Song(s) of the Week: I'll Fly Away/Will The Circle/I See Them All/This Land Is Your Land
It's a fourfer.
A song moved me to tears twice last weekend. Two songs, actually. One on Saturday and another on Sunday. I’m not just being dramatic. I’m not talking about the minor lump in throat or the “eyes watering and threatening to cry” kind of tearing up where tears just well up but never touch your face. Actual crying. Serious crying.
By cosmic coincidence, both songs were medleys. So….four songs, actually.
The first was at the funeral of my friend Tosh’s dad, a remarkable man who did a whole lot of good in his lifetime. He was a true artist—a talented and thoughtful maker and calligrapher, as well as a musician/performer (he toured with Jonny Mathis when he was a teen!) who spread the love of music into his family and farther afield too.
You sit in a funeral like that and you just want to do and be better. It’s inspiring. And, while the grief is still right there up front at all times, it’s a celebration. Gratitude reigns. And rains. I didn’t know him well, having met him maybe twice. But I feel a connection because I admire his son so much, and because, like me, he was a redhead who spent his life leveraging his artistic gifts in the advertising world while also being obsessed with Martin guitars1, art, and music as a lifestyle.
When I say lifestyle, I mean LIFESTYLE. To conclude the funeral service, no fewer than 25 people crowded onto the church’s stand, around and behind the pulpit. There had to be 9-10 acoustic guitars, at least one banjo, probably a fiddle, and everyone else singing. Tosh’s dad had requested to go out with a song, so his wife and kids led the funeral attendees in an old-fashioned hootenanny.
The songs? A couple of classics I’ve loved for years: “I’ll Fly Away2” segueing into “Will The Circle Be Unbroken.” Both are pantheon songs on their own, but at a funeral?
When I die,
Hallelujah, by and by,
I’ll fly away.
Will the circle be unbroken
By and by Lord, by and by3
There's a better home awaiting
In the sky, Lord, in the sky.
The whole funeral was beautiful and inspiring but watching Tosh and his family & friends joining joyfully in song hit me so hard, a joyful, hope-filled counterweight to their grief. It was like they were, right then and there, living the words:
We sang songs of childhood
Hymns of faith that made us strong,
Ones that mother (father) Maybelle (Dick) taught us
Hear the angels sing along.
It—the moment matching the song, the longtime meaningfulness of the songs in my own life, the inspiring stories of a good man’s life, the picture of all of these people singing and playing together in joy and grief—overwhelmed me.
For once in our marriage, Holly had to hand me the handkerchief.
The next night, we sat at the feet of David Rawlings and Gillian Welch for 20+ spellbinding songs—just the two of them, their guitars, and the occasional banjo or harmonica (and one song where Gillian charmingly and deftly hamboned).
I have to admit that when it comes to concerts, a lot of the time, I lean towards less is more4. I’m happy with about 18 songs. Obviously, I stick around because a good deal of magic happens in the home stretch of a concert and I’m rarely anything but thrilled at the end. But I am getting older and sometimes would call it a night before the band does.
Not this time.
Rawlings & Welch’s performance was so achingly melancholy and haunting in spots, joyful and beautiful in others, that when they finally bowed for the last time after the second encore, I was overtaken by the feeling of “PLEASE DON’T LEAVE US!” Just one more, my soul cried.
Their last song? Well, as a student of setlists, I was certain they were gonna pull out “I’ll Fly Away.” Statistically speaking, it was the most likely set-ender and a can’t miss choice. They’ve closed more shows with “I’ll Fly Away” than any other song on this tour. In my mind, I was preparing for the poetry of the harmonizing bookends between the funeral the day before and the concert.
Instead…
Rawlings started into one of the duo’s songs I wanted to hear the most5 (and thought I wouldn’t6), a beautiful cry for unity, essentially a modern-day-but-timeless tender hymn called “I Hear Them All.” I have always loved it, but it rang even truer in these war-fraught and divisive times, when heels are just digging deeper by the hour.
I can hear the flowers growing in the rubble of the tower
I hear leaders quit their lyin', I hear babies quit their cryin'
I hear soldiers quit their dyin' one and all
I hear them all
I hear them all
I hear them all
And as if that wasn’t enough to catch me, they then segued into the Woody Guthrie classic “This Land Is Your Land.”7 It’s a song that most people my age could sing the first verse and chorus of and, when you omit certain verses, could mistakenly be lumped in with jingoistic anthems like Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless The U.S.A” but when heard with all the verses is radical and romantic in its view of The America That Could (Should) Be. Woody Guthrie loved America just as much as Lee Greenwood, but wasn’t afraid to say that maybe we could do better8. When Rawlings and Welch got to my favorite verse, I couldn’t help but think about miserable Senator Mike Lee, trying9 to sell our public lands to the highest bidder:
As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
And on the side it said "No trespassin'"
But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!
And I couldn’t help thinking about how this land was made for you—whoever you may be—and me. In a month where the news is splattered with ICE raiding Home Depots and fragile men staging Straight Pride rallies, that hit hard. And as the oligarchic billionaires get richer and tech execs leapfrog boot camp (and hard-working military lifers) to become military lieutenants, while others go hungry and can’t afford housing, these lines hit too:
On the steps of the courthouse- in the shadow of the steeple
By the relief office, I see my people
And they stand there hungry and I can hear them asking
Is this land made for you and me?
Well, is it?
He was so calligraphically talented, he actually visited the Martin Guitar factory and headquarters and worked on their wordmark! Talk about a dream gig.
“I’ll Fly Away” was in my go-to quiver of lullabies I sang to each of my kids. I’ve sung it at bedsides, on rooftops, in theaters, at the opening of the new June Audio (with M Horton Smith on mandolin), in Nebraska (!), on a Lower Lights album twice (one as yet unreleased for good reason).
And “Will The Circle” has been a staple in Lower Lights setlist for years now, one of my favorites to sing along to every time we play it.
What’s with all the “by and by”?
THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS.
But the concept is particularly in play when it’s a standing concert. This back can only do so much.
#1 would’ve been “I Dream A Highway” which is 16 minutes long and super unlikely, the last time—and only time, per setlist.fm’s incomplete record—that they played it being 2004 in Australia.
#2 was “Revelator” which they played. Holly laughed when I made some involuntary whoop-like noise.
#3 was “I Hear Them All”
They’d only played “I Hear Them All” one other time on the whole tour.
Here’s a live version with Willie Watson from 2015. It’s good but it doesn’t capture the pure magic and emotion that was in Capitol Theater that night.
Not unlike the famous James Baldwin quote
“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
And failing! Suck it, Lee. Go support an insurrection or something.
Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.
Tosh played me the video of the songs at the end of the funeral. What a moment out of time. Simply astonishing.
And I may have told him that your vocal on I'll Fly Away (from the Old Time Religion album) is one of your most heartfelt in my opinion And one of my favorites.