Working on a Miracle #2

Kelly Hunt, Sara Morgan, Samantha Crain, and That Scene in Sinners

My brother was at the wheel, so I was in the shotgun seat. That’s where I used to be when my old friend Erica would show up at my apartment late at night and say, “Wanna go for a drive?” And though it was the noon hour, trying to make it to Kelly Hunt’s set at the Weston Roots Music Festival, the tall grass and brush reaching to shade the road flashed me back to those midnight drives… in search of what Erica was always searching for…, a sense of peace?

“I didn’t know people thought like this anymore,” she told me one time. She was referring to my social justice work, my optimism, my sense that the world could be what we dream of it being. That was a conversation we never finished, and an argument I never won.

For Erica, those drives were in part about her lost mother, who died when she was eight, and her mother’s family from that same Weston, Missouri area. The name comes from being the farthest American settlement west until 1845. It was a place where dreamers set off into the wild, immigrating along the Santa Fe Trail or the Oregon Trail in search of a better life. Its limestone spring served up water for liquor and cellars for beer, the production of alcohol important to the hub from the middle 19^th Century on. A little liquid courage must have been useful whether setting off against all odds or making life at the trailhead.

Within the next two hours, Kelly Hunt would sing at least two yet unrecorded songs about dreaming—one inspired by the illusions clouds make in the highway distance, one that asks, “What’s the use of dreaming if you dream your life away?” Hunt did plenty of dreaming when she lived in Weston, sitting on the caboose down by the river, a place where she wrote a new song Saturday, “Across the Many Miles.” It’s on her Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/kellyhunt The refrain’s been in my head all week: “There will come a time when nothing comes between you and I and the substance of our dreams.”

Hunt’s dreams helped build the Weston Roots Music Festival, a beautiful gathering of first-rate musicians that brings shop owners out on the sidewalk, the town crackling with energy. Hunt played her set in part with folk musician Kelley Smith and then with country musician Sara Morgan. I first saw Hunt and Morgan play together almost two years ago at Knuckleheads.

There’s a story there about Morgan losing her father and thinking about hanging it all up. That was not long before the Knuckleheads show, and Morgan suggested Hunt had something to do with why she’s playing today. Their sounds seemed so different back then—Hunt in some timeless mountain space and Morgan somewhere near Nashville. Today, their styles blend seamlessly, their harmonies shining. I believe we heard a record is coming out, which is very good news.

We need good news to deal with the bad. Conservative estimates would say 140 Americans died homeless since my last blog while 178 died of malnutrition, and almost 900 from inadequate access to health care. The Supreme Court removed protections from 350,000 Venezuelans, ICE broke records arresting over 2000 people in a single day on Tuesday. Israel air strikes killed 100 people one day and 50 the next. Drone attacks on Russia last weekend were answered by missile attacks all over Ukraine last night. There are around 92 countries engaged in armed conflict beyond their borders. American troops are playing war games in the Pacific, and people keep bringing up World War III.

“He not busy being born is busy dying,” Dylan once sang, and we can find hope in what’s being born. There were the crowds that drove out ICE at Buona Forchetta in San Diego last Friday, and people across the country—in Cincinnati, Chicago, Worcestor, and Tucson—have confronted ICE agents to stop these raids. KC Tenants has announced the founding convention for The Tenant Union Federation, “organizing tenants to wield power on a massive scale, to bargain for tenant protections, to secure alternatives to the current housing market, to guarantee housing as a public good, and to establish tenants as a political and economic class that cannot be ignored.” On every imaginable front of struggle, people are fighting so that “nothing comes between you and I and the substance of our dreams.”

Last night, I heard a member of Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation (AIRR) talk about how he has learned the value of setting aside old dreams for a life of service. He thanked those he worked with for the support they gave immigrant families—everything from drives to appointments to wedding arrangements, voter registration and “know your rights” campaigns, rapid response teams and support networks. He who embodied this work was honored to work with them as I was honored to be little more than a witness.

https://airrkc.org/

The primary soundtrack for my week has been Samantha Crain’s new album Gumshoe. As a member of the Choctaw Nation, Crain’s family was driven from the American southeast to southeast Oklahoma, and she sings on the soulful “B-Attitudes” about “a place to call my own, somewhere I belong.” With stately horns that call to mind “A Change Is Gonna Come,” the world of that song is almost big enough to live in, as is the album. At base a rock record, Gumshoe adds strings, piano, steel guitar, and loads of percussion to those horns, sounding at once as unassuming and audacious as Crain’s wide-ranging vocals.

I find myself thinking about the yin and yang of it all, the way the finger scrapes on acoustic guitar strings spark as hard and bright as the probing electric riffs on “Dragonfly” or shiny descending keys on “Boilermaker.” Such contradictions fill the lyrics, as on “Old Hallicrafter Radio” where Crain cuts a loved one’s hair while being bit by mosquitos— “Catbirds take the tresses up for their nests/All the time I wonder if we could ever have that.” The last sounds on the record are the shifting static of a radio searching for a clear station, stumbling on a bright and shiny banjo, an add for a true crime broadcast, an update on the Kansas City Chiefs, and Crain’s own song.

https://www.samanthacrain.com/

Shirley Jackson started The Haunting of Hill House with that famous line, “No living organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.” To live is to dream; to be human, some kind of dreamer. I think that’s what makes the moment so exceptional when the supernatural finally takes over Sinners, when the point of view character Sammie begins to play his guitar. The lines between worlds are erased and dancers from the past—from every era of Black dance (which is to say American dance), from West Africa, and from ballet and the Beijing (Peking) Opera share the floor with dancers and musicians from the future. I set a whole novel (yes, unpublished) around such a scene, so if I say that moment alone was worth my price of admission, that’s no small praise.

https://www.sinnersmovie.com/home/

I don’t know if we’ve ever been more divided along thousands of illusory lines when we so urgently needed to be united. With its mix of voices, traditions, and instrumentation, music perpetually fights for us to come together, and the power that’s kept me writing about it for four decades lies in that glimpse of what’s possible when it all takes off. The lush greenery of Weston even before filling the place with new sounds and opportunities, the entire world that has survived to this point, all of it suggests what’s possible. The 8 billion people on this planet, particularly those reaching for one another and a future where we all can live in a necessary new harmony— with one another and the world around us— they are all reasons to believe. I cling to them as I do my old friend Erica, a friend who took care of those around her, who lives on in my heart and the hearts of all she knew.