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Lessons learned from last year’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass:
Do not try to park anywhere near Golden Gate Park. Either take the bus, or drive to a bus stop far, far away from the park and take the bus from there.
Don’t just bring a picnic–bring all the food and drink you’re going to want.
Don’t try to meet a friend there. It’s hard enough to find the family members you dropped off half an hour earlier. But do expect to run into someone you know.
Bring toilet paper.
Even if one of you says she hates bluegrass, and another says she hates country, and the band you particularly went to see was disappointing, you’re going to love it.
I was inspired by a Facebook friend’s inquiry (“What songs give you goosebumps every time?”) to bring Dylan’s Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 in the car yesterday and start it up at “Blind Willie McTell.” The goosebumps are still there.
Something I love about Dylan is that how, when he has a refrain, he will sing it differently every time. There it was on “Blind Willie McTell,” five verses and the two-line refrain sung five different ways. Next song, “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,” same thing. I’ve been listening to “Jokerman” for 25 years, hearing new things in it all the time, and part of the reason is that no two refrains are sung the same way.
It doesn’t sound at all gimmicky the way Dylan does it, but like the result of a singer really listening to the words he sings. He’s there with every nuance of meaning, with what’s happened in the preceding verse, and it flows out in his voice. When a singer elicits so much from the music–when his voice is so present to his words, gives them such immediacy and power, reaches down through the depths and pulls so many layers of meaning from them–the listeners do the same. My dream of a perfect Sunday morning is for my preaching to be like that.
Bob Dylan is one of my all-time favorite artists. I love the inventiveness, passion, poetry and humor of his writing. I love the way he sings his heart out. I love his recreation of old blues and folk songs and even chestnuts like Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times.” Most of all, I love the way he keeps recreating his own songs, pulling something new out of a song he’s performed hundreds of times. During the time I was married to a Dylan fanatic, I went to about twenty shows, maybe more, of “The Neverending Tour.” It’s still going. Bob is still going, here on his 70th birthday.
(As a side note to those interested in the “contemporary music in worship” conversation: now you know why today’s young adults do not think of Bob Dylan’s music as contemporary. Yes, he’s still performing and releasing new songs, but not only are his most famous songs decades old, also, look at the math: he’s the age of their grandparents.)
I was going to write about a few favorite songs, and maybe I will now and then, but not tonight. I’ll just quote some of the best words I ever heard about Bob Dylan, said by Bruce Springsteen (no slouch with the English language himself) at Dylan’s induction into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.
The first time I ever heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA and on came that snare shot that sounded like someone’d kicked open the door to your mind: “Like a Rolling Stone.” My mother–she was no stiff with rock ‘n’ roll, she liked the music–sat there for a minute and then looked at me and said, “That guy can’t sing.” But I knew she was wrong . . . Dylan was a revolutionary. Bob freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body. He showed us that just because the music was innately physical did not mean that it was anti-intellectual. He had the vision and the talent to make a pop song that contained the whole world . . . .
To this day, whenever great rock music is being made, there is the shadow of Bob Dylan. Bob’s own modern work has gone unjustly underappreciated because it’s had to stand in that shadow. If there was a young guy out there, writing the Empire Burlesque album, writing “Every Grain of Sand,” they’d be calling him the new Bob Dylan.
About three months ago, I was watching the Rolling Stone Special on TV. Bob came on and he was in a real cranky mood. He was kind of bitchin’ and moanin’ about how his fans come up to him on the street and treat him like a long lost brother or something, even though they don’t know him. Now speaking as a fan, when I was fifteen and I heard “Like a Rolling Stone,” I heard a guy who had the guts to take on the whole world and who made me feel like I had to too. Maybe some people misunderstood that voice as saying that somehow Bob was going to do the job for them, but as we grow older, we learn that there isn’t anybody out there who can do that job for anybody else. So I’m just here tonight to say thanks, to say that I wouldn’t be here without you, to say that there isn’t a soul in this room who does not owe you his thanks, and to steal a line from one of your songs–whether you like it or not–“You was the brother that I never had.”
Today someone asked me what my favorite Dylan album was. That was pretty tough. This is easier: I’ll list 70 of my favorite Dylan songs instead, quickly and without thinking too much. Serious fans may notice that I don’t name anything since Time Out of Mind (1997), which is because I haven’t gotten an album since then (well, I just acquired Modern Times, but I don’t really know it yet). Long story, but it isn’t due to my having lost my taste for Dylan.
So, 70 songs (mostly but not only written by Dylan), with a happy birthday to Bob and hope for many returns of the day.
