unreachable. But the meter we can
share. I can hear the gentle dance in his language, thousands of
miles away and centuries hence: “For Heaven’s sake, don’t murder
me. I am not fit to die.”
So Like A Wretch My Days I
End, Upon The Gallow Tree
Shropshire, England, 1684
T he noose hung from the tree and the assembled crowd made
a barrage of noise like happy jackals as Francis Cooper was
led by the authorities to his fate.
Nearby, perhaps, someone had a broadside telling the tale of “The
Bloody Miller.” Its hawkers promised that it was his sworn confession,
which wasn’t true, but that hardly mattered. Francis would now be
judged by God, a prospect that he could find no comfort in.
We do not know whether he was remorseful. We do not know
precisely what motivated him to kill her, despite the clear motivation
described in song. Ballad writers were not fastidious fact checkers,
after all. They were entertainers. They went for the kill; they went
for the thrill.
We do know that “The Bloody Miller” was preserved by Samuel
Pepys, who was a member of Parliament from 1673 to 1679 and
An Excellent Ballad of the Lord Mohun and Duke Hamilton. With an exact account
of their melancholy deaths, circa 1712. Courtesy Yale University Library
again from 1685 to 1689, as well as serving
as a chief naval administrator under two
kings. That alone would not have earned
him much of a place in history, but he was
also a diarist. His writing is one of the best
primary sources available about life in En-
gland in the period. He was also a fan of
ballads, collecting more than 1,800 broad-
sides, including “The Bloody Miller,” with
the notation about Francis and Anne. His
are the records we have.
We do not know for certain whether “The
Bloody Miller” was an altogether new com-
position about this murder, or whether it
borrowed from some previous ballad, the tale of some earlier
wicked killing, as later songs might borrow from “The Bloody
Miller” or use “The Berkshire Tragedy” as a template for wicked
deeds to come. These songs were flexible. Certain details in the
ballad could well have been drawn from another incident, recycled
for the tragedy of Francis and Anne.
Anne was likely around twenty-three years old when she was
murdered. We do not know if some remnant of her spirit was si-
lently there that day at the gallows. From the very beginning, her
silence was hiding somewhere in the song. We know what he did
to her body, but every version was written from his perspective,
not hers. History is littered with the dead, written by the living.
Dead girls don’t write songs.
But we do know that a man named Francis killed a woman named
Anne in Shropshire in 1684. Slade dug up the county records.
Anne—last name Nicholas according to the records—was buried
with the notation TRUCULENTER OCCISA, Latin for “brutally killed.”
Another reference from around the same time appears to establish
that her murderer was Francis Cooper.
And from these records, we do know something else, some-
thing that’s hard to reconcile with the song. The child was born.
Anne was buried on March 1. A few weeks later, a baptism was
recorded. The boy’s parents were listed as “Francis Cooper,
homicide, and Anne.”
Perhaps she had already given birth, but the ballad writers
preferred her to be pregnant for dramatic effect (one scholar
speculates that the ballad had it right and the baby died with her,
but that Francis also got a different woman named Anne pregnant
at the very same time). Or maybe Francis couldn’t stomach killing
the child, so he waited for her to give birth. Or maybe the tale was
more gruesome still: He could have killed her and left the newborn
alone in the meadow, clutching his dead mother’s arm.
“Was the pregnancy so far advanced that someone managed
to cut a living child from the dead mother’s womb?” asks Slade.
That would certainly be the most murder-ballad manner for the
tale to end. But I’m not sure how plausible that is. In any event, if
that’s what happened, surely the people of Shropshire chalked it
up to a divine intercession, a holy gift. So we might as well call it
a miracle, too.
We do not know what became of the boy. We do not know whether
he had children of his own. The trail is lost. The song ends there—we
do not know where the branches go.
We do know the boy’s name, from the records that we have.
His name was Ichabod.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 145
 Multi-Grammy
Award-Winner
Bobby Rush

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 A Mississippi Playlist

Live sounds
on the square
and everywhere.
From big festivals (Slugburger and
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 A Mississippi Playlist

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 A Mississippi Playlist

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Slight Light Fest – December 2

Tree Lighting – December 7
Holiday Open House – December 8 & 9
Discover Christmas Parade – December 10
Ocean Springs Elks Mardi Gras Parade – January 27
Ocean Springs Night Mardi Gra Parade – February 9
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your next big live music event.
