THE DAILY GRIST… “These kids don’t have a little brother working in the coal mine, they don’t have a little sister coughing her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns of the Northeast. Why? Because we organized; we broke the back of the sweatshops in this country; we have child labor laws. Those were not benevolent gifts from enlightened management. They were fought for, they were bled for, they were died for by working people, by people like us. Kids ought to know that.” ? Bruce (U. Utah) Phillips, the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest
[My Facebook page blossomed with Labor Day quotes last week; this is the only one with a tiny bit of bluegrass content. — GM]
We had a phone call last week from a long ago ex-neighbor who contacted us to tell us that her grown-up daughter had recently died. We expressed our sympathy, chatted some about the old days, and after she hung up I remembered how she and her then-husband had resurrected my love of playing music.
Back in about 1975 a band I was in broke up amid a lot of bitterness. I felt keen rejection, since I was being essentially fired by a group I had originally organized. I was only slightly comforted by the fact that the band couldn’t keep it together after that and shortly totally collapsed. The real change in my life was that my banjo went into its case and was stashed off in a corner and I quit playing music at all.
That state of affairs lasted for months, but then one day the phone rang and it was Sharon, saying she and her husband Paul had some friends up and were playing some country songs and would I like to join them? I was initially reluctant, but then a cold beer and maybe a little herbal something sounded comforting, so I grabbed my guitar case and walked up the hill.
There were no virtuosos at the party, but there were some folks who knew the words and sang some harmony, and the beer was cold. I won’t go into what other substances might have been passed around. At any rate when I got home I was in a mellow mood, remembering the pure pleasure of making music.
It was almost like karma had set it up, but a few weeks later the phone rang again and it was a woman I had never met, saying she was trying to start a bluegrass band and someone had given her my name as a possible musician. And that call resulted in the formation of a new band that I played with for the next four years or so, until the responsibilities of parenting and then a new job with odd working hours made playing organized music too difficult to pursue.
Anyone who has ever been in a band with musicians who become your close friends and musical collaborators know how much fun it is. I wonder if I would have been ready for that second phone call if I had not gotten the first one.
Another instance of great comfort from music came to my attention recently. My cousin’s husband died after a long time in a convalescent home. Dick’s body failed in a lot of ways, but it was slow and he lingered in a pretty helpless condition for a long time. Later my cousin told me he loved listening to a CD of my band that I had given him many months ago.
Before our last visit, a few weeks before he died, my cousin told us the CD had gotten lost, as things tend to do in a lot of nursing homes.
I brought another copy, and my cousin told me later he had listened to it many times in the final weeks of his life. The CD is full of old, classic songs that he knew well and that brought him great comfort.
Just last week our band played an annual Labor Day barbecue that we have been booked for each year for at least seven years. We play a set, they have dinner, and we play another. During dinner I sat near a woman who told me she had lost her life partner fairly recently and had been devastated. Eventually she had found another relationship and had even married, but still mourned her long-time companion.
“I was feeling so depressed this morning,” she said, “but hearing this music today has made me feel much better. I’m so happy I came.”
Those are some of the reasons I feel so blessed to be a musician. It would be wonderful to be a great, super-talented picker, but just being able to touch the hearts of people now and then means a lot to me, and I am grateful every time it happens.
