As it’s Sunday morning, and much of America is at church, allowing another human being explain God to them, it’s a good opportunity to spotlight one of the thousands of great country gospel songs. There are so many — and none that I’m aware of have prosperity theology as its subject.
Most of these country gospel songs address the concerns of regular people: what will become of loved ones who die, will the afterlife be less painful than life on earth, will I be accepted into Heaven despite being a relentless sinner. There are few country gospel songs that are less than sure about the existence of God — these were songs meant to give strength and comfort, not explore intellectual issues.
The Stanley Brothers recorded many of the standards. The combination of Ralph Stanley’s high harmony and Carter Stanley’s steady tenor provided a mix of longing and gravity that made their versions especially poignant. The song that I’ve chosen from the many, Lonely Tombs, describes a graveyard epiphany that is chilling and reassuring.
Lonely Tombs (recorded by the Stanley Brothers)
Traditional
I was strolling one day in a lonely graveyard
When a voice from the tomb seemed to say
I once lived as you lived, walked and talked as you talk
But from earth I was soon called away
Oh those tombs, lonely tombs,
Seemed to say in a low gentle tone
Oh how sweet is the rest,
In our beautiful Heavenly home
Every voice from the tomb seemed to whisper and say
Living man you must soon follow me
And I thought as I looked on those cold marble slabs
What a dark lonely place that must be
Then I came to the place where my mother was laid
And in silence I stood by her tomb
And her voice seemed to say in a low gentle tone
I am safe with my Savior at home
I’ve spent a lot of time in cemeteries as part of the genealogy research I’ve done, and I never fail to think of this song. You can read the names on the gravestones, but when you imagine the lives and trials that each of those names represent, and consider that you are no different — and will have no different fate — it puts life into perspective like few sermons could.
The New Yorker’s online edition has a fascinating article that combines everything you might want to know about elevators (”The Otis Elevator Company, the world’s oldest and biggest elevator manufacturer, claims that its products carry the equivalent of the world’s population every five days.” I did not know that!) with the frightening story of Nicholas White, who in 1999 was working in Manhattan’s McGraw-Hill Building and returning from a smoke break, when his express elevator stopped a third of the way up, in a section that had no outlet for many floors in either direction.
Oh yeah, and it was late on a Friday evening.
By the time he was rescued 41 hours later, he had endured the worst nightmare of many urban workers. He has watched the video of himself trapped in the elevator (a speeded-up version which the New Yorker provides), and is amazed most that the video was available also to the staff performing routine maintenance during his ordeal.
A fascinating article, and an inspiration to take the stairs.
Will Rigby, drummer for the DBs, writes a post on Ted Barron’s always-entertaining Boogie Woogie Flu blog about a road trip to Memphis, hanging out with Alex Chilton and Chris Bell, and a visit to an abandoned Sun Studios. There are oral histories of rock, like Please Kill Me and Jim Walsh’s book on the Replacements, All Over But The Shouting, and I bet there’s a history of Big Star waiting to be told. Rigby’s recollection includes meeting a very depressed Bell, who was managing a family restaurant prior to recording I Am The Cosmos, not long before his death. Great stuff.
2007. Starring Emile Hirsch, Catherine Keener. Directed by Sean Penn.
In 1992, Christopher McCandless graduated from college and began a mission — the point of which has since become the speculation of a best-seller written by Jon Krakauer and a film by Sean Penn. His journey winds through the American Southwest, to the corn fields of the Dakotas, but always — as he reminds everyone throughout the film — to Alaska. There he would he would finally escape other humans, then discover how much he needs them.
McCandless, here portrayed by Emile Hirsch, comes off as wise-beyond-his-years free spirit and an inspiration to those he encounters on his travels. He shows old hippies how to love again, he teaches a lonely widower to live again, and he throws cold water on the passion of a too-young folksinger.
The portrayal of this flawed character tempts a person to explain why he needed to get away from it all. He may have been running from a preprogrammed life that would begin after graduation, or to repair a disconnection with nature that he felt masked greater truths in life. The film suggests a moderately dysfunctional home life (though the petty and immature squabbles his parents — portrayed by William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden — don’t seem traumatizing enough to make a child leave home forever without a word of goodbye.)
Sean Penn’s direction is warm and admiring, Hirsch is very likeable, and the locations are beautiful. McCandless’ meandering trail — hiking through the desert, kayaking through the Grand Canyon, hitchhiking across country — looks like a lot of fun. We don’t meet unfriendly folks along the road (even the immigration officers help him out), the weather’s almost always nice, and McCandless doesn’t seem to suffer from all the rough traveling. And that’s where I find the appeal in his story.
Everyone is capable of wanderlust. There’s endless romance in traveling the way the river flows, sleeping under the stars, seeing the untouched world with our own eyes (although the flight paths overhead keep closing in on McCandless). It’s easy to fall in love with the natural world.
But the really impressive thing about all that beautiful nature is that it’s more than willing to kill you. But like the “kind warrior” Timothy Treadwell in Werner Herzog’s disturbing Grizzly Man, I think Christopher McCandless was too much in love with nature to be properly afraid of it.