 Music Credits
1. WALK WITH ME, 1963
Fannie Lou Hamer
“Walk With Me” is a congregational spiritual. As such, it is designed to be mal-
leable. In this mainstay of African American churches, the lyrics change from
singer to singer, making it ballad-like in that sense, but each variant depicts a
sojourner pleading to Christ. The African Methodist Episcopal Church Hymnal
emphasizes the weariness of religious pilgrimages, but Fannie Lou Hamer
emphasizes Christ’s ability to comfort His followers. Whereas the hymnal
writes of trials, heartbreaks, and sorrows, Hamer sings of a Christ who can,
whenever His believers are in need, take on many forms: In her version, He’s
asked to be a friend and then a way-maker. Hamer was a leading voting rights
and food justice activist from Sunflower County, Mississippi, and she often
lent her singing voice as motivation during meetings and rallies. In 2015,
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings rereleased Songs My Mother Taught Me,
an album of field recordings that includes songs (hymns, spirituals, and a
lullaby), a brief narrative, and a speech, all given by Hamer. “Walk With Me”
appears in the second half, which contains recordings from a mass meeting.
Hamer belts the selection out as the attendees join or give the asides so dear
to Black sacred song. At the beginning, as Hamer croons the titular line, one
man hollers, “That’s what we need. We need Jesus.”
158 WINTER 2023
WRITER: Traditional/Spiritual
PERFORMED BY Fannie Lou Hamer
Courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
2. Cigarettes
and Coffee,
1966
Otis Redding
I
n “Cigarettes and Coffee,” an arguably overlooked track from
side one of Otis Redding’s fourth studio album, the singer is so
in love that he appears to be in pain. The Soul Album came out
the year before Redding’s unexpected death in 1967. Redding’s
vocal performance was described by one critic as “sweaty,” and
“Cigarettes and Coffee” is no exception. The song begins like
the dawn, with gentle blaring horns backed by a simple drum
rhythm and the tinkle of a hi-hat. Redding’s voice, with its sig-
nature combination of rough and warm, croons to the woman he
Looking for that tea, 2023, water-soluble oil on canvas, by Judy Koo. Courtesy the artist
loves about the simple pleasure of early-morning conversation
with her. Though it’s a simple domestic ballad, Redding sounds
tortured by just how long it took him to find this kind of bliss: And
all the good-looking girls I’ve met / They just don’t seem to fit in
/ Knowing it’s particularly sad, yeah. At the song’s crescendo,
the backing instrumentation stays steady, but Redding is nearly
crying, trying to hold on to the moment with his voice: It’s so
early / so early / in the morning / so early / so early.
WRITERS: Jerry Butler, Eddie Thomas, and Jay Walker
PUBLISHING: Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp., Mal Williams Music Corp.
PRODUCED BY Jim Stewart, Booker T. & the MG’s, Isaac Hayes, and David Porter
PERFORMED BY Otis Redding
℗ 1966 Atlantic Recording Corp.
Courtesy of Rhino Entertainment Company, A Warner Music Group Company
3. OMIE WISE, 2003
Okkervil River
“Omie Wise” is the indie and folk rock band Okkervil River’s take on a murder
ballad, based on the 1807 (or 1808) killing of Naomi Wise by the father of her
child, Jonathan Lewis. The song is featured on their 2003 album, Down the
River of Golden Dreams, a split record with singer-songwriter Julie Doiron
that preceded their 2005 breakout album Black Sheep Boys. As David
Ramsey’s essay “Blood Harmony” lays out, the storylines of traditional
murder ballads tend to evolve, and “Omie Wise” is no exception. Over the
decades, Naomi’s character has gone from an unwed mother of ill repute
to a more palatable innocent. Okkervil River’s arrangement begins as a soft
and simple folk tune with sparing instruments but becomes a whirlwind
rock ballad in the bridge, where the narrator, in the voice of frontman Will
Sheff, screams for mercy. Don’t be fooled by Sheff’s sometimes-straining
voice in the song’s folksy first half—once the snare drum picks up, Sheff is
truly in his element, unleashing the angry pleading of one of folk music’s
oft-silenced murdered girls.
