Awoke this morning for a 12:50 whizz, with the line “‘Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave” (from “Hard Times, Come Around No More”) in my ear, causing me to think that if there were a memorial service or wake for me after my death, this is one of the pieces of music I would want played at it; death is a constant presence for me, so I muse on things like this.
But then I realized that there would be no memorial service for an old person whose surviving friends are spread all over the world; if they aren’t able to spend some moments with me while I’m alive, why would they gather to mourn my death? The song line for this is “Give me the roses while I live”, from Odem (Second), Sacred Harp 340 (more on this below). Come by and I will entertain you with random thoughts and stories from my life — and play for you my music of joy, or all the versions of “Hard Times” I have (listed below), or my favorite Mozart Operas (Figaro and Zauberflöte, but it’s a hard choice), or Sacred Harp songs, or the rock music I used to dance to (heavy on the Rolling Stones), or Haydn’s Missa in Tempore Belli, or Linda Ronstadt, or Louis Moreau Gottschalk, or Candide (the original one), or Company, or Heitor Villa-Lobos, or I can go on annoyingly for a really long time in this vein.
Roses now. From my 1/29/20 posting “Roses now, or roses later”, about #340 in the 1991 Denson Sacred Harp, Odem (Second), with the chorus “Give me the roses while I live”:
I don’t believe in life after death — my Lutheran childhood and Episcopalian young adulthood have left (good) marks on me, but I no longer hold to any part of Christian creed, though I do believe that I should try to live as a force for good — so the idea of roses in my memory would mean nothing to me. They might be useful for those who survive me, but they have literally nothing to do with me. As far as I’m concerned, it’s roses now, or no roses at all.
Hard Times. From my 9/2/19 posting “More dream linguistics”, about Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times, Come Around No More”, with a chorus that laments the hard times of the past and pleads that they not return:
… Foster’s South was a sentimental fabrication, a piece of imaginative fiction, peopled by stage folk: dreamy elegant whites and simple but oppressed blacks. Yet the song could be folded into other, different, narratives of terrible pasts and uncertain futures. It could, for instance, be sung by blacks, for blacks … Eventually, by singers of the caliber of Mavis Staples, in a version (from the album Beautiful Dreamer (2004)) informed by the black experience but illustrated by images of the Great Depression, with both white and black subjects
… It can be worked into a lament for the hardness of life in the Southern mountains, combined with passionate affection for the place, as in the Anonymous Four + [Bruce] Molsky version [on the album 1865: Songs of Hope and Home from the American Civil War (2015) — 1865 marking the end of the Civil War] …, or in the astonishing re-imagining of the song in a live performance by a trio of Yo-Yo Ma, Marc O’Connor, and Edgar Meyer, with James Taylor on vocals (on the album Appalachian Journey (2000)) [this is the version I awoke to for my 12:50 am whizz this morning]
… Or it can carry the whole weight of our past sorrows and fears for the future, displayed (apparently) without reference to any particular history, as in a heart-breaking live [Transatlantic Sessions] performance by Kate & Anna McGarrigle and friends (Rufus Wainwright, Emmylou Harris, Mary Black, Karen Matheson, and Rod Paterson)
… But everything comes with a context, everything has a history. It’s relevant that the folksinging McGarrigle sisters grew up in Montreal, with parents of Irish and French-Canadian descent; their music grows out of the experience of the Scots and Irish in Canada, and more generally in North America, and of the French-Canadians. Kate McGarrigle’s American-Canadian son Rufus Wainwright: openly gay. Emmylou Harris: Southern country and folk singer, with Appalachian roots. Mary Black: Irish. Karen Matheson and Rod Paterson: Scottish (and the video was shot on the Atlantic coast of Scotland). Everybody brings a past to this occasion, and there is sorrow in all of those pasts, which the singers draw on in their performance.
Parts of the text that are especially relevant to my story: the first verse, which tells us that this is a sorrowful song about the poor; the haunting chorus; and the last verse, with that murmured dirge:
I’m generally allergic to Stephen Foster’s sentimentality, but “Hard times come again no more” moves me deeply; as a result, even though I appreciate that “a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave” just begs for lampooning, the plain diction of the “hard times” line, tolling both mourning for the past and prayer for the future, cushions the mournful dirge from my derision.
My hope is that upon my death there will be no grave, mournful or otherwise, for dirges to be murmured over, but that my ashes will go into the soil to feed growing plants. Transflormation would be delightful — I think I’d make a fine flowering shrub — but Ovidian metamorphoses are hard to come by these days, so I’ll settle for nourishing a garden.
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