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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen
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Content provided by Anthony Esolen. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Anthony Esolen or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true
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8 episodes
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Manage series 3540370
Content provided by Anthony Esolen. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Anthony Esolen or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true
ā¦
continue reading
8 episodes
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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen
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You might think it would be hard to turn our Word of the Week , romance , to a hymn ā unless youāre steeped in the poetry of the Middle Ages. Every time I say, āMiddle Ages,ā I hope youāll think of all the bold and bright color of those high times between about 1000 and 1300, when the weather was warm, the Vikings were growing barley on the coasts of Greenland, the population of Europe doubled, the universities were founded, and international trade and banking began. Or, for some sweeter things, people sang Christmas carols, and a vast and many-sided poetry of love came into being. And it wasnāt as if the monks latched on to some āsecularā themes and gave them Christian meanings. There was no such distinction to make; and in any case, poetry and philosophy centering on Godās love for mankind and our love for God, especially centering on the person of Jesus, is right there at the beginning and the heart of it all. It certainly was there in our featured hymnodist this week, perhaps the greatest and most influential European of his century, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. Consider an Upgrade to Support W&S Our Hymn of the Week , āJesus, Thou Joy of Loving Hearts,ā is a translation of five stanzas from a long poem attributed to Bernard, though we donāt think he wrote all fifty or so of the stanzas; some seem to have been added later on, in the same spirit and of course with the same meter. The poemās first line is Jesu, dulcis memoria , which weāve had here at Word and Song , or rather some other stanzas from it, which Edward Caswall translated as the wonderful hymn, āJesus, the Very Thought of Thee.ā Bernard, the Doctor mellifluus, the honey-flowing Teacher, wrote a great deal about the love of God, and how without that love we canāt ascend to knowledge of the divine. You donāt simply love what you see. You see because you love. It opens your eyes. I recall speaking about this to a group of very happy and bright religious sisters in a rural village in northeastern Pennsylvania. They had asked me to lead them in a discussion of Bernardās treatise On the Love of God. As I was driving toward their monastery, I saw one of the sisters walking down a country road with an open book, and, thinking about my school days, I said, āWell, this is a first for me! Instead of the sisters checking my homework, Iām checking theirs!ā The highest form of love, Bernard says, goes beyond even loving God for Godās sake. Itās when you love yourself for Godās sake: then you do more than gaze in wonder at the beauty of God; you participate, by love, in that divine love that overflows into creation itself, that makes something from nothing, even yourself. Give a gift subscription But here in this hymn, the focus is on Jesus and his love, and that too is characteristic of the Middle Ages. Look around you. Everything you see will have its rising and its setting. āWhere are the snows of yesteryear?ā asked the late medieval poet Francois Villon, sadly. āEat, drink, and be merryā ā thatās not the saying of people who really feel merry inside. Itās a smiling face for people who have resigned. Not Bernard. Itās why, when Dante chooses a guide to lead his namesake to the very presence of God, he turns not to theology but to Bernard, who wrote most powerfully not about what we understand but about what we love. For todayās hymn, the translator, Ray Palmer, chose five stanzas from the original Latin poem, focusing on what does not change, and on the sweetest of all food and drink, the sacrament of the living bread come down from heaven. Other foods satisfy for a time, and if we eat or drink more of them beyond a certain point, they will no longer even please. The love of Jesus ā his love for man, manās love for him ā both satisfies and makes the soul all the hungrier, and that can only be said of love, whose motto is never, āAll things in moderation,ā but āThe more the merrierā! Please Share this Post Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Jesus, thou joy of loving hearts, Thou Fount of life, thou Light of men, From the best bliss that earth imparts We turn unfilled to thee again. Thy truth unchanged hath ever stood; Thou savest those that on thee call; To them that seek thee, thou art good, To them that find thee, all in all. We taste thee, O thou living Bread, And long to feast upon thee still; We drink of thee, the Fountainhead, And thirst from thee our souls to fill. Our restless spirits yearn for thee, Where'er our changeful lot is cast; Glad, when thy gracious smile we see, Blest, when our faith can hold thee fast. O Jesus, ever with us stay, Make all our moments calm and bright, Chase the dark night of sin away, Shed o'er the world thy holy light. Share this Post Our hymn for this week is set to the tune, Eisenach, and beautifully sung by Christās College Choir, Cambridge. Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is a reader-supported online magazine devoted to restoring the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, about words themselves, hymns, poetry, classic film, folk music, and popular song. To see new posts please join us as a subscriber. Thank you for reading Word & Song .ā¦
