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 Old Paths: “Help Me to Sing”
June 23, 2013
It was probably two years ago that I attended my first Sacred Harp singing. The closest one I could find was in Columbus, Ohio, a two-hour drive. The winter sun was beginning to set as I pulled into the empty parking lot of the borrowed Episcopalian church (which has no denominational connections to the group, or to the style itself). Soon, somebody else arrived. It was Eric, the group’s leader. He let me in and I flipped through the pages of the Sacred Harp songbook as he set up chairs in a square formation.
The Sacred Harp has been around for roughly 150 years. It’s origins are scattered across many southern states, but you can somewhat trace the tradition back to B.F. White and Elisha J. King in Georgia, who first organized the Sacred Harp songbook in 1844. The two compiled melodies and lyrics that drew upon the southern style of shape note singing. Within the style, notation is condensed to four notes, with a symbol representing each one (triangle for fa, oval for sol, square for la, and diamond for mi). As each hymn begins, the choir “lines out” the song by singing the notes aloud, establishing the melody. It’s an eerie sound, unlike anything else that I know of in sacred music (or in music in general).
White, King, and the wealth of singers and writers who contributed to the sacred harp tradition weren’t creating this new form of music from nothing. They were absorbing years of sacred writings and hymns; songs that had travelled down mountains and over oceans; and they were transforming them into something much different. The Sacred Harp songbook is a vast trove of ancient lyrics put to ghostly melodies. Some of the words may have been contemporary to the first printings of the songbook, but many preceded the tradition by generations.
Sitting in the recreation room of the church, I turned to one such adaptation. It was a tune called “Idumea”, number 47b in the book. Charles Wesley’s hymn, written in 1763, has seen many alterations over the centuries, none more notable than it’s sacred harp translation. My favorite is probably Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton’s version, recorded in 1964. It wasn’t a sacred harp performance, but it was very much inspired by the tradition. As Carlton’s fiddle moans, Watson’s voice, full of Appalachian dread, utters the terrifyingly honest words:
Soon as from earth I go,
What will become of me?
Eternal happiness or woe
Must then my portion be!
Just as sacred harp has taken old songs, rearranged their melodies, and created something much different; artists since have been drawing on the songbook for inspiration, taking the words, taking pieces of the melodies, and adapting them into other music styles. Watson and Carlton’s version of “Idumea” is an early example of this, and it seems to set a precedent for an album of sacred harp cover songs released in 2008 called Help Me to Sing. Their reinterpretation of “Idumea” sits alongside reinterpretations by a number of modern-day independent and mainstream musicians.
Help Me to Sing was organized by Matt Hinton as a companion piece to the sacred harp documentary, Awake My Soul, which he and his wife, Erica, directed. Hinton discovered the tradition when he was about 16. Escorted to a singing, he remembers approaching the church: “You could hear the power of the thing before you entered the building…Twenty or thirty people sounded like a couple hundred people”. He was immediately fascinated.
Erica’s grandmother was a sacred harpist as well, and when the two young college students needed a topic for a 10-minute film they were assigned to create at Georgia State, they were both in agreement on what it should be. They filmed different gatherings and interviewed aging singers who were carrying on the tradition. After they had finished the short film, Matt says, “We never stopped bringing the camera with us”, and in 2006, the full-length documentary was released.
Matt’s interest in music has always been diverse. Sacred harp is not for the casual listener. It is not instantly pleasant or easy on the ears. It challenges. It demands participation to be fully understood. So I think it’s telling that at the same time that he was travelling to different singings, studying and documenting this uncommon singing style, Matt was also embracing other unconventional artists and styles as well.
In the late 90’s, when Daniel Smith’s Danielson Familie began making waves in the indie music world, Matt would give them a place to stay on tours down the East coast. Through sacred harp, he met Tim Eriksen, the punk rocker/musicologist (a rare breed), who has studied and performed various forms of American folk music over the years, sometimes traditionally, and sometimes not so much (listen to the cover of “Idumea” by his band, Cordelia’s Dad, for instance).
