Last year’s final post – a Single Song Sunday feature on Cash classic I Still Miss Someone – found me musing on death, loss, and change after a rough year in the Howdy house.
This year finds me in a different frame of mind. My work as an inner city teacher of an obscure elective subject is joyous and fulfilling, a challenge worth taking up each day. Our small community grows ever stronger, as does our commitment to it; each new activity we join brings new friends and companions. Our household has been passed over by death, and we are thankful for it. The brand new kittens have grown into half-pint terrors with personality, no longer shadows of the long-time companion they came to us to replace.
It’s strange and unsettling to look back and find oneself so blessed. It seems like the worst kind of hubris to claim such an existence as one’s own.
But I have to admit, it’s been a pretty good year.
Of course, life isn’t perfect, and there is always pain. My ears never fully recovered from tinnitus, and each time I write a post, or consider a new song or a song anew, the buzzing ghost of audio distraction hovers over me like a mosquito in a quiet camp. My older daughter and I are working on anger management, talking through the rage that runs through her veins as my own tendency towards quick heat begins to show itself in her. Two years after losing her job to the early recession, my wife is still struggling with self-employment as an event planner, exercising her talents on church socials and PTA events as a distraction from the lack of clients.
More generally, as adults, death is always in our past, present, and future. Our consideration of our own mortality becomes a context for even the best of times, part and parcel of the pain we feel at others’ loss, projected onto the universe. Over at Star Maker Machine, as we begin to forge through our now-annual review of those artists who have passed us by this year, I am saddened to realize how many have left us so young, and with so much still to give. Closer to home, friends have lost loved ones, and I take their mourning as my own, for having been on the other side, I know that trouble shared is trouble borne.
But two hours away, even as we speak, my wife’s sister and her husband learn to sleep lightly, their ears cocked for the cry of their tiny Christmas baby. In our own home, the elderchild has come to love math and computers, piano lessons and theater; her smaller sister has begun to show herself an empath capable of making grown men cry with her prescient, sensitive observations. My children grow into their selves and their world, losing their kid fears, learning their immortality; they will have to learn of its false veneer in their own way, but not now.
Life goes on, bittersweet in even the most blessed moment. We stand over the eternal stream of tears, building bridges, finding new ways to cross.
Hard Times Come Again No More – often shortened to simply Hard Times – is a perfect companion to the precarious blessing of a good year gone by. Written by popular songsmith Stephen Foster in 1854, the Civil War favorite is a not-so-gentle admonition to the affluent, reminding them to “pause in life’s pleasures” and remember the hard times, that they might be more inclined to support those whose lives are full of sorrow and pain, hunger and need.
The curious narrative frame is often overwhelmed by the dire verse portrayals; once you get past the scene-setting introduction, Foster’s lyrics speak of the plight of poverty, not the perspective of the subject. As such, many versions of this song verge on sparse and dirgelike, or at least mournful. Among these, Emmylou Harris‘ typically soaring version stands out, as does the dustbowl alt-country of Peter Bradley Adams project Eastmountainsouth, while Mavis Staples’ slow gospel blues, off the wonderful, mostly folk Foster tribute Beautiful Dreamer, is glorious and funerial.
Ragged works, too: Dylan finds a hoarse sympathy in his delivery; the amateur Breskin siblings go broken and deliciously instrumental. And a more balanced effect comes of the addition of slow strings, as in the almost classical-slash-appalachian cello-and-fiddle take from Yo Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, and Mark O’Connor project Appalachian Journey with James Taylor on vocals, or the way Willie Nelson’s broken voice plays majestically off Darol Anger’s sweet yet mournful fiddle and David Grisman’s mandolin on Anger’s American folk opus Heritage.
But Foster’s litany is surprisingly complex. There’s celebration of the giver, here, and a pride in the repeated refrain of the song’s title. The gospel tradition of bluegrass, especially, allows for a lighter, more upbeat tone, heard here in the warm stringband tones of the Dry Branch Fire Squad, and an almost cheerful take from a young Claire Lynch with her early project the Front Porch String Band. A different sort of lightness can be found in the fluid Celtic take from Irish tradfolk group Cherish the Ladies, which – with a rich mix of harp and flute, pipe and squeezebox, piano and voices – comes off as majestic and sweet.
Too, the unspoken spiritual connotations of the song contain their own strange hope. And later versions add explicitly religious lines, such as the “how we tremble before thee, have mercy we implore” contained in the below version from this year’s indiefolk anthology of spiritual songs and hymns Come O Spirit!. With or without the additional lyrics, sung as a simple hymn, Hard Times is bittersweet, balancing the portrait of poverty with the potential for salvation inherent in the subject’s situation; Laura Love and David Massengill, among others, find this balance, bringing beauty to simple, plaintive versions, though Love’s rearrangement of the refrain is eminently that of the singer-songwriter ballad, too.
It’s in our hearts to give when we can; after all, we were homeless, once, with two tiny children, no job, and a fading safety net, and would not have survived if not for the support and charity of those around us. But this reminder of humility and grace towards those who have not prospered is a necessary one, nonetheless.
If you, too, have been one of the lucky ones, and are already minded towards those on the other side of the door, then consider this offering both a ward against the chill and a prayer of thanksgiving, that – this year, at least – we find ourselves on the good side of poverty and hunger, able to help those needier than ourselves.
If not, then may this song, in all its versions, be a reminder that we are here, with open hand, to help ease the pain.
Amen. And may your heart be glad and prosperous, with music and friendship, in the year to come.
Cover Lay Down posts new coverfolk features and sets each Wednesday and Sunday throughout the year. See you in 2010!