The Wandering Boy: Wesley Randolph Eader’s “Of Old It Was Recorded”
October 10, 2013
Last night, under a sky full of stars, I drove the gravel back roads that lead to my grandparents’ house. I followed a barbed wire fence that vanished and reappeared in the dark fields along the road. A rusted oil well stood silent on the other side of the fence, and beyond it were trees and hills that I had explored tirelessly through youthful summers. The fence gave way to houses and garages and allotments of land that had been parceled out a few years back, breaking up a good chunk of the forest of my childhood.
It’s like that in a lot of places these days. Economies ebb and flow. Demands and resources change. Fertile towns go dry and family farms go under.
I’ve had fits of nostalgia driving those roads before, but not last night. I was listening to Wesley Randolph Eader’s album, Of Old It Was Recorded, and perhaps it gave me a sense of the eternal, and a hope that some things never pass away. Void of any sort of contemporary sheen, Eader’s songs of blood and redemption, set against gentle Appalachian melodies, are something out of time. Like the old trees that still stand among the model homes and driveways, the album is unabashedly “old-sounding” amidst a brave new world.
Eader, reflective and unassuming, has always felt like an old soul tossed into the wrong generation. Growing up the son of a pastor in a small Washington town, he fled to Portland, Oregon in his early 20s in hopes of finding some anonymity. There, in that oasis of diversity, conformity out of the question, his identity began to take shape. He found solace in the old timey music he had brushed against in trips to Tennessee. And he found a renewing of his spirit in the worshipping assemblies he met there.
It was ministry that took the Eader family to the West Coast in the first place; first to Oregon, where Wesley was born, and then to the shipping town of Kalama, Washington. Though Wesley felt the strain of expectations that most ministerial families face, he also saw the deepness of his family’s professed faith as well. He says, “I think the most memorable moments from my youth, those that impact me still today, are was when I would witness the change that occurs when people encounter the gospel for the first time”. His father would sometimes feed and open their home to the lonely Chinese shipmen, far away from home and language, who would make port in Kalama. The Eader family would tour the ships and get to know the freight workers. Wesley would witness the grit and beauty of his father’s hospitality. “I think seeing the gospel have a positive impact in peoples lives is what allows me to continue to believe in its power”.
Eader carried those ideas with him to Portland, where he began to carve out his own path of faith, experiencing God in new and unusual ways. In a small, packed room, stacks of Bibles and hymnals piled about, Wesley and his friends would pray and sing for hours; rejoicing together, struggling together, and grappling with the great Unknown together. He says, “It really felt like we were in the middle of a genuine revival”.
It was in this time of intense worship, that Eader began to take seriously the idea of gospel music. He reflects, “I had kinda told myself that all the best gospel songs/hymns had already been written…that nobody could say anything better than the great hymnists like Watts, Cowper or Crosby and no one could perform them better than guys like Johnny Cash or the Stanely Brothers”. The modern Christian music scene, much of it a repackaging of faith with radio hooks, didn’t sit well with Eader. Taking faith–that eternal idea that outweighs and outreaches everything that we know–and trying to box it up…there’s oftentimes very little honesty in something like that, and it gave him a bad taste in his mouth for gospel music.
But the more he thought about it, the more he started to wonder: Isn’t gospel music the forefather of our American music traditions? Our country and blues and folk music…weren’t they born out of the gospel tradition? When did gospel start following trends as opposed to setting them? When did it get turned around?
In that small, packed room of worship, Wesley witnessed the power that a well-written hymn can have when the poetry and theology is taken seriously again. Sometimes those old hymns get a little too embedded in our lives. Sometimes they get a little too familiar, like children’s songs. But strip those melodies down to a single guitar, strumming a few chords; put a weathered weight-of-the-world voice behind the words…and you can feel that fire again. You can’t help but sing along.