WRITER: Traditional
PRODUCED BY Okkervil River
PERFORMED BY Okkervil River
Courtesy of Acuarela
4. At My
Most Beautiful, 1998
R.E.M.
N
estled within their 1998 album Up, “At My Most Beautiful”
stands out in R.E.M.’s vast catalog as a ballad of piano
notes and overlapping voices. The history behind its
conception is as compelling as its lyrical depth. Michael Stipe,
the primary storyteller behind R.E.M., shared an early chorus
with friend and actor-activist Cameron Diaz. Despite the chorus
resonating immediately, the quest for the perfect verse took
Stipe a staggering year to complete. The song’s eventual lyrical
epiphany is anchored in a line that speaks of counting eyelashes
and whispering confessions of love—an intimate, captivating sen-
timent. This tale underscores the unpredictable nature of Stipe’s
songwriting—and how a singular line can transform a good song
into an unforgettable one. In Stipe’s words, it wasn’t just about
crafting a “standard love song,” but about creating something
with a deeply personal touch that “hooks you and pulls you in.”
“At My Most Beautiful” is a love story, a journey, and a testament
to the power of words.
WRITERS: Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills
PUBLISHING: Universal Music Publishing Group
PRODUCED BY Pat McCarthy
PERFORMED BY R.E.M.
Courtesy of Craft Recordings, a Division of Concord
5. THE TITANIC, 1956
Pink Anderson
Pinkney “Pink” Anderson was born in 1900 and likely would have remembered
the sinking of the Titanic from his childhood in South Carolina. In the years after
the 1912 disaster, the story became a global pop culture phenomenon, a slow-
er-burning presage of the 1990s Céline Dion–fueled trend. Anderson’s version
of “The Titanic,” recorded in 1950, is one of several folksongs that cropped up
in the nineteen-teens to relate, comment on, and lament the tragedy. These
songs, which became particularly popular with blues musicians like Anderson,
are some of the most modern examples we have of the messy and meandering
life cycles of folk ballads. Anderson’s lyrics give us a hint to how information
about the Titanic was related orally—in one verse, he misremembers John
Jacob Astor, the business magnate who was one of the Titanic’s most famous
casualties, as “Jacobud Asker.” (Fellow bluesman Blind Willie Johnson, in his
version of “God Moves on the Water” from 1929, similarly misremembers
Captain E. J. Smith as “A. G. Smith.”) Anderson combines his localized version
of the Titanic story with sparkling, up-tempo guitar that transforms the tragedy
into a dance track. The insistent, questioning chorus—Wasn’t it sad when the
great ship went down? Wasn’t it sad when the great ship went down?—catches
and sticks in the ear and has hooked generations of listeners.
WRITER: T raditional
PERFORMED BY Pink Anderson
Courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
6. HOW DO I LIVE, 1997
LeAnn Rimes
At the 1998 Grammys, fifteen-year-old LeAnn Rimes performed “How Do I
Live,” a ballad written by Diane Warren and brimming with—to borrow a phrase
from Lauren Du Graf’s feature from this issue—“codependent excess.” A few
minutes later, Trisha Yearwood beat out Rimes in the Best Country Female
Vocal Performance category for her version of “How Do I Live,” which was
likely recognized by country voters as a more classic-sounding interpretation
from a genre veteran; it was the first time in the award show’s history that
two artists were nominated in the same category for the same song. But
even though Yearwood’s version took home the Grammy and was preferred
for the soundtrack of the Nicolas Cage action blockbuster Con Air, Rimes’s
version—soaring and soulful, with falsetto flourishes that hint at her yo-
deling bona fides—spent sixty-nine weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 and is
remembered fondly as one the ’90s premier schmaltz sing-alongs. (It spent
some of those weeks directly competing with Usher’s “Nice & Slow,” further
evidence of ballads’ omnipresence at the turn of the millennium.) Some reports
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 159

suggested that the movie studio passed because they felt Rimes was too young
to convincingly express the song’s grownup-grade yearning (a claim Rimes
told Texas Monthly the film executives denied)—and yet, who understands
romantic melodrama and unchecked devotion better than a teenager?
