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Them (1965; Van Morrison, center) (Wikipedia)

Released against his wishes on an LP he never approved, “T.B. Sheets” was one of a handful of tracks recorded in March 1967 (“Brown-Eyed Girl” was another) and set aside for Morrison’s debut as a solo artist. The moody singer, late of Belfast’s working-class blues rockers, Them, only learned of the material’s release when a friend mentioned he’d bought the album. Blowin’ Your Mind! was an embarrassment for its stupid title, condescending cover art, and disrespect for its creator – a cynical move by a tone-deaf industry still thinking of rock as teenybopper music. But its songs capture Morrison at a creative crossroads, on the verge of the artistic breakthrough that produced 1968’s masterful Astral Weeks, with its unique blend of folk, jazz, rock, and impressionistic, alternately dark/light lyrics. In many ways, “T.B. Sheets” is a veritable dry run for complex song-portraits like “Slim Slow Slider” and “Madame George.”

The song’s chorus – the only recurring text in the song – is a devil’s whisper, urging the singer to flee:

The cool room, Lord, is a fool’s room
The cool room, Lord, is a fool’s room
And I can almost smell your T.B. sheets
And I can almost smell your T.B. sheets

The words are visceral – evoking sense memory so specific (“I can almost smell…”) the sick room appears with repellent realism. Throughout, the song’s tone is pained and resentful – emotions that often accompany prolonged illness but are usually repressed in polite company. One phrase in the lyric – a fleeting, unspoken thought – sticks out for its impenetrable mix of grief, anger, and self-loathing: “your little star-struck innuendos, inadequacies, and foreign bodies.” It is painful, agonizing, to watch a partner die, and part of us resents them for putting us through this misery.

Rembrandt van Rijn: “Sick woman lying in bed, probably Saskia” (1638) (Wikipedia)

So open up the window and let me breathe
I said open up the window and let me breathe
I’m looking down to the street below
Lord I cried for you, I cried, I cried for you
Oh Lord

The musicians play on, prolonging contemplation with alluring monotony, and the singer grows increasingly frantic. His girl begs him to stay, asks him to bring her a drink of water, but he’s already backing towards the door: “I gotta go, I gotta go, baby.” And then, pathetically: “I’ll send somebody around later.” A friend is coming later, he says, with a bottle of wine they’ll all share, as if her condition warranted a party. He turns on a radio for her, offering music, at least, in lieu of human companionship: “If you wanna hear a few tunes there you go, there you go, baby,” and leaves her in the darkness.

The listener leaves, too, forced by the track’s fade-out (originally followed by the LP’s end-of-side-one run-off groove; I imagine a stunned shaking of heads with no one rising to turn the record over). The song’s relentless focus on the young man’s thoughts plus Morrison’s gut-wrenching performance inevitably put us in the singer’s place and by song’s end, with no catharsis possible, his sense of panic and dread is such that we want out too. Consequently, it’s hard to listen without feeling complicit in his abdication.

Open up the window

“What’s natural is the microbe.”
— Albert Camus, The Plague

As an amateur genealogist I’ve spent countless hours pouring over old death certificates – mostly from the early 20^th century and my home state of Kentucky. My forebears were rural and urban, farmers and steamboat captains, and there’s something fascinating about studying their mortal circumstances. Everybody dies so it’s interesting to see what everybody dies of, especially during an era recent enough to seem both grandparent near and sepia tone far.

Edvard Munch: “The Sick Child” (1896) (Gothenburg Museum of Art; Wikipedia)

Then as now, most people died of depressingly familiar ailments. The Big Three remain: heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Old people often died of “senility” (“old age” in prewar parlance). Accidents were common, sometimes with an antique flavor (“run over by street car”) or ballad-like air of tragedy (e.g., a married couple, recreating with their children, who “drowned in the river”). More prosaic are the many victims of once lethal, now largely eradicated infectious diseases – maladies that terrified our ancestors now neutered by childhood needle jabs, like diphtheria, smallpox, measles, whooping cough, polio, typhoid, and tuberculosis. In 19^th century America it was not unusual for every second or third child born to die of such an illness. Consequently, with birth control and inoculation both distant dreams, many women spent much of their lives pregnant and grieving a recently lost child.

T.B. patients at Waverly Hills Sanatorium, Louisville, Kentucky, 1930s (historic photo: WHS Memorial website)

Tuberculosis is ubiquitous in those Kentucky death certificates. An airborne contagion, it most often settled in the lungs, causing gradual weight loss and suffocation. The poor and city dwellers were hardest hit. Victims who could afford to often drew their last breaths in sanatoriums – long-term medical facilities that offered bed rest, fresh air, and supervised nutrition in lieu of a cure (streptomycin, the first effective treatment, wasn’t available until 1949). In advanced cases painful surgical procedures – the removal of ribs and collapsing of lungs – also occurred.

Pulmonary tuberculosis in a child (source: radiopaedia.org)

Equally lethal in Van Morrison’s Ireland, tuberculosis ravaged the impoverished nation well into the 20^th century, remaining the third most common cause of death among children until after the Second World War. While Europe overall made strides combating the disease, reducing mortality rates from 25% of all deaths in the 19^th century to under 10% by the 1950s (when Morrison was a child), poverty, substandard living conditions, and lack of access to medical care, exacerbated by prejudice, left the Irish especially vulnerable. Consequently, for natives of Morrison’s generation, T.B. remained the stuff of nightmares and vivid childhood memory.

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