Sunday, March 3rd
Lord, have mercy . . .
Rev. Gary Davis, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” c. 1970
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Lord, have mercy . . .
Rev. Gary Davis, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” c. 1970
back to church
The Wings of Faith, of Waynesboro, Mississippi (pop. 5,197), live, 2012
Voices, hands.
Guitar, bass, drums.
And soul.
Sensational Friendly Brothers, Canton, Mississippi (St. James Missionary Baptist Church), 1978
“Where Shall I Be (When the First Trumpet Sounds)”
***
“Heaven Is My Goal”
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lagniappe
Thanks, Richard—great clips too.
—George Saunders, featured here the other day
When he died, at the age of twenty-nine, folks got the news the same way they heard his music.
WCKY (Cincinnati), 1/1/1953, announcing Hank Williams’ death, followed by his recording of “I Am Bound For The Promised Land” (S. Stennett)
old stuff
Rev. F. W. McGee (with Arizona Dranes, piano and vocals, and congregation), “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room,” 1930
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langniappe
reading table
He was little more than a ruin, but a superb one, or perhaps not even a ruin so much as that most romantic of beautiful objects, a rock in a storm. Lashed on all sides by the waves of suffering, of anger at suffering, and of the rising tide of death, by which he was surrounded, his face, crumbling like a block of stone, still kept the style, the hauteur I had always admired; it was worn away like one of those beautiful but half-obliterated classical heads with which we are still always glad to ornament a study. Only it seemed to belong to a period more ancient than before, not only because of the way in which its once more lustrous material had become rough and broken, but because an expression of subtlety and playfulness had been succeeded by an involuntary, an unconscious expression, constructed out of illness, the struggle against death, mere resistance and the difficulty of living. The arteries, all their suppleness gone, had given his once beaming face a sculptural rigidity. And although the Duc had no inkling of this, his neck, his cheeks, his forehead all displayed indications that the human being within, as if obliged to cling tenaciously to each minute, seemed to be buffeted by a tragic gale, while the white strands of his thinner but still magnificent hair lashed with their spume the flooded promontory of his face. And I realized that, like the strange, unique glints which only the approach of an all-engulfing storm gives to rocks normally a different colour, the leaden grey of the stiff, worn cheeks, the almost white, foam flecked grey of the swelling locks, the weak light still emanating from the scarcely seeing eyes, were not unreal colours, far from it, all too real, but uncanny, and borrowed from the palette and the lighting, inimitable in its terrifying and prophetic shades of darkness, of old age, and of the proximity of death.
—Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again (translated from French by Ian Patterson)
*****
What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.—Kobayashi Issa (translated from Japanese by Robert Hass)
Today we welcome her to the ultra-exclusive MCOTD Hall of Fame, where she joins previous inductees Von Freeman, Wislawa Szymborska, William Bronk, and Lester Bowie.
Dorothy Love Coates, January 30, 1928-April 9, 2002
“The Accident” (Odessa Edwards, speaking), “Get Away Jordan,” “Getting Late in the Evening,” “You Must Be Born Again,” live, Los Angeles, 1955
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“You Must Be Born Again,” “He’s Right On Time” TV show (TV Gospel Time), early 1960s
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“Won’t Let Go” (AKA “I’m Just Holding On”)
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“Strange Man”
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lagniappe
reading table: two takes
The old pond— a frog jumps in, sound of water.
—Matsuo Basho (1644-1694, translated from Japanese by Robert Hass)
New pond. No sound of a frog jumping in.
—Ryokan (1758-1831, translated from Japanese by Kazuaki Tanahashi)
two minutes of joy
I’m gonna sing while I’m here . . .
Bessie Jones (1902-1984), “So Glad I’m Here”
another take
Rev. Claude Jeter, Shirley Caesar, The Dixie Hummingbirds, Take Six, et al., “Mary, Don’t You Weep,”* TV show (Night Music), 1989
*David Sanborn is overly generous in his introduction. Claude Jeter may be responsible for this arrangement, but he certainly didn’t write the song. Folks were singing it before he was born.
The other day, in the wake of Inez’s passing, we heard several takes on this. How about another?
Aretha Franklin (with James Cleveland & The Southern California Community Choir), “Mary, Don’t You Weep,” live, Los Angeles, 1972
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lagniappe
reading table
The recent death of a friend of my younger brother’s, whose sole housemate was his beloved cat, brought this to mind.
“Cat in an Empty Apartment”
by Wislawa Szymborska (MCOTD Hall of Famer; trans. from Polish by Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak)Die—you can’t do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here
but nothing is the same.
Nothing’s been moved
but there’s more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.Footsteps on the staircase,
but they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.Something doesn’t start
at its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.Every closet’s been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.
Here, following up on Monday’s post, is more of Inez Andrews.
Live, “I Made It,” Washington, D.C.
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Live (with the True Voices of Christ Concert Ensemble), “Come In,” Chicago
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lagniappe
reading table
“[B]eing able to ask a question means being able to wait, even one’s whole life.” (quoting Martin Heidegger)
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“Someone who proposes a non-strange answer [to the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing’?] shows he didn’t understand the question.” (quoting Robert Nozick)
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[T]he universe was created by a being that is 100% malevolent but only 80% effective.
—Jim Holt, Why Does The World Exist? (2012)
music clip of the day 