WRITER: Diane Warren
PUBLISHING: Real Songs (ASCAP)
PRODUCED BY Chuck Howard, Wilbur C. Rimes
PERFORMED BY LeAnn Rimes
Courtesy of Curb Records
7. IT HAD
TO BE YOU, 1975
Milt Hinton and Friends
Milt Hinton—better known as “The Judge,” for his legendary timekeeping—was
the heartbeat of 1950s jazz, laying down bass line rhythms for the likes of
Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, and Cab Calloway. Despite
being one of the most recorded bassists in history, few recordings were
released under Hinton’s own name. “It Had to Be You” is featured on Here
Swings The Judge, a rare LP released with Hinton at the helm. Alongside Jon
Faddis’s mute work on trumpet and John Bunch’s tickling piano, Hinton’s
bassline shines through in their arrangement of the American songbook
classic. In 1919, when Milt Hinton was nine, he and his family moved from
Vicksburg, Mississippi, to Chicago, away from the oppression and lack of
opportunity facing many Southern Black families. Immersed in Chicago’s
church choirs, Hinton began piano lessons and later enrolled in the National
Black Music Association and Wendell Phillips High School, gaining a rigorous
music education and catapulting himself into the jazz world.
WRITERS: Isham Jones and Gus Kahn
PUBLISHER: Famous Door Records
PRODUCED BY Harry Lim
PERFORMED BY Milt Hinton
Courtesy of GHB Jazz Foundation
8. ABILENE, 2022
Plains
Not all country music is about heartbreak, but country music does heart-
break pretty well. The music of Plains—the collaborative project featur-
ing Alabama-raised Katie Crutchfield (aka Waxahatchee) and Texas-born
singer-songwriter Jess Williamson—tackles the heartbreak that comes
with choosing yourself over the relationship, the place, the vibe, that is not
working for you. Their twangy harmonies reveal the sadness and the hope
that comes with major life change: I’da stayed there forever, ’til death do
us part / Texas in my rearview, plains in my heart. Crutchfield has said that
“Abilene,” written by Williamson, was the song that “solidified” the duo’s
debut album, and there’s no doubt that this downtempo, three-chord ballad
earns its spot among the best country collaborations, calling to mind Trio,
the Judds, and the Chicks.
WRITER: Jess Williamson
PUBLISHING: Orgasmic Bliss (BMI) c/o Covertly Canadian Publishing
PRODUCED BY Brad Cook
PERFORMED BY Plains
Courtesy of Epitaph Records
160 WINTER 2023
9. Be Real
Black For Me, 1972
Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway
I
n 1969, Billboard changed the r&b chart’s name to “Best
Selling Soul Singles,” calling the new genre a kind of “musical
Americana” that drew on gospel, jazz, pop, and the blues. The
sound was urgent, crackling with vitality and truth-telling. It
reflected the vicissitudes of the decade, when victories like the
Voting Rights Act had been won, but had also been met with
violent retaliation. Weary leaders urged an inward turn. The
word “soul” became shorthand for Black authenticity and pride.
Before long, there were “soul brothers” and “soul sisters,” “soul
food” and Soul Train.
In the fall of 1971, former Howard University classmates Donny
Hathaway and Roberta Flack collaborated on their first of two
albums of duets. Both had come from smaller Southern towns to
Washington, D.C., and had been child prodigies. Both played piano
with gospel and classical training. Flack described Hathaway as
“very shy, very self-conscious about his weight”; she said that when
they were starting in the music business, they both were. Their
albums together vibrate with the tender intimacy of being seen.
On “Be Real Black for Me,” the two trade lines of devotion,
beginning with Hathaway, who describes the moment: “Our time,
short and precious.” He means shared time, with the beloved,
but also, perhaps his time—our time—on the planet. He loves
the person in spite of what everyone else says is wrong: their
luscious lips and crinkly hair. Black, formerly an insult spewed
on hateful tongues, became, on Donny’s and Roberta’s, some-
thing lovely, with value. In my head I’m only half together, the
two sing in unison, harmonies lilting over a soaring bridge. I fall
short of this love, they seem to say, and so do you. But we need
each other more than all the earth’s riches. “There is something
about the way love flows between the two,” Ashawnta Jackson
writes in this issue.
WRITERS: Roberta Flack, Donny Hathaway, Charles Mann
PUBLISHING: WC Music Corp. / Universal Music Publishing / Microhits Music Corp.