In honor of our Word of the Week , candle , Iād like to look at someone whose works to me are like a candle in the dark, Charles Dickens. Iām thinking here of that powerful light in the window, set in that wonderful ship turned into a house on the beach at Yarmouth, in the novel David Copperfield. The situation, as you may remember, is this. Mr. Peggotty, an old tar and a tower of moral strength, is going forth to seek his niece, Little Emily, through England and the continent. She has been seduced by Davidās old friend from school days, Steerforth, seduced from the side of the young man who loves her more than he loves his own life, and who was on the verge of marrying her. Steerforth had insinuated himself into the familyās confidence, so what we have here is the basest of betrayals. Mr. Peggotty has one object in mind, one alone, and that is to find Emily and to bring her home. Heās always been a bluff and charitable man, one whoās seen a lot of suffering in his day, but his is a snug, clean, welcoming house, made out of that beached ship, and among the objects of his care is a crotchety old lady named Mrs. Gummidge. Sheās hard to live with, because sheās always moaning and whimpering, saying, āIām a trouble and a worrit to ye, that I am, Danāl,ā and other such unhelpful things. But Mr. Peggotty is indulgent. Sheās a widow; her husband was one of Mr. Peggottyās shipmates ādrownded,ā as he puts it. āSheās thinking on the old āun,ā says he, whenever she gets into one of her blue moods, which is about every day. But now that the crisis has struck, Mrs. Gummidge rises to the occasion. Sheās not going to leave that house, no sir. She will keep it ship-shape for when Danāl returns, she says, and she means it. To that end, she will do what Daniel Peggotty has always done. She will keep a light burning in the window, for when he returns. The candle of home will shine. Help Word & Song with an Upgrade to Paid Our Film of the Week , David Copperfield, is in many ways a comic romp. Youāve got the roly-poly W. C. Fields, not even bothering to imitate a British accent (and he was right not to try), as the scapegrace Mr. Micawber, irresponsible, but with a real heart ā who calls the now grownup David āthe friend of my youth,ā which is fitting, in a way, even though Micawber was married with quite a passel of children when Davy first met him in London. Youāve got the irrepressible Edna May Oliver as Aunt Betsey Trotwood, who takes Davy in when heās got no one else in the world, and after heās walked, penniless, half-starved, and with but scraps of clothing to keep away the wind and the cold, all the way from London to Dover. Youāve got Roland Young ā you may know him from his role as the gentle and dotty rich man who lost his butler Charles Laughton in a poker game with an American hillbilly on tour in Paris, in Ruggles of Red Gap ā as the so very āumble Uriah Heep, wringing his clammy hands and on the lookout to extort from his employer permission to marry the manās daughter, Agnes. And thatās not to mention Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Peggotty, and Freddy Bartholomew as the boy Davy ā a first-rate cast in a clean and clear film adaptation of the novel. Yes, itās a romp ā yet, as you can tell, it can be a dark world to romp in, and hence the need for that candle. Give a gift subscription But then, Dickens was always about the light in darkness. Itās there atop the crown of the Ghost of Christmas Past, in A Christmas Carol. We see it shine on the shore of the Thames in Our Mutual Friend, when Lizzie Hexam, one of the most powerful heroines in English literature, rows on the dark river to find the mangled body of the man who loves her, Eugene, barely hanging on to life ā and she herself will be the light he struggles to see, as he recovers, slowly, over many weeks. It is there in the steerage of the ship, ridden with sickness, as Martin Chuzzlewit, in the novel by his name, sails penniless back to England, and falls ill, and his friend and servant, Mark Tapley, nurses him back to health. I could go on, finding the light, the candles, the lamps, the sun beaming from eyes of pity and forgiveness and love, in every one of his novels: the very names of Esther Summerson and Lucie Manette are suggestive of the light that envelops them. The words of another writer ring in my ears: āAnd the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.ā Share this Post We are sorry today not to be able to give you more than a trailer for the bright film David Copperfield , directed by George Cukor (1935). Itās still our family favorite film version of the novel, if you can find it, and it is considered by many to come closest to the spirit of the story and the characters as the author conceived them. Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks . Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and on-demand access to our full archive, and may add their comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!ā¦
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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen
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Who said that the contemplative life is superior to the active life? Well, everybody did. You can find it in Plato ā as C. S. Lewisās Professor Kirk said, scratching his head as he wondered why young people didnāt know this or that, āItās all in Plato, you know.ā But you will find it everywhere in Scripture too. Debraās long thought that poor Martha got the short end of the stick, when she was doing all the work for supper, while her sister Mary was seated at the feet of Jesus, gazing up at him and listening to his words. I feel a bit sorry for Martha, too! But then, weāre all taught that unless youāre busy, you arenāt worth anything; and one of these days Iāll do an entry on sloth, which the philosopher Josef Pieper says is the besetting sin of a society in which everybody is at work all the time. For spiritual sloth is irritable and never at peace, because it canāt take joy in what really ought to bring joy: itās the sin against the Sabbath, said Thomas Aquinas. I chose our Word of the Week , candle , in honor of the Feast of the Presentation, when the infant Jesus was brought to the Temple on the fortieth day after his birth, as the law of Moses prescribes. There in the Temple were two saintly people, both of them quite aged: Simeon and Anna. Simeon had prayed that God would not let him die before he had seen the Anointed One. Anna had been widowed after seven years of marriage, and since then had spent more than fifty years of being in the Temple, praying. The thing that strikes me about these two old believers is how spry they are, how full of life. Herod seems a doddering fool by comparison, even apart from his murderous intent. But why should we be surprised? People who live so deeply in contemplation drink from the wellsprings of light. It is light that nourishes the soul, not sweat. I donāt speak here as someone who is far advanced in the practice of contemplation. When it comes to that, Iām too easily distracted ā meaning, pulled this way and that. Yet we should tend to the soulās peace, and we should remember too that heaven is described not in terms of doing, but in terms of seeing. Consider an Upgrade to Support W&S And that brings us to our Hymn of the Week , another by the gentle and amiable William Cowper : āSometimes a Light Surprises.ā It first appears in 1779, in Olney Hymns, the splendid collection which Cowper and his friend and fellow minister John Newton put together. But then in 1830, across the ocean, the Reverend Joshua Leavitt published it in The Christian Lyre, where it appears with a melody which someone, perhaps Leavitt himself, composed for the poem ā a melody called Light. Leavitt was not, like Cowper, shy and retiring; though, like Cowper and Newton, he was an ardent abolitionist, serving as the editor of The Emancipator for seventeen years (1833-1850). Yet his most prominent form of action had a good deal of the contemplative about it. I say that because The Christian Lyre wasnāt intended as a hymnal for regular church services. Leavitt had it in mind for what he called revivals, that is, evening meetings, somewhat apart from the regular rounds of seasons and feasts in the Christian year. He made a deliberate choice that ran a bit counter to what you would find in other hymnals, even in the Appalachian shape-note hymnals scored for three parts, with the melody in the tenor, books such as The Sacred Harp and Southern Harmony. Iāll let him describe it: āAs the number of parts is apt to distract the attention of an audience, or to occupy them with the music instead of the sentiment, the tunes here printed will be generally accompanied with only a simple bass, and sometimes not even with that. In a vast number of cases the religious effect of a hymn is heightened by having all sing the air only. Possessing no musical skill beyond that of ordinary plain singers, I send out my work, without pretensions.ā Yet if it was he who wrote the melody for āSometimes a Light Surprises,ā he was a skilled melodist indeed. Join Us at Word & Song One comment on Cowperās words: surprise is brilliantly chosen. The light God gives is not ours to demand at will, as if you could turn a spigot and drink when you please. It takes us unawares. The best we can do is to try to be ready for the light, or to pray for it, and to be grateful when it comes. Share this Post We were not able to find a recording of this hymn to the tune written for it, āLight.ā But we did find a bright and cheerful organ version of another tune, played by John Keys. If anyone finds a version to the tune, āLight,ā please do send us a link. Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts please join us as a free or paid subscriber. Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Sometimes a light surprises The Christian when he sings; It is the Lord who rises With healing in his wings: When comforts are declining, He grants the soul again A season of clear shining, To cheer it after rain. In holy contemplation We sweetly then pursue The theme of God's salvation, And find it ever new; Set free from present sorrow, We cheerfully can say, Let the unknown tomorrow Bring with it what it may. It can bring with it nothing But he will bear us through; Who gives the lilies clothing Will clothe his people, too: Beneath the spreading heavens No creature but is fed; And he who feeds the ravens Will give his children bread. Though vine nor fig-tree neither Their wonted fruit should bear, Though all the fields should wither, Nor flocks nor herds be there, Yet, God the same abiding, His praise shall tune my voice, For, while in him confiding, I cannot but rejoice.ā¦