Matt was drawn to the unordinary, and through incidents of happenstance, he was building musical relationships that would eventually join him in his sacred harp experiments. When he and Erica were searching for ways to expose new listeners to sacred harp, easing them into a tradition that can be jarring at first, Matt began to call upon his old friends, who would filter the lyrics, melodies and harmonies through the lens of their respective musical styles.
Each artist brings his or her unique sensibility to the project. The Innocence Mission condenses the hymn, “Africa”, down to a gentle folk song. Jim Lauderdale fits “the Christian’s Hope” with eerie Appalachian harmonies. And Danielson, screeching vocals and odd melody shifts in tact, still sounds like Danielson on “Sermon on the Mount”. But there is a beautiful movement to the album, as if each track were a step towards that promised land of Canaan that sacred harpists so often sing about. Much of it comes from the words, which are drenched in the archaic poetry and mournful laments of the tradition. But even beyond the words, there is a fire that lies behind them. Many of the songs erupt into bursts of choral and instrumental lamentations, unconventionally capturing the emotion of the old harpists shouting out their joys and sorrow.
The album is strange, bleak, uplifting and mysterious…just like sacred harp; a tradition that, according to Eriksen, involves “an ongoing, sometimes tacit, sometimes heated but in any case dynamic, discussion about what it is and what it isn’t”.
Eriksen, who sings two songs on the record, has studied its history, teaches and sings it often, but struggles to find words that describe it appropriately. Matt and Erica filmed a movie about the tradition, but would most likely admit that it cannot be captured through any medium outside of performance. It has led all of them to many Southern singings and far beyond, as it led me through many secondhand recordings, books, and finally to that church in Columbus, where I had no choice but to experience it firsthand.
After I had flipped through the pages for a while, admiring the noted poetry as if it were an ancient art (which it almost is), the singers began to arrive and take their places at the square. Quiet voices nimbly immersed in small talk soon gave way to an epic sound that shook the room. I sat among the basses and was timid at first, whispering the words, while the singers shouted and sang around me. I had only listened to the style beforehand. I had never tried to sing it, nor did I understand how to read and interpret the four shape notes. But as the night wore on, and the music took hold, I began to see past my insecurities. Matt was right. There were only about ten of us in that square, but it sounded like an ocean of voices. I lifted my own voice, decibel by decibel, until I was almost shouting with everyone else, the words crashing like waves while our voices ebbed and flowed together. That is the mystery of sacred harp. I was drawn in, my soul awakened. That’s what it does to you.
Help Me to Sing is part of a 2 disc set that also includes the soundtrack to Matt and Erica’s film. It can be found at most online retailers.
References
Eriksen, Tim. Email interview. November and December, 2011.
Hinton, Matt. Phone interview. Sometime in 2011.
Steel, David Warren, and Richard H. Hulan. The Makers of the Sacred Harp. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield, University of Illinois Press, 2010. Print
A Brief Respite
April 8, 2013
Throughout this series of essays, I’ve been rummaging around in the fringes of gospel music, mostly looking at artists who have travelled that Appalachian gospel tradition in different exploratory ways, when the rest of the industry was adapting to the genres of hit radio. But far outside of Christian radio, and even further than the Appalachian mountain fridge, there are artists that I love and admire who are making deeply spiritual music that cannot be defined by any category. Call it outsider art, call it independent music; it is a big, bold reaction to the Father’s love. For that reason, I decided to take a brief respite from my essays to shine a small light on those particular artists. Some of them you may have heard of. Some you will hopefully check out and support.
Brother Danielson’s Brother is to Son– It’s extremely difficult to single out one album from Daniel Smith’s many Danielson incarnations (Ships is strange, complex, and brilliant), but I think the album that hits me the most on a spiritual level is his Brother Danielson solo record, Brother is to Son. Smith strums, stomps, shouts, and wrestles with his faith across 10 peculiar songs that continually veer directions. A quiet, erratic plea from a doubting Thomas may lead to the revelation, “I can’t understand the ways of my Lord with my mere mind as a man”.
Brother is to Son can be found through the Sounds Familyre record label, some independent record stores, and most online retailers.
