Yellow-eyed Junco On Old Mining Wheel — Image by kenne
Old friends? They mostly vanish, they are ghosts out on the road
Some turned around, threw up their hands, and disappeared
Like old folk songs, their stories change, fairytales of love and pain
Another verse, another chorus, one more year.
— from The Light Beyond the Coyote Fence by Tom Russell
Image by kenne
I love the music of Tom Russell, he is a singer-songwriter who is in touch with those who ramble the earth. In the introduction to his 2012 book, “120 Songs” Russell writes about how songs beckon you to move a little closer, “Let me tell you a story.”
“They beguile us with their sing-song rhyme and tinkle-down melodies, yet they are imbued with trued feel for human history, poetry, emotion and cold hard facts of life, than a thousand dusty tomes from social scientists, poets, politicians, theologians and academic historians. Songs travel.”
Russell’s songs are about real people, their suffering and survival, and times when whiskey needs to be drank like wine — songs for as long as forever is.
GUADALUPE
There are ghosts out in the rain tonight,
high up in those ancient trees
Lord, I’ve given up without a fight,
another blind fool on his knees
and all the Gods that I’d abandoned,
begin to speak in simple tongue
and suddenly I’ve come to know,
there are no roads left to run
Now it’s the hour of dogs a barking,
that’s what the old ones used to say
It’s first light or it’s sundown,
before the children cease their play
when the mountains glow like mission wine,
then turn gray like a Spanish roan
ten thousand eyes will stop to worship,
then turn away and head on home
She is reaching out her arms tonight,
lord, my poverty is real
I pray roses shall rain down again,
from Guadalupe on her hill
and who am I to doubt these mysteries?
Cured in centuries of blood and candle smoke
I am the least of all your children here,
but I am most in need of hope
She appeared to Juan Diego,
she left her image on his cape
five hundred years of sorrow,
cannot destroy their deepest faith
so here I am, your ragged disbeliever,
old doubting Thomas drowns in tears
as I watch your church sink through the earth,
like a heart worn down through fear
She is reaching out her arms tonight. . .
When you read the words in Russell’s songs, you can see the influence of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Federico Garcia Lorca and Charles Broskoski. The words and songs, “. . . suck us in, slap us around, kick us in the belly and heart, and then push us back out into the world with a memory we’ll never purge from our blood.”
kenne
Image by kenne
from “We Are Family” Lyrics
by Sister Sledge
