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Alfred North Whitehead
(1861-1947)

Carter’s approach resonates for me more with the thought of mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Although he valued Spinoza’s insights, Whitehead held that the experience of freedom and the activity of creativity were metaphysically fundamental. The tie with mathematics also makes me think that Carter and Whitehead were kindred spirits of a sort. Carter said that “Mathematics is a process of making your metaphors ever more precise.”

I don’t know that Carter read Spinoza, Masters, or Whitehead. When I asked Grammer, she did not recall them as sources of inspiration. “What I remember are Buddhist texts, Beatles scores, mythology, psychology, martial arts, songwriting, and the works of Joseph Campbell.”

I would probably hear more of the Buddhist influence if I were immersed in those traditions. If, however, Whitehead and Buddhism were both part of the cultural inheritance brought together in Carter’s creative work, it would not be the first time. To get an even better idea of the complex interplay of physics, metaphysics, dreams, and the influence of his mother, listen to Carter’s introduction to “The Mountain” in the Coda at the end of this post.

“Access to their own secrets”

Well then, apart from “When I Go” tripping over some wires left behind from my grad school days, what does this all have to do with “Conversations with Death”? The song’s connection to Carter’s mother suggests that it was part of his “conversation.” How is it part of mine?

In preparing this post, I’ve tried to take some cues from Carter’s statements about his creative process: getting back to “the lizard brain,” focusing my attention on relevant material before sleeping, and paying attention to the dreams I remember when I wake up, etc.

Dave Carter in 2002
(photo by Tracy Grammer)

In Carter’s final class on songwriting, the notes from which Paul Zollo recently published in The American Songwriter, Carter said: “Songwriters are infected. They are looking for a lifestyle, but it’s really about something simpler than that. They have to learn what they want, really, which is access to their own secrets.” In my writing, I want access to a song’s secrets, but my own secrets as well. I’m not a songwriter or the confirmed mystic that Carter was by any means, but I dig for buried secrets in this work. As I move from post to post, I’m trying to figure out what this work is telling me, where it is taking me.

After I have those angst-ridden 3 a.m. wake-ups I described above, I do my best to go back to sleep. I’m usually rewarded with a series of dreams that fix the damage. It’s as though I just had the bad fortune to wake up during my brain’s mucking-out cycle, and after that, everything gets restocked, refreshed.

The morning I finished drafting this post, I went through this same cycle. My final dream before waking for the day was a startling one—scary, but ending well. I had entered a room to find a loved one submerged in water, where I feared she had been for some time. I pulled her up and said something like, “Enough of this already. Time to get up. Time for singing a song.” She opened her eyes and sang the opening line of the “Johnny Appleseed” blessing sung at many summer camps, “Oh, the Lord is good to me.”

My time with “When I Go” has been a strange one. This is a more personal post than I expected to write. When I spend time wondering whether my interest in murder ballads and “Conversations with Death” is an overly morbid one, “When I Go” is a rebuttal to that doubt. Carter’s song makes a compelling argument that the “change [that] could happen any day” may not in all respects be tragic, at least not for the one going through it. Carter’s vision of being transfigured into natural forms all around us is one that greets death as a new adventure, with its own beauty and possibilities. It projects an end to the soul’s isolation in the fragmentation of bodily human existence, integrating it with a transcendent and wondrous reality.

Steve Goodman’s gifts as a performer who lived with chronic disease lead me to believe that he had figured a few things out about life and death. Dave Carter’s songwriting and his thoughts about the creative process make me think he had, too. Their premature deaths were terrible losses for the rest of us, most especially for those closest to them. Their lives, though, were exemplars for the creative life and how to live it. Both serve as guides urging us to get busy with the work that is ours to do–the important work, not the unimportant work. For them, we can hope that their wanderings “out on the borderline” are at least as exemplary and at least as wondrous.

Dave Carter in 1997
(photo by Brenda Howard)

“When I Go” Covers

“When I Go” is one of Carter’s most covered songs, mostly among acoustic, contemporary folk musicians following in the Carter & Grammer footsteps. The most prominent recent cover was performed by Judy Collins and Willie Nelson, who sing a fine duet on Collins’s album, Strangers Again.

You can explore a few other versions on the playlist below.

The Dave Carter Legacy Project also maintains a playlist of Dave Carter covers on YouTube, including many of his other songs.

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