The Band Played On

There’s a song in my head since I woke up this morning. I haven’t heard it since I was a little girl, a long while now, but it’s still there. Just as clear as a bell. I know every lyric and I am taken back to a time when I twirled in sock feet across the slick top of my grandmother’s living room coffee table. She had an old record, so thick and stiff it was like glass. I loved the sound of it, the hissing and scratching when she’d put it on the enormous record player, the needle touching down with a little gasp before the music would start. And then, I’d watch my grandmother’s face. One breath, two. No matter how many times I made her play that song, or how she protested and begged me to settle for a different tune, no dice. Because none of her other records did what this one could do. With the first strains of that melody, the corner of her mouth would lift.

Magic.

There was a story in the song. It was simple: a boy and a girl, dancing, thrilling to one another. That was enough to make me love it. And trust me, I didn’t need an excuse to get up on that table and perform waltz after waltz, all dolled up in my grandmother’s square-dancing slip, delighted with the way those skirts billowed out around my little legs. I knew my grandmother was smiling at me. I was a little queen, then. But she had another smile, a secret smile, one I’d never seen before. It puzzled me and bothered me and made me dance harder and wilder, trying to pull her attention back to the wonder of me.

For the first time, I must have realized the woman in the little farmhouse – the person I thought I knew everything about, whom I believed had set her days to revolve solely around our family – had lived a life before us. Each time she played the waltz, I caught a glimpse of that girl. A stranger. A mystery. A pure wonder.

She taught me to make biscuits. She taught me the Lord’s Prayer. She taught me other things, too, like how to manipulate or regret decisions. She was quick to laugh, quick to judge, full of such pride in her family and weighed down with sorrows for brothers she couldn’t redeem. She loved her work, but never felt she was a smart woman. She loved her husband, and they were a gruff pair. She could work like a man in the summer garden, always lamented that she couldn’t grow a rose, and she never missed an epidsode of ‘Dallas,’ come Friday night. I knew all of this and I remember her that way to my children.

But today, I’ll put on a waltz. Because I know the corner of my mouth will lift, so like hers. And my daughter will wonder. She’ll watch me and weigh all the things she understands about my life against all the things she fears and hopes for her own, and she will tuck away the seed of what my grandmother’s waltz taught me.

She had a secret…

The Band Played On

Save Your Soul Pound Cake

It’s a hundred degrees here in north Georgia and too hot to do much of anything except remember summers in my Granny’s kitchen. Usually, she had a pressure cooker going full steam, putting up vegetables from the garden. I’m sweating in my house and I have air conditioning and steam-in-a-bag veggies from Publix.

For some reason, that makes me want to get out my cookbook. It’s a binder full of recipes she put together over the years and slid into plastic sleeves so I’d be able to feed my husband and children right one day when she wasn’t around to tell me how to do it anymore. Every time I pull out these recipes, I think of her. And today, she’s telling me I need to quit worrying about the – forgive me, Lord – bikini I’ll be squeezing into in a few weeks when I travel to Europe, and sustain my soul with a lemon pound cake.

So, here you go. I’ve copied the recipe as she wrote it, word for word. If you don’t understand, shoot me a comment. It’ll heat up your house like a sweat lodge and rid you of all impurities.

Old Fashioned Pound Cake

2 cups plain flour

1 cup Crisco

2 cups sugar

5 tbsp Sweet Milk

5 eggs

2 tbsp Lemon Flavoring

Cream sugar and Crisco. Beat one egg at a time into mixture, alternately adding bits of flour and tbsps of milk. (Add part flour, mix, add 2 tbsp milk, mix. Add rest of flour, mix. Then add rest of milk and flavoring.)

Grease bunt pan and pour in batter. Bake at 300 degrees for 1 hour, or until brown on top.

You might want to put a cookie sheet on the lower rack in the oven to catch anything that drips out.

Serve with vanilla ice cream.

She Began to Sing to Me

The wisdom of a mother’s song remains a mystery, until her daughter makes it her own.

In writing The River Witch, I wanted to explore the timelessness of that core feminine wisdom, passed down through the experiences, memories and traditions of several very different communities of women. What made them the same? What made them different?

Music is very prevalent in my own memories and specifically the hymns I recall from my childhood. One of the most poignant and quietly influential musical traditions in America is the Sacred Harp. Singing and dinner on the grounds still take place in many communities all across the United States, and in other places in the world.

The main character, Roslyn Byrne began to reveal herself to me by reflecting on the music of her childhood as part of a congregation that sang from the Sacred Harp songbook. In the prologue, she is haunted by the loss of her southern Appalachian heritage as part of her identity. As the novel progresses the music becomes a guiding voice, the wisdom of her grandmother.

“These were the first things I heard, the sounds of women and water on a cool, November morning just south of the Cumberland River. My grandmother and two ladies from the Glenmary Baptist church sat in the living room and sang number 159 from the Sacred Harp as my mama labored. Later, the midwife who was also a Keller cousin, told the story of how there’d been a storm that flooded the hollow and the rising water threatened to come in the door all night. Stranded in that little house for three days, they swaddled me in a flour sack quilt, decided what to name me, and predicted all the days of my life. Granny Byrne always said they’d never ate as well, fellowshipped as sweetly, or sang with hearts that full of the Spirit.

I was a grown woman, lost and stranded by my choices, before I realized I’d forgotten that story. And then I heard my Granny Byrne. Day and night, she began to sing to me again, an old song, a lesson of water and time. 

Listen.”

Does music play a part in your own sense of place and identity?