I made it up. I made it up. . .
It was about my gratitude for being well in the face of homelessness, the capacity to contribute to the world and have friends. I have no recording of this song. I sang it a few places. And I've really got to get better at keeping my songs and recordings of them.
There is something about singing a song for me that is really cathartic. I learned sometime over the years that the low notes have to be slow and they come from a deep place. I like to think that that deep place is in the location below your navel. In Hindu terminology, this would be called the second chakra but just think of chakras as a places of specific energy in the body.
This specific location below the navel can contain some painful energy. So, even though my song was about being grateful, it had its notes of sadness. What the song did not articulate in words was the empathy I felt for the need to have a place to belong, to feel loved and cared for.
There are many songs and genres of music that I enjoy and the ones I like to sing are always the songs that not only talk about painful experiences, but the music resonates in my whole body.
I think that that is the reason that I have chosen to call blues and folk music my own.
I suppose some might think that it is my own- upon first glance- for phenotypical reasons and then after more thought. . . well perhaps because of growing up singing gospel music in the Black Church.
Hmpf.
While that is true for a lot of famous and new singers that is not the case for me.
I was an integration baby. . .by circumstances that were derived from a long history that is the subject of another blog.
Just accept it. You don't have to like it. And I did not say that these social facts or circumstances make me better than anyone. Definitely, I have a particular if not somewhat dubbed peculiar perspective by some.
Either way, the Christianity in my religious upbringing cannot be denied. Nor would I deny it.
While I recall my parents as intermittent church goers, one was Pentecostal, the other was Baptist. In the 21st century, this yields one Muslim and one Unitarian Universalist- my brother and me.
The religious upbringing I claim is rich with a long heritage of musical influences that I am just beginning to understand. While I took a 101 college course on jazz in college, I received my first informal education about gospel music in my late twenties in a Unitarian Universalist Church from a beautiful middle aged African-American woman.
Not only did she have perfect pitch but so did all her children. So incredibly awesome!
She taught a group of us about Thomas Dorsey the Father of gospel music. She taught us about how he traveled to sell his music, about how gospel music is taught by rote because people may not have been able to read. And she learned about us too.
What I recall which my memory may be foggy about is that she taught something about improvisation. It might also be -as referenced by some of the young people I know- "getting the feels" so much in a song that you have to shout and jump up and ask people if they have the "feels" too.
Anyway, a person goes off script. . Did I mention that we were learning by rote?
We were not so much able to improvise. People who are used to reading music and following the notes exactly can be challenged with improvisation and sometimes putting feeling in music.
But gospel music comes from blues, comes from people singing work songs to get through the day, comes from disenfranchised Americans of African heritage who were enslaved and forced into a certain kind of life we would rather forget.
Slavery?
But it comes up in the music over and over again. It is undeniable. Nor should it be denied. It is American history that has influenced many musicians.
I do enjoy listening to what I call white boy blues. . . .
The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Elvis Presley, Jack, Black, John Mayer, they cut their teeth on blues music... Ledbelly, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Elizabeth Cotten, Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