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
Angelina
Ballad of Hollis Brown
Blind Willie McTell
Blood in My Eyes
Blowin’ in the Wind
Bob Dylan’s Dream
Boots of Spanish Leather
Buckets of Rain
Changing of the Guards
Clean-Cut Kid
Dark Eyes
Desolation Row
Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight
Every Grain of Sand
Everything is Broken
Forever Young
4th Time Around
God Knows
Going, Going, Gone
Hard Times
He Was a Friend of Mine
Highway 61 Revisited
Hurricane
I and I
I Believe in You
Idiot Wind
I’ll Keep It with Mine
I’m Not There
Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
Like a Rolling Stone
Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts
Lone Pilgrim
Lord Protect My Child
Love Minus Zero / No Limit
Maggie’s Farm
Man in the Long Black Coat
Man of Constant Sorrow
Meet Me in the Morning (and its earlier incarnation, Call Letter Blues)
Most of the Time
Motorpsycho Nightmare
Never Say Goodbye
New Pony
Not Dark Yet
One Too Many Mornings
Precious Angel
Queen Jane Approximately
Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)
Rank Strangers to Me
Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)
Series of Dreams
Seven Curses
She Belongs to Me
Shooting Star
Simple Twist of Fate
Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart (and its other version, Tight Connection to My Heart [Has Anybody Seen My Love])
Spanish Harlem Incident
Talkin’ World War III Blues
Tangled Up in Blue
Tears of Rage
10,000 Men
To Ramona
Two Soldiers
Under Your Spell
We Better Talk This Over
When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky
Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)
With God on Our Side
World Gone Wrong
You’re Gonna Quit Me
Got a favorite Dylan song that is or isn’t on here? I’d love to know which ones you love and why.
I’m thinking about music a lot as we continue our process to find our new music director. As I wrote before, we had a music stakeholders’ brainstorming session and recorded people’s wishes and peak musical experiences. A lot of my own peak experiences occur during congregational singing, so my bias is toward strengthening that aspect of our music. It’s a bias that was reinforced this week by the singing at our ministers’ chapter retreat. We love to sing together, and we sound great. We were a little tamer than at some previous gatherings–there wasn’t a lot of drumming or dancing–but we leapt into rounds and harmonies as always, and some folks gathered around a guitar and sang late at night. (There was also karaoke, but I got tired and forgot to join it, to my disappointment.)
There are many routes to a vibrantly singing congregation. Here are three:
(1) At St. Gregory of Nyssa, “with no organ, the choir serves as the backbone to support the people in a capella singing.”
The congregation sings, in four-part harmony, during most of the service– opening prayers, hymns and canticles between Scripture readings, the Lord’s Prayer, music when we walk up to the altar, music during communion, and music with the dance. Visitors tell us that they’re struck by how easy it is for first-timers to participate, and how wonderful it is to be part of making such high-quality, beautiful music.
Even for congregations blessed with organs or pianos and excellent musicians to play them, like the one I serve, having a group of singers lead the congregation in singing opens up new possibilities.
(2) A Nick Page workshop will get a congregation singing powerfully, as I know from compelling personal experience: he led a service at the restrained, not to say uptight, Vermont congregation I used to attend, and got us harmonizing, gently drumming on the pews, and singing with big smiles. In covering the workshop he gave on the Saturday, the local paper picked up on something he said, along the lines of “You can be ordinary or amazing, so you might as well be amazing”: their headline was “You might as well be amazing,” and wouldn’t you love that as the lead-in to Sunday’s service?
(3) Worship leaders who know how to teach parts and lead music well make a huge difference. I’m not bad at this, but I’m far from expert, and it takes a lot of preparation. Finding and learning appropriate music can take as much time in a week as preparing my sermon. In other words, it’s ideally the role of a music director, or people and groups trained by the director.
I go back to a few basic assumptions: We’re going to have music in our Sunday services. Some of it will be the congregation singing together. It might as well be amazing.
Our congregation is looking for its next music director, and we had a really interesting music stakeholders’ meeting last week. As we brainstormed wild-eyed dreams and wishes, one that came up was a desire for more variety in our music. Most of our music is classical–including some fresh off the press, thanks to our current music director’s being a highly accomplished composer–or folk.
When brave souls suggest that we use more contemporary music, the names that come up tend to be the Beatles and Bob Dylan. To be fair, Bob is still chugging away, but believe me, we aren’t talking about any of his albums from the ’00s, ’90s, or ’80s. Or probably ’70s. This is understandable, because studies suggest most people seldom listen to any popular music that came out since they were in high school or a little older. I’m an unadventurous music listener, myself, mostly listening to stuff that’s as old as I am or older. (When I was in high school, the airwaves were dominated by Michael Jackson and Madonna, neither of whom inspired me to buy their CDs, or as we still called them then, albums. Feh.) But “Blowin’ in the Wind,” while deservedly classic and even potentially useful in worship, is not contemporary. Heck, it had stopped being contemporary before the escalation of the Vietnam War.