The 1890ās was a decade of great hope ā and retrospection ā in the United States. On the one hand, what is a mere one hundred years to a nation? But on the other hand, the new nationās first century was marked a second war with England in the teens, by bitter civil war and the 60ās, and by great and life-altering innovations in transportation and industry. There was indeed a lot to contemplate as the turn of the new century, the 20th, drew near. In the earliest part of the 19th century, American writers yearned to establish a distinctly American literature, separate from the young nationās inescapable literary debt to England. That century gave us such works as Longfellowās āSong of Hiawatha,ā Cooperās The Last of the Mohicans , Irvingās comic History of New York , Hawthorneās tale of the American Puritans, The Scarlet Letter , Melvilleās great epic whaling novel, Moby-Dick , and Mark Twainās novels about the Missouri frontier, such as Huckleberry Finn . If I may say it, great and truly American literature came naturally to writers in the nineteenth century. But what about a distinctly American music? How did that come about, and what has this to do with todayās song? Some folks mark the 1892 as the year that gave American music the push to come into its own. How is that? We Need Your Support at W&S Well, it happened that socialite and patron of the arts named Jeannette Thurber had long been working to establish a National Conservatory of Music in New York City to provide a place to train and foster American musicians and composers. This work was her ministry, and she set her sights high in her search for a director. She found him in Antonin Dvorak, who at that time in his career was considered the worldās greatest living composer. Dvorak (whom I have written about here ) agreed to serve for three years in this position and also accepted commissions to compose several pieces of music during his tenure. One of these compositions became his most successful orchestral piece, āNew World Symphony,ā which he said was inspired by music of the native Americans, the African Americans, and the Scottish folk songs which were popular in America. Dvorakās āNew World Symphonyā was the first symphony written in America, and the composer declared that he would never have written such a piece if he had not visited the place itself. One of the instructors at the National Conservatory, a fellow who studied composition with Dvorak himself, went on to teach some of the most important American composers of the early 20th century, notably Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington. Set with words by Dvorakās friend, composer William Arms Fisher, āGoing Homeā had such authenticity that it was often mistaken for a genuine Negro spiritual. In fact, Dvorakās personal assistant Harry T. Burleigh, then a student at the Conservatory, Harry T. Burleigh, introduced the composer to African-American music by singing Negro spirituals to him by the hour. Dvorak loved this music so much that he recommended that Burleigh arrange the spirituals for choral singing, and the result was the first hymnal devoted to these songs. Likewise, Dvorak was first introduced to the music of the best American composer of the 19th century, Stephen Foster, during his time in New York. He was so impressed with Fosterās work that he composed a setting of his own for āOld Folks at Home.ā And his praise did a great deal to restore Fosterās reputation as a composer, a reputation which had faded somewhat and had suffered some disparagement in the years after his death. Dvorakās genuine appreciation of American popular music was significant and prophetic, in fact. In his parting comments as he prepared to return home to Bohemia, he anticipated that a great flowering of American music would come from those folk sources. As he said, āI must give full expression to my firm conviction that just as this nation has already surpassed so many others in marvelous inventions and feats of engineering and commerce, and has made an honorable place for itself in literature in one short century, so it must assert itself in the other arts, and especially in the art of music.ā And so letās listen to āGoing Home,ā the hymn taken from Dvorakās American-inspired āNew World Symphony,ā arranged beautifully for a male choir by Rosalind Hall. This work has made its way to many hymnals, and was sung at the funerals of presidents Franklin Roosevelt and of Gerald Ford. Join Us at Word & Song I listened to many of choral adaptation of the Largo from Dvorakās āNew World Symphonyā and found this recording by the BYU Menās Choir most moving. Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is a reader-supported online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. To receive new posts and join this project, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Share Word & Song by Anthony Esolenā¦
Yesterday, in our Word of the Week , which was home , I reminisced a little about the town in Pennsylvania where I grew up, a bittersweet experience for me. In case youāre wondering, the town is Archbald, right in the heart of the old anthracite coal mining district. Already by the time I was a boy, many of the things that characterized the town at its most bustling had gone. First among them was the famous Gravity Railroad. I didnāt know anything about it then, except that every town in the valley seemed to have a Gravity Street. The principle of the railroad was simple and ingenious. It worked by gravity to go down hills, but when the cars heaped with coal were going down hill, they hitched them up to an enormous rotary chain, so that the force going down would pull empty cars to the top of the hill in the other direction. I think they even had tours back in the 1890ās. Then there was a place called Stump Field. I had heard