PRODUCED BY Arif Mardin, Joel Dorn
PERFORMED BY Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway
Courtesy of Rhino Records, A Warner Music Group Company
10. THE DAY IS
PAST AND GONE, 1964
Buna Hicks
“They have new songs and they’re right pretty—some of them is—but I still
hold to the old songs,” Buna Hicks says in Tom Burton’s book Some Ballad
Folks. As Justin Taylor explains in this issue, some of the songs Hicks and her
Beech Mountain, North Carolina, contemporaries sang were very old indeed,
with roots in Renaissance poetry. “The Day is Past and Gone” is a relative
neologism by those standards—its lyrics were written in 1792 by John Leland,
a Baptist minister from Massachusetts. But by the time Hicks recorded her
version of the hymn for Smithsonian Folkways in the early 1960s, it was
thoroughly integrated into her own musical tradition. The liner notes for The
Traditional Music of Beech Mountain, North Carolina Volume 1, on which the
recording initially appeared, note that the hymn was sung harmonized in the
local church. Hicks sings it solo, to an austere, knobbly tune that seems to
summarize the dense chords of “Idumea,” the shape-note melody written
by Ananias Davisson in the nineteenth century. Her voice renders the lyrics,
already dire, into something apocalyptic, adding in time-worn grace notes and
the “yips” that “Orphan Girl” author Melanie McGee Bianchi in this issue still
hears in the ballad singing of western North Carolina today.
WRITER: John Leland
PERFORMED BY Buna Hicks
Courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
11. HAWK FOR
THE DOVE, 2022
Amanda Shires
From Amanda Shires’s seventh solo album Take It Like a Man, “Hawk for the
Dove”’ is an Americana power ballad about a woman who knows what she
wants. A Nashville-based singer, songwriter, and fiddle player, Shires—also
known as one-fourth of the country music supergroup the Highwomen—says
of “Hawk for the Dove” that, “I want people to know that it’s okay to be a forty-
year-old woman and be more than just a character in somebody else’s life.”
Written by Shires and Lawrence Rothman, the song explores “the emotions
that turn prey into predator.” Shires, who was born in Lubbock, Texas, has
Southern roots that come out in her music. From her tremulous voice to her
skilled fiddle, the markers of her West Texas upbringing are evident across her
discography, including her most recent release, Loving You with the late Bobbie
Nelson, featuring vocals from Bobbie’s brother, Willie Nelson.
WRITERS: Lawrence Rothman and Amanda Shires
PUBLISHING: Little Lambs Eat Ivy Music, BMI
PRODUCED BY Lawrence Rothman
PERFORMED BY Amanda Shires
Courtesy of ATO Records
12.Think of Laura,
1983
Christopher Cross
L
aura Carter was an eighteen-year-old college student who
was killed by a stray bullet in Columbus, Ohio, while sitting
in the backseat of her father’s car. The Texas-born singer
Christopher Cross was dating her roommate, and he wrote “Think
of Laura” as a tribute. It’s a tender tragedy ballad, with somber
chords and unfussy elegiac poetry: “Hey Laura, where are you
now? / Are you far away from here? / I don’t think so / I think
you’re here / Taking our tears away.” It’s an unsubtle yet effective
tearjerker, thanks in large part to the Grammy- and Oscar-winning
songwriter’s trademark serene timbre, which is imbued here with
a genuine-feeling melancholia. True to the spirit of the ballad
tradition, Boyz II Men would later reimagine the track as “Think
of Aaliyah”—in memory of the late, great r&b singer who died
in a plane crash in 2001.
WRITER: Christopher Cross
PUBLISHING: Get Ur Seek On (ASCAP) c/o Universal Music Publishing
PRODUCED BY Michael Omartian
PERFORMED BY Christopher Cross
Courtesy of Seeker Music
13. THE CARRIER
LINE, 1942
Sid Hemphill
Known as a talented instrumentalist (of the fife, panpipes, fiddle, mandolin,
drums, and more) and instrument maker, Sid Hemphill, a blind man from
Mississippi whose father was at one time enslaved, was also a prolific balladeer.
His ability to come up with lyrics on request built him a reputation across his
region; as explained in Jim O’Neal’s essay about Hemphill from this issue, locals
would approach him to commission songs about events worth memorializing.
