Love and the Blues
Looking for some truth
Dancing with no shoes
The beat, the rhythm, the blues
The pounding of your heart’s drum
Together with another one
Didn’t you think anyone loved you?
See what you lost when you left this world
This sweet old world
What you lost when you left this world
This sweet old world
Lucinda Williams 1992 “Sweet Old World”
Hoyt Axton
Lucinda Williams
Michael Kelsey
When I was growing up in Montana; we had a phonograph instead of a TV set. Dad would invite his students and sometimes fellow faculty members over for an evening of folk music. If I hid behind Mom’s rocking chair and was very quiet, my parents would forget to send me to bed and I could stay up with the music. Every summer, we drove in a convertible VW to visit grandparents and Sam Goody’s record store in Chicago.
Hoyt Axton was my favorite folk singer. As a young girl, I would lose myself in the soulful pain of Hoyt’s rendition of the 1933 classic “Blue Prelude.” If I sat with my body leaning against the side of Dad’s big speakers, I could feel Hoyt’s lonesome voice and sparse accenting guitar notes deep inside me.
My second child, Wescott, was ten when he lost his best friend. My husband, Ray, and I didn’t watch the local news. Our phone rang shortly after 10 PM. “What about Tom?” Ray asked me later that night in the safety of our bed. In the space of a few minutes on a crystal brilliant autumn day, Tom had lost his wife and both of his sons.
I made coffee the next morning, cooked breakfast, and waited for my son to come downstairs; cherishing the final minutes of innocence before I have to tell a young boy that his best friend, Sean, had been pushed off a parking garage at Purdue University by his mother, Kathy Kent, who then jumped herself seven stories down to the black pavement. Within a few days, hometown rock star Shannon Hoon, lead singer of Blind Melon, died of a drug overdose while touring on the road. One of the last songs, Hoon recorded was a cover of Hoyt Axton’s “The Pusher ” from the Easy Rider soundtrack.
Eight years later, our family imploded when our SUV was rear-ended by an uninsured driver as traffic slowed on I-90 outside of Rockford, Illinois. I was still in intensive care in critical condition when my husband’s family had Ray’s funeral without me, cremating his body on our 23rd wedding anniversary.
What keeps us walking after such horror and loss?
Music.
After my friend Kathy murdered her sons and killed herself, I listened to Lucinda Williams’ “Sweet, old world,” trying to understand how I could miss the signs of severe depression and how a mother could kill her own children. Our church was no help because Kathy committed suicide; plus she was a murderess. I didn’t know what to do with my emotions, since her kids were frequent visitors in my house and mine in hers. I took her widower food and swapped Leo Kottke records with him. Perhaps, we should have discussed our grief, but sometimes shared music means more than conversation.
Kathy’s death sent me on a spiritual quest, traveling from the holy island of Iona and the monastery founded by St. Columba to the sacred rock of Uluru in the Dead Red Centre under the stars of the Southern Cross. The old Celtics wrote in Latin about places where the veil between the worlds is thin and the Aborigines speak of the land knowing we are here. I was searching for a way to say goodbye to the young boys I loved as my own, and the friend I knew before mental illness stole her soul. Many of the Celtic prayers I was reading were collected by Alexander Carmichael in the mid 1800s before the Education Act of 1872 forbade the teaching and speaking of Gaelic. According to Carmichael’s detailed notes, these prayers were actually songs to be entoned as people went about their milking and other tasks.
Without my husband I couldn’t bear the loneliness, so I fell asleep every night for months listening to Michael Kelsey’s CD entitled “November.” In one of life’s twisted ironies, Mike was Shannon Hoon’s childhood friend and fellow band mate, but I didn’t know that at the time because I wasn’t familiar with Blind Melon’s music. I had met Mike when I was looking a band to play at Wescott’s high school graduation party. I hired Mike to play Michael Hedges style acoustic guitar in my living room. Subsequently, Ray and I went to Mike’s shows on a regular basis.
I stayed in Indiana just long enough for my youngest son to graduate and then I moved back to Montana. Fifteen months after Ray died; I understood why the only time I had felt safe was when I listened to the complex layered looped solo acoustical guitar music created by Mike. Shortly after Easter Sunday on a lonely stretch of Montana two-lane blacktop coming back from Ray’s grave, listening to a new copy of a misplaced CD, I got physically ill. I knew what I had to do to ease the emotional agony of not being able to say goodbye to my husband.
I recreated our last trip—stopping at the ½ mile-marker where he died, praying at the hospital chapel where his Presbyterian pastor father and brother conducted the funeral without me, and talking with the chaplain who brought me the news that Ray was gone. Along the blacksnake road of I-90, I went to Mike’s concerts as he played bars across the Midwest. Mike asked me plenty of questions trying to figure out why I was traveling so far from Montana to see him perform; I was somewhat evasive because I was saying goodbye to Ray while traveling in the spiritual landscapes created with an acoustic guitar. The ancient Celtic blessings for a soul’s release had been prayed at Ray’s grave at the start of my journey, at the fractioned milepost marker on I-90, in the church of Ray’s baptism, and on the Iona beach where Ray and I had walked in 1999. The pastor from Ray’s boyhood church agreed to read the blessing I gave her, because as fate would have it, she was flying to Scotland the next day. I was very specific about the time of the reading and the place: when day merges into night and where the land and sea are one.
I don’t understand the why of how I could feel my husband when Mike played “Wild Blue Ride.” All I know is that Mike’s notes from the missing CD were the last sounds Ray heard before screaming metal shattered our existence.
I watched Montana guitarist, Jess Atkins, struggle through his gig at the Haufbrau bar in Bozeman, the day his good friend, Ben Spangler, was found dead. I never heard Ben play his wild brand of rock ‘n roll live with his band the Touchers, but I like the Michael Hedges meets Johnny Cash style of Jess’s flat picking. At the end of his first set, Jess introduced a blues song he had composed that his fellow musician, Ben, had wanted to learn despite the stylistic differences between the two songwriters. The naked grief on Jess’s face brought back gut-wrenching memories. I wish I could tell Jess, everything will be okay, but I can’t because I know from personal experience that while the pain of loss changes, it never goes away. After the set, I simply told Jess to keep playing his blues song that Ben liked so well.
For me, Hoyt Axton was right when he sang, “But what is love, but a prelude to sorrow and a heartbreak ahead for its goal?”
Blessing for the Soul’s Release
You go home this night to your home of winter,
To your home of autumn,
of spring, and of summer;
You go home this night to your lasting home,
To your eternal bed, to your sound sleeping.
Sleep now, sleep, and so fade sorrow,
Sleep now, sleep, and so fade sorrow,
Sleep now, sleep, and so fade sorrow,
Sleep, my beloved, in the rock of the fold.
The sleep of seven lights upon you, my dear,
The sleep of seven joys upon you, my dear,
The sleep of seven slumbers upon you, my dear.
Sleep, oh sleep in the quiet of quietness,
Sleep, oh sleep in the way of guidance,
Sleep, oh sleep in the love of all loving.
Translated by Caitlin Matthews
Printed in Celtic Blessings, Caitlin Matthews, Rockport, MA: Element, 1994, p. 32
Another version appears in Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica.