Richard Shindell

The Lost Mountaineer

I’m too attached to the legacy of dead musicians. The musicians who left us early in their lives are particularly compelling to me–Sam Cooke, Steve Goodman, Stan Rogers, Kate Wolf, Dave Carter. My personal list is surely longer. You will have your own list of artists in whose lives the flash of brilliance and the tragedy of loss play off each other in your imagination. Carter was the oldest of the five I’ve named when he died, but perhaps the one with the shortest career as a thriving performer, and his death was shockingly sudden and premature. My post on his “44 Thunderer” from last summer led me to our song today.

David Carter (1952-2002) and Tracy Grammer

I hadn’t planned on joining Pat’s “Conversations with Death” series, but once I started thinking about Richard Shindell‘s “So Says the Whippoorwill,” I couldn’t stop. I hope you found Pat’s post on “Oh, Death” an appropriate extension of our mission. I did, and it’s likely that we’ll be returning to it from time to time, with material old and new. Pat’s post was about an old, familiar song. My post is about a younger, less familiar one. I hope to show you why I care about it before I’m done here–and perhaps why you could care about it too.

Dave Carter’s partner, Tracy Grammer, wrote a song in his memory called “The Verdant Mile.” She alludes to Richard Shindell’s “So Says the Whippoorwill” in it:

Richard says the whippoorwill taught him how to go
I tell him death is just a dream, but I don’t really know
It’s everything and nothing when the spirit cracks the sky
But flowers fold and go to seed and no one questions why
Nobody, oh no

Snake-handlin’ man

Jamie Coots (1971-2014)

The conversation between us that ensued focused on the context of this practice of worship. I don’t practice snake-handling, but I don’t see it as being entirely irrational–given the practitioners’ starting presuppositions (this is a very big caveat). In this case, worshipers in this church are following a particular reading of a passage in the Gospel of Mark, and it’s guiding how they conduct their worship.

However tempting it might be for some to view such Pentecostal rituals as downright nuts, however much one might view “literal” readings of Scripture as suspect, this practice speaks in its own way to at least one profound and enduring truth: We are ultimately not in charge of whether we live or die. We can do what we will to stack the odds in our favor, but metaphorically speaking there’s nothing in principle to keep God (however you may or may not conceive of her) from pushing the “Smite” button when our time comes.

Those of you who have been with us for a while might remember my post on how the murder ballad “Down in the Willow Garden” helped me cope with the death of a young person who was in my charge at the time. I was a Resident Head at a university, and a 19 year old student in my dormitory “house” died of heart failure in her sleep. I still live in the same university community, and was recently reminded of this episode by the death of another college student, this time 20, who also apparently died of natural causes in his dorm room. My experience of that first death 12 years ago was the most vivid and tangible reminder that, as Shindell sings, “the change can happen any day.” I don’t live in that moment, but I haven’t forgotten it.

Lyrics (YouTube version here)

I talking this post over with Pat in advance of going live, he offered, “Maybe, for some, handling songs is like handling snakes – a way to put it all on the line for a chance to feel the boundary between worlds, however we might interpret it all.” I think that’s right. It’s a feeling that comes through in Carter’s work and Richard Shindell’s as well.

Currently, the cleanest, most complete YouTube version is in the clip below, with Shindell providing some opening humorous asides about the song’s folk bona fides:

The change could happen anyday
So says the whippoorwill
She hangs around for the seeds I leave
Out on the windowsill
Be-free-you-fool, be-free-you-fool
She sings all afternoon
Then, as if to show me how its done,
She leaps into the blue

[The change could happen anyday
Or so say all the guards
In the prison I have built around
My solitary heart
I tell myself that I’m alright
That it’s not so bad a place

Richard Shindell

The truth is that I’m just scared to death
Of walking through that gate]

The change could happen anyday
So say my true love’s eyes
They see into my shadows
With their sweet, forgiving light
She smiles and says, Come on – lets go
Lets stroll the boulevard
Its such a shame to waste the night
Just sitting in the dark

The change could happen anyday
Or so says Father Brown
I listen for that still small voice
But I just cant make it out
Beneath the constant whispering 
Of the devil that I know
But who would I be if I believed?
Who am I if I don’t?

The change could happen anyday
So said the mountaineer
Before he turned to face his cliff
Without a trace of fear
Yodel-ay-hee-hoo, yodel-ay-hee-hoo
He sang right up until
He caught sight of the open blue
And became a whippoorwill
He caught sight of the open blue
And became a whippoorwill

One reading of the final verse of the song makes Dave Carter “The Mountaineer.” The song still works without knowing this reference, but works especially well with it. You can read Tracy Grammer’s report of Carter’s last moments here and see just how true the verse rings. A fitting tribute.

At first, I far preferred the Chandler Music Hall performance to the studio version on Shindell’s Vuelta. I generally like live versions. If things can’t go really wrong, they can’t go really right. The studio version seemed too slow to me–a little morose for a song about death, I suppose. I’m normally focused on the lyrics, but when I came back to the song for this post I turned the volume up and realized what he was doing. Listen for the percussion. It’s obvious once you know what the song is about.



(For reasons of time, perhaps, or to give the instrumentalists a break, or some other reason I haven’t yet learned, Shindell drops the “Father Brown” verse from this version.)


Hear that lonesome whippoorwill
If I have my way, “So Says the Whippoorwill” will become the second most famous song involving whippoorwills in the canon of American folk and popular song. The first, of course, is and shall remain Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” The whippoorwill is in Shindell’s song for more reasons, I’m certain, but Shindell knows Williams’s song well. I believe it was in the repertoire of Cry Cry Cry, the combo he formed with Dar Williams and Lucy Kaplansky.