Songs like “The Carrier Line”—a ballad detailing the wreck on the Sardis &
Delta Railroad owned by Sardis lumber baron Robert Carrier—exemplify his
uncanny knack for turning true stories into lively, lasting music. It also exists
in conversation with other train wreck ballads, like “Engine One-Forty-Three”
and “The Ballad of Casey Jones.” Alan Lomax and Lewis Jones sought out
Hemphill in 1942 as part of a historic project, supported by Fisk University and
the Library of Congress, to create an archive of songs from the South. When
Lomax joined him at a summer picnic, Hemphill became the first person in
Mississippi to record fife and drum music with his band.
WRITER: Sid Hemphill
PUBLISHING: Mississippi Records
PRODUCED BY Alan Lomax
PERFORMED BY Sid Hemphill, Alec Askew, Lucius Smith, and Will Head
Courtesy of Mississippi Records
14. DEAD HORSES, 2022
The Local Honeys
“Dead Horses” appears on the self-titled album by the Local Honeys, a folk
bluegrass duo based in Kentucky. The song is, obviously, about dead horses:
The narrator, voiced by Linda Jean Stokley, recounts a buckskin pony that
mourns beside her dead mother. The narrator mourns with the pony, as she
“never got used to watching horses die.” The song is intimate, with Stokley’s
lead vocals and Montana Hobbs’s cascading fiddle, and offers a bittersweet
view of rural, Appalachian life. Here, animals and humans are connected in both
love and grief. Madeline Weinfield writes in this issue of a similar connection
to the horses of her own youth, the memory of which, “like a first love…burns
sometimes still.”
WRITER: Linda Jean Stokley
PUBLISHING: Gerle Travis Publishing, BMI
PRODUCED BY Jesse Wells, Linda Jean Stokley, and Montana Hobbs
PERFORMED BY The Local Honeys
Courtesy of The Local Honeys
15. PA’LANTE, 2017
Hurray for the Riff Raff
In Clarissa Fragoso Pinheiro’s essay on Chilean folk artist Violeta Parra, she
writes that the artist never had the chance to “witness the profound impact
her songs would have on social movements in Latin America, particularly
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 161
 the Nueva Canción, a movement of politically engaged music inspired by folk
traditions.” We can trace a line from this movement in the ’60s and ’70s to the
work of New Orleans–based Alynda Mariposa Segarra, aka Hurray for the Riff
Raff. Segarra has said that this song was a means of connecting with both
their Puerto Rican heritage and activists of the past who have challenged the
status quo, especially the status quo that excludes queer people and people
of color. In many ways, the song’s simple melody and straightforward lyrics of
protest hearken to the revolutionary work of Violeta Parra. Though the lyrics
speak more directly to our contemporary world, “Pa’lante” feels kindred to
“Gracias a la vida,” with its yearning for a simplicity and freedom of life that
so many struggle to experience. “¡Pa’lante!” literally urges listeners “onwards”
and “forward”; they sing To all who had to survive, I say, ¡Pa’lante! / To my
brothers, and my sisters, I say, ¡Pa’lante!
WRITER: Alynda Segarra
PUBLISHING: Mariposa Gang Publishing (BMI) administered by Domino Publishing
Company of America Inc. (BMI)
PRODUCED BY Paul Butler
PERFORMED BY Hurray for the Riff Raff
Courtesy of ATO Records
16. THE GLORY
OF LOVE, 1965
George Lewis & the Barry Martyn Band
First, get that Peter Cetera song “Glory of Love” from the Karate Kid II
soundtrack out of your head. “The Glory of Love,” written by Billy Hill in 1936,
is one of the twentieth century’s most durable love songs and has appeared
on soundtracks from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner to Beaches. Composed
by Hill during the Great Depression, at first listen, its lyrics feel like jaunty
platitudes: You’ve got to give a little / take a little / let your poor heart break a
little / That’s the story of / That’s the glory of love. But when you consider that
the song was written during one of the nation’s longest economic downturns
and you consider how difficult it must have been for most people to survive,
let alone thrive, the lyrics gather greater meaning: As long as there are two
of us / We’ve got the world and all its charms / And when the world is through
with us / We’ve got each other’s arms. This 1965 instrumental version by New
Orleans jazz clarinetist George Lewis and the Barry Martyn Band, swings with
joy, and feels like the stroll of two lovers who’ve just had a lucky break and
are on their way to celebrate, even with the knowledge that the win may be
fleeting. For now, they will seize the moment.