One woman in the meeting talked about a song she knew, a pop or rock song I think it was, that seemed very spiritual to her. I bet most of us can think of some songs just like this, if we listen to any contemporary popular music.
I don’t think newer or more varied music can be counted on to bring hordes of young people to our churches (or African-American or Latino or working-class people, or whatever underrepresented-in-our-congregation population we’re aiming for). What I think is that it is meaningful for people to hear their music, and more diversity in music means this happens for more of our people, just as it’s meaningful for us each to hear our own theology and so our congregations use a range of theological language. So without making any claims of musical messianism, I’d still like to hear your suggestions for music appropriate in Unitarian Universalist worship that:
- was written in the last 10 years,
- is in some popular genre, and
- isn’t already in a UU hymnal.
Dropping a verse or changing pronouns are time-honored ways to adapt music to worship, so don’t be shy about that. E.g., change “Rainmaker” by Keb’ Mo’ from 3rd person to 2nd and it is suddenly less a love song about a woman than a paean addressed to God, or your congregation, or something. I can’t use that one, though, since it’s from 1998.
My first nominees are “One Voice” by the Wailin’ Jennys (from the CD 40 Days) and (oh dear, the only new music I seem to listen to is kids’ music) “Extraordinary,” “What a Ride!” and “How Big” by Eric Herman (all from What a Ride!). Your turn!
A few months ago, the Worship Associate for the Sunday service touched my heart with a few words. She gestured toward the piano where our wonderful pianist, Veronika Agranov Dafoe, had just played the offertory in her usual stunning way, and said, with a little shake of her head, “A human being wrote that music. And another one played it.” I can’t even remember now who the composer was–maybe Chopin, whom I suspect is Veronika’s favorite, or maybe Mozart himself–but I thought of that moment again last night when I heard Mozart’s Requiem at the San Francisco Symphony. What a wonder that a member of our species created that, and 200 others recreated it for us to hear.
Unitarian Universalists need to be countercultural. We need to be countercultural because there is much in our home culture (I’m thinking of US culture, but it applies everywhere there are UUs) that needs to be challenged. One such characteristic (and here I’m definitely speaking of the US) is the tendency to equate progress and future orientation with a dismissal of the past. Tear down the old to build the new. Adopt this exciting new technology and don’t bother to save anything from the one it replaces. Favor youth over age. Why learn history?–it’s boring and irrelevant. That’s our modus operandi as US Americans.
So Unitarian Universalist ministers are walking in step with the dominant culture when we diss the “gray hymnal,” Singing the Living Tradition (SLT). There were a few such occasions during the UUMA CENTER Institute in Asilomar earlier this month, which is why I bring it up. There was a lot that bothered me about the “uh-huhs!” that followed the hymnal-bashing, and the gleeful trashing of the past was bothersome element #1. Hymnals are not just songbooks; they are repositories of history. For example, SLT records a very brief window in our history, between the adoption of the seven principles and five sources in 1985, and the addition of the sixth source in 1995.* And of course, it holds melodies and words that, like the beautiful brick buildings of old mill towns, I would hate to see discarded in favor of the new, no matter how beautiful the new might be (and the songs we are proposing to put in their place are sometimes as unbeautiful as the factory-built, vinyl-sided crap that now occupies the towns, but that’s a topic for another post).
When we changed over to the gray hymnal, what did we do with all the blue ones? In the case of most congregations, we discarded them, maybe keeping one on hand for the library (or not) but not using them anymore. That great reading that didn’t make the cut for SLT? Forget it. The vast legacy of Kenneth Patton, whose mark is all over the blue hymnal as it was all over the Universalism (and humanism, and UUism) of his time? Reduced to eight nuggets (and most of them are indeed solid gold). Your mother’s favorite hymn? Gone. What a waste.
I appreciate the openness to other music that characterized the week at Asilomar. We sang music my congregation almost never uses, and a lot of it was great. It was cool to find spiritual meaning in pop songs that usually make me change the station (but seriously, UU ministers singing “love, lift us up where we belong!” in worship sound much better than Joe Cocker. Of course, I think just about anything sounds better than Joe Cocker). I have lots more to say, good and bad, about the music of Institute week, but only praise for the willingness to break out of the hymnal(s) and try some new-for-us music.
