Category: Bill Morrissey


Death, Impending: Coversongs for an old friend

September 28th, 2008 — 10:40 pm


I was planning to use this weekend’s entry to celebrate the impending one year anniversary of Cover Lay Down. But last night the cat turned up yowling pitifully under the shrubbery along the front porch, and he wouldn’t come out. We couldn’t find a flashlight; in the end, my wife lit a tiny candle in the rain, I heaved aside the overgrowth, and she reached into the darkness to reel him in, his body limp.

That he didn’t tear us to shreds as we extricated him from the shrubbery was tellingly out of character. When we finally pulled him into the house, he was too unsteady to walk. When he tried to take a drink, he slumped against the edge of the bowl, tipping it into himself.

We tried to make him comfortable in a crate, and headed upstairs to bed, but at four, my sleepless spouse couldn’t take it any more. She bundled him up into the car, and drove almost an hour to the all-night vet clinic, where a battery of tests pointed to congestive heart failure, or worse.

Since then, we’ve spent an exhaustive day at the vets, a family waiting, gathering hope and losing it again, finally coming to accept the sad truth that after sixteen years of perfect health, Jacob is just too sick to go on for much longer. But I think we knew it in our hearts already, the moment we lost him to his nausea and pain. And though he is still technically with us now, the best we can do is make him comfortable, and hold him into the night.

I’m not a cat person, but Jacob’s place in our lives has always been much bigger than furballs on the laundry, the occasional half-eaten mouse at the door. Once, the cat was our only child, adopted off the streets, loved against our better judgement. Back when we were working food service, living in sin out of a series of truly awful apartments, Jacob was the first thing that made us bigger than just ourselves, and we doted on him as he grew, carrying him over our shoulder even as we moved and stretched, until we finally began knocking him down the hierarchy to make room for a dog, and, later, our two beautiful girls.

In the last few years I’ve taken him for granted, focusing my energies on our own kids. I’ve pushed him away, claiming allergies and limited attention, even as his origin story became a favorite bedtime story for each of my children in turn. I regret that loss keenly tonight.

Now the kitty sleeps the drugged, logy sleep of the dying, his core temperature dropping, his kidneys burned out beyond repair. He hasn’t eaten, and he won’t walk. The girls went to bed all cried out, their faces puffy from a long day of disappointment; my wife’s heart is broken, and we struggle to put words and brave faces to our grief as we ask the children to understand what it means to plan for painless death as a final gift of love.

But in the meantime, my small independent partner, brave mousehunter and constant companion, the only other man of the house, suffers in his newly-made bed. And since I cannot do anything else for him, I am left to grieve in the only way I know: by writing, and sharing, and praying out loud.

Grant me this forum, folks. It’s all I have. We’ll celebrate another day. For now, here’s a short, slow playlist of loss, for a beloved family member’s bedside vigil.

642 comments » | Bill Morrissey, De Dannan, Doug Marsch, Emmylou Harris, Eric Anderson, Greg Brown, Jill Sobule, Susan Werner

Covered In Folk: (Not) The Grateful Dead (on Borrowed Tradsongs and the Dead as a Vehicle of Renewal)

June 6th, 2008 — 10:01 am

Naturalismo, which I discovered when researching last week’s post on Freak Folk, seems to be one of very few music bloggers to note the passing of Alton Kelley — the sixties poster artist whose most popular work was probably the above skeleton-with-rose-garland poster, originally created for a 1966 Grateful Dead show at the Avalon Ballroom. You may not have seen the poster before, but you’ve seen the graphic it inspired on a hundred Volkswagen bumpers; the image, which Kelley and his long-time partner Stanley Mouse adapted from a nineteenth century illustration for The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, was the source from which the Grateful Dead took their early, longstanding, most recognizable iconography.

The relative dearth of recognition in the blogworld at Kelley’s passing, coupled with the evolutionary story of the iconography of the skeleton in that poster, got me thinking about the similarly under-covered relationship between the Dead themselves and the folk tradition. I’m particularly interested in the way the Dead, like Kelley and Mouse’s skeleton itself, served as a bridge between the images and objects of the past and the ongoing recognition of those objects in the present. If the skeleton reframed the imagery, the Dead reframed the tradition. And that’s pretty folk, right there, folks.

I’m not claiming that the Grateful Dead are folk music, necessarily, though their credibility in the folkworld is pretty strong. The combination of their use of traditional appalachian folksong as source material and their pre-history as jug band artists align them closely with the bluegrass that preceded them, and the newgrass movements which would follow. And their tendency towards acoustic sideprojects, their use of acoustic instrumentation and folk instruments, their connection with the same hippie movement which brought forth and nurtured the second wave of the new folk revival post-Guthrie and Dylan, and their not-so-occasional stripped down performance makes a strong case for their inclusion in the folk canon.

Jerry Garcia’s solo work and influence, especially, are a major component of this; by most accounts, though others in the band co-wrote their share of originals, it was Garcia who learned the majority of these traditional ballads and jams, on train rides and on back porch sessions, and brought them in for the band to arrange. And while his bandmates went on to play music across the genre map, both on hiatus and in the more recent aftermath of his death — it’s hard to argue that the solo output of, say, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, or Bruce Hornsby count as folk in any shape or form — it was Garcia who would become almost as well know for his more delicate acoustic mandolin and guitar work with compatriots such as David Grisman.

One day, it is my intention to give that Garcia and Grisman folkwork the full attention it deserves. And previously, I’ve posted several sets of songs more properly characterized as bluegrass which follow the Grateful Dead take on tradition: two wonderful newgrass takes on Deep Elem Blues; a Single Song Sunday collection of covers of Rain and Snow; a great high-energy version of Grateful Dead “standard” Don’t Ease Me In. But it’s never to late to do more, especially in tribute. Today, a few traditional songs played by others from the less countrified side of the folkworld, post-popularization by the Grateful Dead, and in most cases, surely influenced by same.

I considered adding a few more traditional songs of and from the Grateful Dead playbook here as a bonus, but it’s Friday, and we only do short posts here at Cover Lay Down on “off” days. Luckily, several recent and especially relevant posts on other (better) blogs are still live and worth the visit. So quick, before they’re gone:

PS: Much credit goes to the Grateful Dead Lyric and Song Finder as a general resource for today’s post. As the plethora of links here and elsewhere remind us, the folkworld would be a much poorer place were it not for the obsessive pursuits of others.

479 comments » | Abigail Washburn, Bill Morrissey, Bill Staines, Elizabeth Mitchell, Grateful Dead, Greg Brown, Zak Smith