Eader’s songs are definitely imbedded in those classic traditions of gospel songwriting. He doesn’t shy away from the bloody imagery, or paper over those grand themes of resurrection and atonement. But he also writes through the lens of his own Christ-experiences; and emphasizes, first and foremost, the love of Christ.
Oh perfect love come near to me
From hatred let me part
So I can bless my enemies
With glimpses of Thy heart
The recording process was pretty modest. Recorded by Blitzen Trapper’s Eric Early, they set up a microphone in Earley’s living room. Wesley whittled his catalogue down to 10 songs, and for the next two hours, using just his voice and a guitar, they ran through them all. Afterward, Early and a few musicians added strings and other subtle instruments to fill out some of the songs.
But despite those little touches, there’s very little polish to be found on the record. Though probably not the case, the album sounds like it was recorded the old fashioned way, long before tape and digital allowed for second chances and manipulated files. There’s a lived-in feeling to it, and a delicate echo that permeates. Eader sings each song as if he’s been singing them forever…as if they were passed down like precious heirlooms, or discovered on one of A.P. Carter’s song expeditions.
And that valley may be dark
Over all the earth, extended
But the love of God is brighter
And its path cannot be bended…
Eader explains that, “We live in an age marked by anxiety and uncertainty, often burdened the past and fearful of the future…Many of us fail to find value in the present moment because we fear it will be forgotten forever, but the gospel teaches us the opposite: that the present moment is holy because it is marked by eternity”. There’s a hope there for someone like Eader, whose heart lay in centuries long past. And there’s a hope there for the rest of us nomads as well, whose attachments get swept away in the currents of progress.
I think it was that, or something close to it, that gave me a sense of comfort on my back road drive. I still walk those woods sometimes. I still climb those hills and cross those streams, moving among the tall grass and broken branches. But 1988 is gone, and so is 1938. You have to hold onto the things that last a little longer…songs and traditions and the redeeming blood of Christ.
Of Old It Was Recorded can be found at Amazon, Bandcamp, and most online retailers; as well as noisetrade.
References
Eader, Wesley Randolph. Email interview. July, 2013.
The Sacred and the Secular: Murry Hammond’s “I Don’t Know Where I’m Going but I’m On My Way”
October 19, 2011
Some time ago, my friend Matt and I walked a stretch of train tracks to an old railroad bridge. It was around 10:30 at night. We planned on hopping a train and riding it the 15 miles or so back to his house. I carried a guitar while he toted a pouch full of supplies for recording and documenting our experience.
We came to the bridge, black beams and rusted iron rising perhaps 15 or 20 feet above the ground. We slipped on gravel and clutched at beams as we moved downward, toward our hiding place under the bridge. There was graffiti on the iron, and bits of litter and bottles among the overgrowth. We waited for perhaps an hour. I walked in circles, fingerpicking and singing old train songs. Soon after, we heard it: a lonesome whistle, somewhere in the near distance. Matt strapped the guitar to his back. We stood on the graveled slope and watched. There were more whistles, closer now. After maybe 20 minutes, we saw it, speeding towards us. We raced back to our hiding place. We crouched low. The sound grew louder and louder. The bridge began to vibrate. And then…a mighty roar as the great machine raced by, mere feet above us.
When the engine had passed, we ran up the slope and down the line of trains. They sped past us, one after another. I had never been so close to a speeding train before. I stood frail against an uncompromising force. The noise it made was like heavy wind and thunder. You had to yell to speak over it. For a moment, probably much longer, I was terrified.
The last car sped past and we began running after it, at full sprint, but it was too fast. We stood on the tracks, catching our breath, as the train disappeared into the night, a fading red light.
For some time after, I thought about the great and terrifying locomotive and its place in the history of gospel music. I had never taken the words as sincerely as I did on that particular night, where the great power rushed before my eyes like the angels of Revelation. Many of those old songs recall the wrath and power of God breaking into our lives, whether we like it or not, drawing us into His reign, or leaving us along the tracks.