Chad Marine’s the Honey Trail– An eerie, droning noise arises, and it sets the tone for the rest of Chad Marine’s the Honey Trail. A grave voice comes in. “By and by, we are going to see the King,” he sings with all seriousness. Industrial sounds enter and exit, brooding noises permeate, and ancient texts are spoken, sang, and chanted aloud in what I can only describe as a severe celebration, like the thundering weight of Glory.
The Honey Trail can be downloaded at Chad’s Bandcamp page.
Jay Tholen’s the Great Hylian Revival-I have a faint memory of letting the beginning credits of the original Legend of Zelda play over and over again when I was a kid, so struck was I by that opening theme song. There was something about that strange, electronic melody that enraptured me. Perhaps Jay Tholen had a similar experience as a child, only the melody never left him; and as his faith was being fashioned in those formative years, the two sort of grew together. Perhaps not. But somehow, across a generous number of albums and eps, Tholen has reconciled the mystery of the Creator with the sounds and adventure of classic videogames. Working mostly in the genre of chiptunes, he has amassed quite a catalog over the years, writing many excellent, electronics-heavy worship songs; and, though it’s difficult to highlight just one, my favorite has always been the Great Hylian Revival, a worship ep using the music of the Legend of Zelda: the Orarina of Time. Tholen proclaims, against a hypnotic, mechanical melody, “Creation stands at attention to behold His work; all up in the heavens and here on the earth; sing in harmony to show Him what He’s worth to them”. And I’m struck again.
Here’s a zip of the ep: http://jaytholen.net/jaytholen-thegreathylianrevival.zip
You can also find many of Jay Tholen’s recordings at his Bandcamp page.
Josh Garrels’ Love and War and the Sea Between-As the story goes, Josh Garrels lost his voice halfway through the recording of his 6th album, Love and War and the Sea Between, a cliché-devoid study of relationships, seen through the lens of his faith and journey. The songs were written, the instruments recorded, but following a sickness, he couldn’t sing anymore. After fasting for days, he was laying in his bathtub praying, when a voice told him to give the album over to God. He had a sense that would mean giving the album away for a year (a Year of Jubilee). He briefly struggled with the idea of giving away his art (as well as his main source of income), but he ceded, and his voice returned. The album went on to reach hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom could identify with the brokenness, longing and redemption of the seafaring wanderers in Garrels’ songs. Love and War is as epic as the ocean itself, and charts both new and ancient paths as the artist struggles to understand the emotional chasms that sometimes separate us from those we love. But his questions won’t hold him down. “Farther along we’ll understand why”, he sings, drawing on the old hymn, with a faith that sustains any storm and a conviction that prophetically comforts.
Love and War and the Sea Between can be found at most online retailers and through Garrels’ website.
Josh White’s Achor– There’s an all-around feeling of fellowship that surrounds Josh White’s Achor. I’m not sure how the record was recorded, or who the players are, but each cellist and string player, each guitarist, each vocalist, brings with them a gentle sense of joy to assist White in his candid folk and gospel tunes. Worship music usually has a stigma to it these days. Much of it has been robbed of its poetry and honesty. But when White sings of forsaking all else “to burn in You, my love”, there is true depth to his words…and it sounds likes he means it.
Achor can be found at most online retailers.
Half-Handed Cloud’s Halos & Lassos– I’m a little more secure in my musical tastes these days, but there was an exploratory time in my life where I had trouble recognizing what was real and beautiful and full of truth in music. I’m still a little ashamed that I barely gave Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska a chance the first time I listened to it. I had heard nothing but good things, bought it at a discount price, rushed through it, and didn’t take it out again for a year or so, at which point it realigned how I thought about music. That’s been the case for many of my favorite albums, Half-Handed Cloud’s Halos & Lassos included. Granted, the music of John Ringhofer isn’t as instantly accessible as that of Mr. Springsteen, but I’m extremely thankful that I had the sense to dust off the album and give it a second listen. Ringhofer can put more ideas into a 50 second song than most composers can fit into a double album. His songs are musical collages of spiritual reflections, obscure Bible lyrics, toys, instruments (both traditional and found), and a giddy zeal for the Creator and His creation. The lyrics are oftentimes bleak and bloody, observing the darker side of the faith and it’s black and blue origins. But the child-like enthusiasm that the artist brings to each song fills you with joy at where the Kingdom is heading.
