Gillian Welch has a song about Elvis called The Elvis Presley Blues. Before they sang the song, Dave Rawlings (I think it was he.) said, "Elvis is everywhere here." I thought he was just talking about some nebulous Memphis presence because Elvis really is everywhere here. But it turns out that they meant here, the Germantown Performing Arts Centre. They said that the halls in the back were full of life-size cutouts of Elvis, that you would walk around a corner and he would be there staring at you. "In fact," Dave Rawlings said, "I can see him right now looking at me from the wings," and he went over and brought the cutout on stage and there the three of them were, Dave, Elvis and Gillian, and, of course, my camera was in some sort of rest mode and I missed the picture. Oh well, it would have been small and out of focus anyway. It seemed to me that they put a little extra punch into the song, being in Memphis and all, and that GW even deviated from the authorized version a bit.
Here's a video in a much more formal setting for anyone who isn't familiar with the song.
I searched around a bit and found out that in April, GPAC had "A salute to Elvis on the 35th Anniversary of his Life and Legacy," so that must be the reason for the cutouts.I'm having a bit of trouble wrapping my mind around the fact that Elvis has been dead for 35 years. My goodness.
I got to the concert really early because the concert hall is in an area that is frequently one huge congested maze, so that if you don't give yourself some extra time, there will be a traffic jam and if you do give yourself some extra time, there will be no traffic jam and you will get there almost an hour early.
This was all right, though, because it gave me a chance to sit and watch the crowd. It was a very eclectic crowd. There were people there who looked like somebody's grandparents or great-grandparents--at least one person with a walker. There were people who were old enough to be grandparents, but still had that hippie air about them. There were young couples, and middle aged couples. There were women in fancy evening dress and some in jeans and t-shirts, and there were about a million girls with short, strapless sundresses and cowboy boots.
It's been a very long time since I have been to a concert that was anything other than classical music, and those have been few and far between. I guess the last rock concert we went to was Bob Dylan's There's a Slow Train Coming Tour, so 1979. As I was sitting in the theater waiting for the show to start, I thought, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. The reason I like music is because I like to sing. I'm going to have to sit here all night long listening to this music and I'm not going to be able to sing. (I told the woman next to me to slap me I started humming.) And another thing is that I don't like things to change. If I get used to hearing a song one way, I don't want anybody messing around with my idea of what it should sound like. I wonder if I'm going to hate this."
Well, I didn't have anything to worry about. The entire concert was great. They started off with two of my favorite songs(although if I started listing favorites it would take all night), Tear My Stillhouse Down, and Scarlet Town and then continued on with what was a very enjoyable and entertaining concert. I didn't even have to worry about change because GW sings almost every note exactly as it is on the albums. Dave Rawlings, though, is another story. You just never know where he is going to go next, but you know you will probably be glad you are there.
I chose the above picture because I wanted to show the painful-looking position that GW assumes when she isn't singing. It's like she is brooding over the guitar. The longer she plays, the lower her head goes. During Revelator, DW had a very long (maybe 10 minutes, I don't judge time well) and exceedingly wonderful guitar solo, and by the time he was finished, all you could see was her hair hanging almost to her knees. Had I been in that position, they would have had to carry me to the hospital and pry me out of it, but she just stood up and started singing.
There is a song on The Harrow and Harvest, Six White Horses, in which, I had assumed, there is someone playing spoons. I found out Tuesday that I had been wrong. The sound you hear is GW clapping and slapping her legs, which is quite entertaining to watch. There are several YouTube videos of the song, but none of them seems quite as energetic as the performance we saw. Parenthetically, people have uploaded so many videos from this tour that you could probably watch the whole thing piece by piece.
The concert includes songs from all their albums (one, Ruby from A Friend of a Friend, Dave Rawlings album), and there were several that I did not know. I had not planned on buying the two albums I didn't have, but I downloaded Hell Among the Yearlings and will probably break down and download at least some of the songs from Soul Journey.