Murry Hammond, in his record, I Don’t Know Where I’m Going But I’m On My Way, continues those gospel traditions, often drawing upon the history of sacred music, chronicling various riders on their paths to heaven or elsewhere. It’s not exactly a gospel record. Not everyone chooses heaven in the end. But for some of these lost travelers, a light does appear around the bend. A faith is rewarded.
The album opens quietly, with the soft, pulsating strums of Hammond’s guitar, emerging as if out of darkness. His voice, awash in reverb, soon follows.
What are they doing in heaven today?
he asks, not as Washington Phillips once did, with hints of joy, but as if the possibility of heaven is the only hope for a life marred with tribulation.
I’m thinking of friends that I used to know,
No longer living in this world below.
I’ve heard about heaven but I want to know
Oh what are they doing right now?
Hammond follows a road first paved by the Carter Family, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and the mountain musicians before them. He interprets old songs and sings new ones that sound old. When writing, he adopts ancient idioms. His words, his patterns of language, like those of the old songs, are peculiar and often ambiguous. The sounds of the record, the echo of his voice, the drone of his harmonium, are as ghostly and as mysterious as the mountains that first gave birth to the tradition.
Hammond, like the Carters, like Williams and Cash, is a man who stands in two worlds: the sacred and the secular. He earns a living playing bass for the rock/alt-country group, Old 97’s, who specialize in songs about love, relationships, and yes, sex; and he is a committed Christian, attending church in Burbank, California when he can, singing of salvation often, and struggling, as we all do, to look Godward.
Of his faith, he says, “I was one of the ones that you might say was ‘cornered’, where I felt like God was trying to get my attention. He got it, and it came during a time of a particular valley I was in. Even now that’s often how I get steered back into ‘the fold’ as it were, when I wander off and am in need of a re-pointing of my compass”.
Hammond, a native Texan, was born into the Southern Christian tradition. His mother and father were both devout and deeply spiritual. Prone to wanderlust at a young age, he fought against their beliefs with much energy, but with little success. His journey of faith hasn’t been a straightforward path. It has been, like the trains he so frequently sings about, full of sharp curves and dead ends. It has moved through deep valleys and traversed cliff walls. It has seen pitch-black nights with only dim lantern light to see by. But through every misstep and back step, through every dark night, he has emerged again, wiser and stronger and further enveloped in the great mystery.
As for living and working in the secular world, he says, “There certainly is a lot of opportunity for vice in rock and roll and I tend to give in to some of it, and other times shake myself out of it and look deeper, and higher. The equation is an age-old one: the more worldly I live, the more unhappy and complicated my world gets. Conversely, the higher I shoot, and the more I cling to a universal love, the happier I am and the better I treat people”.
Though not always autobiographical, there are pieces of Hammond in each of his characters. They are all on various tracks, searching hard for something elusive or hidden, whether it be God or love or home or the unknown. He has longed for each of these at some point in his life, and somehow found a few of them.
In the song, “Next Time, Take the Train”, Hammond sings,
Throw it wide and see no end,
Let no one fence or cage you in,
And realize where you have been, and why.
The traveller speaks of finding that place between where you’ve come from and where you’re going. It is in this space that Hammond himself has found clarity. He embraces the places and people that brought him here. He embraces the faith that revived him, again and again. But he is still intrigued and ever excited about the concept of the unknown before him.
* * *
Matt and I walked the tracks until 1:30 in the morning, waiting for another train to pass, but nothing ever came. We talked about the past and the future for hours; the places we came from and the places ahead. Driving home, I listened to I Don’t Know Where I’m Going But I’m on my Way. The train had long rode on. The world had grown quiet. I parked the car and turned to the album’s final track, a song about heaven:
I’m gonna sail on across the wide river
Where my Lord has gone on before.
Where the long look behind turns to family there gathered,
To meet, and to part, no more.
I too grew anxious for that unknown.
Information was gathered through an interview I conducted with Murry Hammond.
let us make a record 