Halos & Lassos can be found through Asthmatic Kitty Records, some independent record stores, and most online retailers.
Soul-Junk’s 1961– Glen Galaxy and his rotating roster of noisemakers is another artist with a dense catalog (this is to be expected from someone who has set out to translate the entire Bible into experimental hip-hop and garage rock songs). 1961 is his most recent Soul-Junk project, and Galaxy is up to “the Songs of Ascent” (Psalms 120-134) in his mission. Joined by two brothers, his son and daughter, Galaxy recklessly launches into each mournful, triumphant, observant psalm with crashing guitars, overextended vocals, and complete unrestraint. There’s no falsity here. At the same time as the record was being recorded, Galaxy’s wife was overcoming a battle with cancer. You can hear the weight of tribulation in his wracked voice, his very soul tapped into each vibrant word. It’s as loud and as messy as a manifested life of faith.
1961 can be found through the Sounds Familyre record label and Soul-Junk’s Bandcamp page.
Sufjan Steven’s Seven Swans– A stripped down departure from Sufjan’s typically ambitious concept albums, Seven Swans begins with a quietly plucked banjo and some playful use of Old Testament poetry; and they set the tone for what is to follow. There are bursts of aggression, hints of darkness pervade throughout and the title track reaches a soaring apex; but most of the songs are hushed, subdued reflections on the artist’s abstract faith.
Seven Swans can be found through Sounds Familyre, independent record stores, and most online retailers.
The Welcome Wagon’s Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices– After an epic, Sufjan-orchestrated debut, the Welcome Wagon pared down their sound and built their songs around simple melodies, delicate instrumentation, and quiet vocals for their second album, Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices. The husband and wife duo of Reverend Vito and Monique Auito draw upon classic hymns, religious texts, and the world at large to explore their faith. The Reverend, in his forthright lyrics, finds God in unlikely places. And there’s a fragility in Monique’s soft, sometimes timid voice that speaks volumes.
Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices can be found through Asthmatic Kitty Records, independent record stores, and most online retailers.
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.
This Side of Heaven: Johnny Cash’s “My Mother’s Hymn Book”
September 20, 2011
I remember crying when Johnny Cash died. Not at first. I spent the morning in a sort of impassive state, travelling from school building to school building as if the world were an unfamiliar place. I was at college, living alone in a dorm at Kent State. I had come downstairs to the lobby and if I remember right, Cash was playing through the speakers, on the radio. When I heard it, I knew that something was wrong. I knew that Johnny Cash wouldn’t be on the radio on any normal day. Sure enough, when the song ended, the deejay announced that the man in black had died.
It was a Friday. Soon after, I ate and went to class. I floated across the sidewalks. I was quiet and blank. After class had let out, I gathered my stuff, got in my car and headed home for the weekend. I put the Johnny Cash mix I had compiled of my favorite songs into the CD player. A few songs in, before I had reached the interstate, perhaps at “Big River”, I started bawling.
Though there were many sides to Cash, there are two that stand out distinctly for me. The first is of the legend, the larger than life icon who sang of murder and sin with complete conviction. He was a man, no, a mythological creature, who burned down forests in stoned rampages. This Cash is universally known and worshipped as a rock star. The monument of this Cash will tower over the world until there is no world.
The second side is smaller, less distinct, but probably more accurate. This Cash was warm, thoughtful, and deeply spiritual. He collected books on theology. He made frequent trips to the Holy Land, studying the ancestors of his faith. Those closest to him testify of this Cash and it was this Cash, who, near the end of his life, laid aside his black coat, his legend, and recorded what I believe to be one of his greatest contributions to American music, My Mother’s Hymn Book.
Cash had recorded a number of gospel records over his long career, but the 15 songs of My Mother’s Hymn Book (a collections of gospel standards like “I’ll Fly Away” and “Softly and Tenderly”) can be traced back to his earliest memories. They are songs that gave strength to the Cash family as they toiled in the cotton fields of Arkansas. They are what shaped the young J.R. into the booming singer that he would become. And they are songs that Cash drew upon when he found himself in the lowest depths of his addictions.