After about three hours, GW and DR pulled out one last treat, and I think it was the best of all. It was Long Black Veil, and they sang it at the front of the stage without microphones. They sang it very slowly and quietly and it was absolutely captivating. After they finished, there was that momentary silence that comes when something has been perfect. Again, there are several videos on YouTube, but the one below, although not the greatest to watch and it is missing the first line of the song, is closest to what I heard, although of course nothing can capture the feeling in the concert hall.
For the past two months, I've been listening to Gillian Welch's first album, Revival, over and over again whenever I have been alone in the car. I love every song on the album. I love Ms. Welch's strong, flexible, homey voice. It's exactly right for the lyrics. I love David Rawlings's guitar. I don't know the right technical vocabulary to describe what I'm talking about, but his guitar riffs seem to grab me right in the chest and pull me along with him. I love the stories in the songs. I love it that the songs are in my range. I'm never happy unless I can sing along. This may be why I only listen when I'm alone.
The song that has really resonated with me this Lent, though, is By the Mark. I spent a long time deciding which of the three available videos to post because they all have their drawbacks, but I've chosen this one because it's the version of the song that's on the album. You might want to ignore the video, it has about 3 times as many pictures as it needs--some good, some not--and the person that assembled them was way too attached to his zoom.
I came fairly late in my life to an appreciation of this type of kind of music. When I was younger, none of my friends or family would have given it the time of day. It just wasn't in my world. I love it now because this type of song speaks to something that is so elemental. There's no complicated theology here, just an acknowledgement that this is the God Who was wounded for His people and that He draws us by the power of those wounds. When He rose from the dead, He could have returned in a "perfect" body, but He chose to come back to us marked with these signs.
Heather King makes a similar observation in her memoir, Redeemed: A Spiritual Misfit Stumbles Toward God, Marginal Sanity, and the Peace That Passes All Understanding.
...it has always seemed to me a deep and shattering mystery that when Christ appeared to His disciples after the Resurrection, He still bore the wounds. One of the things this seems to say is that our suffering counts. Our wounds aren't wiped away, as in a fairy tale: our bodies and souls bear their marks into eternity. Maybe that's how we'll recognize, or classify, or take joy in each other after we die, because maybe then we'll see how our suffering helped someone else, or perhaps saved another from suffering.
About 15 years ago, a friend told me about a young man with Down Syndrome who had recently died. He had been a great friend of her little boys, and they were asking what would happen to Kenny. Their mother said something to the effect that Kenny would go to Heaven and be happy, and that he would be healed and beautiful when they met him there. The boys said, "We don't want him to be beautiful. We want him to look like Kenny."
This really started me thinking about what beauty really is and what we will perceive as beauty in Heaven. I have several friends who have died and I feel just like those little boys. When I see them again, I want them to look like themselves. They were beautiful to me already.
So, maybe Ms. King is right. I don't know. I wrote in another post of how we meet Jesus wound to wound. All of my wounds: the scars from childhood injuries, from operations, from abandonments, from the suffering of those I love, cry out to be subsumed and healed in the wounds of Jesus. We need for Jesus to be wounded.
I love the Anima Christi:
O good Jesus, hear me
Within Thy wounds hide me
Suffer me not to be separated from Thee.
Where is there a safer hiding place?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Crown Him the Lord of love,
Behold His hands and side,
Rich wounds yet visible above,
In beauty glorified.
No angel in the sky
Can fully bear the sight,
But downward bends his wond'ring eye
At mystery so bright.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I first read about Heather King's trilogy of memoirs, Parched, Redeemed, and Shirt of Flame (although I persist in thinking of the last as, Shirt on Fire) in a comment by Matthew Likona at The Korrektiv. The books chronicle her journey from being "a blackout drunk for 20 years" to being a passionate Catholic. She knows about being wounded, and she knows about being healed. Her books are will worth reading, especially the last two.