Lyrics

“I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” could easily merit a “Conversations with Death” post on its own. In some versions of the song, many hear Williams replacing “that means he’s lost the will to live” with “like me he’s lost the will to live” in the third verse (in this case about a robin, not a whippoorwill).

The whippoorwill is a symbol with still broader and deeper currency, though, as Shindell surely also knows. It appears as a death omen in American and some Native American folklore. The whippoorwill gained its name from its nighttime call that sounded like “whip poor Will.” The whippoorwill in Shindell’s song, however, is a braver and brighter herald of transition from one world to another–a curious conversation partner as our protagonist contemplates his own anxiety, death, and freedom. Shindell changes the valence of the whippoorwill, and of this stepping from one world to another. Death is not to feared, but with “The Mountaineer” to be embraced as the next amazing adventure. 

(Although Shindell is a trusty, if more positive guide to the whippoorwill as a symbol–you shouldn’t look to this song for ornithological guidance. Shindell’s whippoorwill doesn’t behave like actual ones–but poetic truth here is far more important than verisimilitude.)

Remember that you are but dust


I first introduced Shindell’s work to the blog in our series on Jesus and the murder ballad. His song “The Ballad of Mary Magdalene” is a literary (not devotional) meditation on Jesus’ love and Jesus’ death in equal measure. My “Jesus and the Murder Ballad” series was a way of exploring how themes of sacrifice echo down from the biblical narrative to many of the folk and popular murder ballads we find resonant. 

While “Mary Magdalene” might have been a Good Friday song, of a kind, “So Says the Whippoorwill” is an Ash Wednesday song. For those of you not familiar, Ash Wednesday is the opening of the Christian season of Lent, a period of self-examination and, for many, self-denial. Ash Wednesday rituals for many Christians include the imposition of ashes on the forehead with the admonition “remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” From the beginnings of the ancient church, Lent has also been a period of preparation for new converts to Christianity, ending in the ritual re-presentations of Christ’s death and resurrection.

I heard an Ash Wednesday sermon recently that opened with the story of a young woman the priest preaching the sermon had met. He was going to perform her wedding. She shared with him that she was religious, at least more religious than her friends, but that she doesn’t attend church very often. But, she “makes a point of going every Ash Wednesday. Not necessarily Easter or Christmas. Ash Wednesday.” 

I took this nod toward Ash Wednesday’s accessibility as suggesting there’s not as much controversy or complication involved in this particular holy day–part of its central purpose being to acknowledge our fallibility and mortality. It’s also an acknowledgment that so much of what we think constitutes our lives will pass away and an invitation to reflect on that which won’t.

Heavy, religious stuff. Not exactly a bird flying off into the blue. Shindell’s song, though, also reminds listeners in about five different ways that they are but dust and to dust they shall return. Perhaps with a fusion of Christian and folk imagery he changes that “to remember that you were a bird and to being a bird you will return.”

I don’t mean to suggest that Shindell’s work here is put to confessional or devotional purposes. It is art and not worship, but draws from deep themes common to both art and worship. Shindell takes the listener along an imaginative border between belief and unbelief, where the more interesting things happen. “…Who would I be if I believed? Who am I if I don’t?”

What murder ballads often point to indirectly is more central in these “Conversations with Death” songs. It’s the insight that this conversation with death is both revelatory of meaning and value, but a way to affirm life. Shindell, perhaps with Jamie Coots and certainly with Dave Carter, has found his own way of saying that our frame of reference for success or failure is not survival but how we might live bravely in the face of the fact of death and the uncertainty of living.

Now, it’s time for me to stroll the boulevard…

Covers

“So Says the Whippoorwill” has captured the artistic imagination of a few other artists who have recorded the song as part of their repertoire. Earlier in his career, Shindell was singled out by Joan Baez for an album of covers she originally intended to be solely, or at least primarily, drawn from female songwriters. I expect it was a healthy boost to his career at the time.

True North Kristen Grainger, Dan Wetzel, Suzanne Pearce, and Dale Adkins.

Shindell has commented that,”one of the great pleasures of being a songwriter is to have one’s songs covered. It’s always fascinating to hear how others approach phrasing, inflection, tempo – even pitch.” I’ve only found two professionally-recorded covers of the song thus far, both of which have women singing the lead.

Oregon-based True North includes “So Says the Whippoorwill” on its 2006 release. The song is arranged with a contemporary, light bluegrass flavor, with the occasional twang of the dobro giving accents along the way. It’s smoother in tone and rhythm than the original, lacking the pulse found in Shindell’s original and live recordings. I believe Kristen Grainger is singing lead here doing a fine job of putting the song first with a smooth alto delivery.

So Says The Whippoorwill from True North on Myspace.

Sutton Sorensen performs the song on her 2012 release Long, Long Time. Sorensen also originally hails from the northwest U.S., although is Nashville-based now. Her album notes describe the song as a “lesser-known folk song.” I’d be interested to know if she took her original bearings on it from Shindell or True North.

So Says the Whippoorwill from Sutton Sorensen on Myspace.

Sorensen takes a few liberties with the song’s melody, presumably to give some freer rein to her own vocal capacities. She also reorders the verses and tweaks the lyrics here and there. It’s a self-consciously sweeter take on the original material, wringing some extra sentimentality out of a word or phrase here or there. Sorensen’s promotional materials say that Long, Long Time “showcases the intricacies of Sutton’s vocals…” Whether this performance of the song works for you will depend mostly on those showcased intricacies.

Sutton Sorensen