Come home, come home
You who are weary, come home…
I can imagine him, in his darkest hours, when voice and body were wrecked, recalling those words.
…Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,
Calling, O sinner, come home.
Cash’s drug problems have been reiterated often. After making a name for himself at Sam Phillips’s Sun Studio, Cash moved to Columbia Records and very quickly became a megastar. To endure the long hours of touring and recording, he began taking amphetamines. The pills wrecked havoc on his mind and body. He grew agitated and restless. His frame became gaunt, his eyes sunken.
The deeper he sank into his addiction, the more unstable his behavior became. In 1965, he famously busted the stage lights of the Grand Ole Opry with his microphone stand. Upon walking offstage, he met the Opry’s manager, who politely asked him never to return.
Cash’s life continued its long spiral downward until, in 1967, he decided to crawl into the bowels of NIckajack Cave, in Tennessee, and await death. For hours he moved deep into the labyrinth of tunnels, until the batteries of his flashlight died and the darkness overtook him. He recalled in his book, “Cash: A Biography”, that as he was laying there,
I felt something very powerful start to happen to me, a sensation of utter peace, clarity, and sobriety. I didn’t believe it at first. I couldn’t’ understand it. How, after being awake for so long and driving my body so hard and talking so many pills-dozens of them, scores, even hundreds- could I possibly feel all right? The feeling persisted, though, and then my mind started focusing on God…I became conscious of a very clear, simple idea: I was not in charge of my destiny. I was not in charge of my own death. I was going to die at God’s time, not mine. I hadn’t prayed over my decision to seek death in the cave, but that hadn’t stopped God from intervening.
In complete darkness, perhaps hundreds of yards, perhaps a mile, deep inside a maze of caverns, he somehow, miraculously, crawled back out.
He would continue to struggle with his addictions for years afterward, but through war and through battle, his faith would once again be restored, helped along by little miracles.
One such miracle happened in New York, probably sometime in the 1970s, when he and June Carter walked past First Baptist Church. They decided to enter when somewhere in the congregation, a young voice shouted, “JOHNNY CASH! Johnny Cash has come to church with me! I told you! I told you he was coming!”
The young boy, mentally disabled, had told everyone earlier that Johnny Cash would be coming with him to church that day.
Cash wasn’t shy when it came to his faith. He wrote a book about Paul, whose conversion he identified with. He made a movie about Jesus, whose life he tried, and often failed, to emulate. “Walk the Line” sort of downplayed this side of his life, in favor of the legend. Nickajack Cave isn’t even mentioned (which I always found odd, being that it’s such a cinematic event). But there’s no doubt, from what he’s written in both his autobiographies, that God, the God of his mother, the God of his youth, was the ultimate redeemer of his brokenness. And it was to this God, and of this God that he sang in My Mother’s Hymn Book. Only this time, he had been around long enough to know the seriousness of the words.
I’m sort of ambivalent about many of the later records Cash recorded for American Recordings. A lot of the songs are crowded with instruments and guest stars, where few are needed; and they seem to perpetuate the myth of Cash. I suppose that’s why I’m drawn to My Mother’s Hymn Book, where the myth is forsaken. The producer, Rick Rubin, and the engineer, David Ferguson, are doing what musicologists like Alan Lomax and John Cohen and Mike Seeger did in the middle of the century. They are capturing an important voice before it’s gone; documenting a musical tradition before it is lost to history. The only things we hear on the record are the simple strums of Cash’s guitar, and a voice that still booms like thunder; that says, with all certainty,
Though all hell assail me, I shall not be moved.
Of the 40 plus albums that Cash recorded over his life, he called this one his favorite. He sings from a worn book of hymns that his mother passed on to him. He sings of the faraway shore and of life eternal. He sings not as the legend or as the undying outlaw, but as a man humbled and frail before his God, the weight of death and glory on his shoulders.
I think it was this Cash that I cried for so many years ago. It was this human Cash that I understood.
Information gathered from Cash’s two autobiographies, “Man In Black” and “Cash: the Autobiography”, as well as the liner notes to My Mother’s Hymn Book.
let us make a record 