WRITER: Billy Hill
PRODUCED BY Barry Martyn
PERFORMED BY George Lewis and the Barry Martyn Band
Courtesy of GHB Jazz Foundation
17. LIAR, 2023
Paramore
Maggie Boyd Hare writes in this issue that when pop punk outfit Paramore
wrote in the 2000s about love, “it was dark, cynical, and it went hard.” While
much has changed for the band since the release of their 2009 hit ballad
“The Only Exception,” they’re still unafraid to confront love’s sharper edges.
Like “The Only Exception,” “Liar” is a quieter, more reflective moment in the
band’s catalog—but it’s also easy to hear the fourteen years of ballad-writing
evolution between the two tracks. Rather than what Hare calls the “worship
band strum pattern” of “Only Exception,” “Liar” opens with a stuttering guitar
arpeggio, a melody like falling water drops. Lead singer Hayley Williams, rightly
162 WINTER 2023
known for her powerhouse vocals, forgoes the belting in favor of airy high
notes that showcase her bell-like timbre and pinpoint intonation. Meanwhile,
the song’s lyrics echo the almost transgressive vulnerability Hare finds in “The
Only Exception,” releasing both singer and listener to fully feel their messy,
inexplicable, inelegant emotions: Love is not an easy thing to admit, Williams
sings, but I’m not ashamed of it.
WRITERS: Hayley Williams, Taylor York, and Zac Farro
PUBLISHING: WC Music Corp., Hunterboro Music, Zac The Wolf Music, But Father, I
Just Want To Sing Music
PRODUCED BY Carlos de la Garza
PERFORMED BY Paramore
℗ 2022 Atlantic Recording Group LLC
Courtesy of Atlantic Recording Corporation
18.The Final Gift,
2023
Dom Flemons
T
he ballad is a form we love because it refuses categorization.
Is it a poem? Is it a song? Is it a story? Is it a lyric? Yes, and.
From Chaucer to B. B. King, Langston Hughes to Lydia
Mendoza, Westerners have bent the millennium to carry this
ancient form forward to teach, grieve, and heal. For this issue,
we commissioned a new traditional ballad from Dom Flemons,
Grammy-winning “American Songster” and a bearer of this
country’s rural music inheritance. “The Final Gift” is presented
here just as it is: a poem and a song, a story and a lyric, a work
of art that is both nascent and old. Written in the formal style,
with an iambic pulse and hard rhyme patterns, “The Final Gift”
reminds us of true love’s most common story: true love, missed.
Marie would walk the sea to meet her rambling beloved, but
when she finds him he is already gone to regret’s many deaths.
It’s a heartbreaker. Flemons seems to ask us, is true love only
ever valued after it is done? Can we still awaken to its power in
our lives, before it is too late? As if to hope for a different ending,
this poem-song edits itself as it sings, with Flemons making slight
adjustments in the parallel refrains, his raw voice breaking across
the tide of notes. A work of living tradition, “The Final Gift”
draws from murder ballads and dying verses, only this execution
is brought by the wicked hand of missed chance. True love’s most
common story—made new, by honoring its age.
WRITER: Dom Flemons
PUBLISHING: American Songster Music, ASCAP
PERFORMED BY Dom Flemons
Courtesy of Dom Flemons
Stream the Ballads Issue Sampler
Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit Oxford American Magazine
on Spotify to stream the playlist.
 ARTISTIC ARKANSAS
INFLUENTIAL ARKANSAS
HARMONIC ARKANSAS
AUTHENTIC ARKANSAS
.GIGPFCT[OWUKEKCPUCPFVJGKTNCUVKPIKPƃWGPEGU
are part of Arkansas’s rich artistic heritage. Come,
enjoy the moving performances, inspiring origins and
resonating creations we’ve arranged for you.

Learn more at
ArkansasHeritage.com.
ARKANSAS ARTS COUNCIL
ARKANSAS HISTORIC PRESERVATION PROGRAM
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DELTA CULTURAL CENTER
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