However, in creating my home music library, I don’t throw out the old stuff when I buy the new, do you? I bought a Dixie Chicks CD last fall–for me, this is cutting edge–and I still listen to my Beatles albums. (Is it okay to call them albums? I’m seriously dating myself, aren’t I?) And that Dar Williams disc that I almost wore out the first six months I had it. And the late Beethoven quartets. And so on and so forth. Let’s not bury the hymnal just because we make the radical discovery that there are excellent songs for worship outside it.
Something I would like to bury is the mantra I heard a couple of times during the week and predict will be repeated ten times more at General Assembly, “No church that’s growing sings from a hymnal.” I want to see some documentation before I take that seriously. Also, I would like to know what it actually means. Individual congregations or denominations? Does it mean they don’t even have a hymnal, or that they do but they tend to project the words on a screen rather than use the books? I suspect it is simply a very broad translation of “mainline denominations are not growing,” which is itself a sloppy statement. The Catholic church and the Mormon church are not, technically, mainline denominations, because that’s shorthand for “mainline Protestant denominations,” but they are not independent or evangelical; they are both growing; and they both have hymnals.
I strongly favor expanding our music sources. I especially favor getting our noses out of the books so we can look at each other. I’ve purposely made our new Thurday evening services hymnal-free because something different happens when we sing music that doesn’t require reading. But they use music from SLT, because it is powerful and beautiful. Let’s not throw that beauty and power away.
__________
*The first five sections of the hymnal, encompassing 356 of the 415 hymns, correspond to the then-five sources. Also, the Principles and Purposes (which also include the sources) are printed on page x-xi.
Tonight and tomorrow our congregation’s choir (and various other musicians, most of whom are congregation members and staff) is putting on a concert, A Nation of Immigrants. The centerpiece is a mass by our music director, Henry Mollicone, a noted composer who is also, this year, a composer-in-residence here at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto. Ever since Henry became our music director, he has forged a connection between social justice and music. This piece, Misa de los Inmigrantes, alternates the elements of the Latin mass (here sung in Spanish) with narration, in English, telling the true story of a recent immigrant from Mexico. Another concert a few years ago featured his Beatitudes Mass, which also integrated interviews with real people, in this case homeless people; Henry stipulates that all proceeds from performances of this piece benefit the homeless. Tonight’s concert splits the proceeds between the Day Worker Center of Mountain View and UUCPA.
Music and justice are a natural fit for our congregation, and Henry has helped put them together in other ways, for example enthusiastically generating a list of pieces for a Coming Out Day service in which I requested that all of the music be by LGBT composers and librettists. I’ve been thinking about other ways to use our love of music, and the power music has to change hearts, to take it out beyond our worship services. How about a congregation-based Threshold Choir? Sending small groups to sing or play at hospitals, assisted-living facilities, shelters, or hospices? (As a teenager, I was very moved by caroling with my mom and a few other members of the New Haven Chorale at Yale-New Haven Hospital on Christmas Day.) Creating a group that sings songs of work, struggle, and peace? Creating musical groups whose membership intentionally combines members of the congregation and other groups such as recent immigrants (our area has a zillion), veterans (ditto), or people without homes (ditto)?
My colleague Dan Harper blew my mind with a casual mention of Richard Thompson singing “Oops! I Did It Again,” so of course I had to go find it. And you know, I liked it. Thompson deemed it “a pretty good song,” and, hearing it sung by a singer I really like, and unburdened by the “oh no, more bubblegum pop” expectation I bring to top-40 radio (do we still have top 40, or am I dating myself?), I agreed.
I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise. Hey, one of my favorite songwriters, Ira Gershwin, said, “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella [Fitzgerald] sing them.” IMHO, they hold up pretty damn well no matter who is singing them, but it’s true, a great singer can make a mediocre song great, or at least “pretty good.” (And vice versa–I heard a version of Joni Mitchell’s “River” the other day that really should never have hit the airwaves.)
I wonder how far we can take this. I recently tuned in NPR and stumbled on an analysis of the Song Most Likely to Make Amy Scream and Reach for the Dial, “Light My Fire.” Lord, how I hate that song. But I didn’t change the station, because the speaker, one of the songwriters, was walking us through the process of writing it, and that was interesting, plus I only had to listen to his playing the piano and talking, not the original with those noodling instrumentals and that pompous Jim Morrison voice.
Of course, at the break they did play the original, and I shuddered and turned it off. But now I wonder if even “Light My Fire” could be redeemed if someone else sang it.
Nah, there’s only one way to make a line like “no time to wallow in the mire” bearable, and that’s to listen to it in the same state the band was no doubt in when they wrote it: seriously stoned.
Sermons in Stones 
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