boys use the name to refer to the oldest and most thickly settled part of town. But only lately have I learned that a long time ago, there was a regular neighborhood up on the overlooking mountain a mile or so away, with even a post office. Then that particular mine ran out, and the only thing thatās left, if you can find them, are house foundations in the middle of the woods. Why did they call it Stump Field? Apparently the name harked back to something even older, which was gone by the time the miners got there in the 1870ās. The local Indians used to hold some kind of ceremony there, for which they cut down the oaks, maples, hemlocks, and birches in the field, leaving the stumps. We are now many generations away from the memory. In time, even the name will have vanished. Consider an Upgrade to Support W&S So then, Iām not just saying that I miss the beautiful or homely things that used to be in my town, but arenāt anymore, like the small grocery store, run by an Italian family, where I picked up my newspapers to deliver when I was a paperboy, and where Iād sometimes get a small carton of orange juice when I got thirsty on a hot summer day. Sure, there are a lot of things like that ā the barber shop where I heard the townās gossip, not that I understood much of it, or the small pharmacy where Iād buy copies of Peanuts comic books, or the abandoned train trestle behind the ball field, that made it possible for you to cut twenty minutes off a walk across town. I mean even the huge heaps of coal-dust, two or three hundred feet high, that marred the townās landscape. They were friendly to me because they were familiar; and now their place knows them no more. Thatās why itās long seemed to me that when you really love your home, youāll also feel a yearning for a home that does not fall away, a place that cannot fade. And people try to build up substitutes for it, but all of these are like the pyramids of Egypt, not places, not homes, but gigantic tombs, with the sands of the desert swirling about. Only in God is there no shadow of change, and therefore only in him can the human heart find its true life, its eternal home, so that we can say with the psalmist, āI rejoiced when I heard them say, Let us go up to the house of the Lord.ā That will be no temple or city built with human hands, but the new Jerusalem, the heavenly City of Peace. There is the true home, and the everlasting bread of heaven, possessing all sweetness within it. Our Hymn of the Week , āJerusalem, My Happy Home,ā is a lovely song of hope and longing for that place so near to those who seek it. We donāt know the authorās name, but we do know he was an Englishman in the time of Queen Elizabeth I, in the late 1500ās, and he had in mind the famous words of Saint Augustine, at the beginning of the Confessions: āThou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.ā There are more than two dozen stanzas in the original, so you could sing it in a long procession as you entered the church, and in fact our audio selection today was for the dedication of a church. Most hymnals print five or six stanzas. Iāve included the authorās original second stanza, which you wonāt find in most hymnals, because it is so fine, and it strikes the note of sweetness that we hear and feel so powerfully in the poem. Join Us at Word & Song The melody is the sweet and lilting āLand of Restā, an American folk tune you can find in The Sacred Harp (1844), set to a text very similar to this one. There it was printed in āshape notes.ā Those are notes are marked with various shapes depending on what they are in the key of the song (do, re, mi, and so forth). That meant that you could know where you were in the melody, no matter what note you actually started with, and you didnāt really have to be able to read music to get it. Shape note singing was quite popular in Appalachia, and you can guess how important music was for ordinary people when you consider that the people all learned to sing in three-part harmony, with the melody carried by the middle part, the tenors and altos, while the sopranos and the boys sang a descant, and the basses were down in the foundation. Todayās rendition, which I find utterly beautiful and movingly simple, is in a harmony weāre more familiar with, as the sopranos carry the melody. Share this Post Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts please join us as a free or paid subscriber. Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Jerusalem, my happy home, When shall I come to thee? When shall my sorrows have an end? Thy joys when shall I see? *O happy harbor of the Saints! O sweet and pleasant soil! In thee no sorrow may be found, No grief, no care, no toil. Thy saints are crowned with glory great; They see God face to face; They triumph still, they still rejoice: Most happy is their case. Our Lady sings Magnificat With tune surpassing sweet; And all the virgins bear their part, Sitting about her feet. There Magdalen hath left her moan, And cheerfully doth sing With blessed saints, whose harmony In every street doth ring. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, God grant that I may see Thine endless joy, and of the same Partaker ever be!ā¦
We scheduled our Word of the Week to go out on Monday as usual, but just see now that it did not go out. So here it is now, and we hope better late than never! When Joseph the patriarch was dying, he asked his brothers to make sure that his bones would not stay in Egypt. āGod will surely visit you,ā he said, āand bring you out of this land, unto the land he promised to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.ā We might think of it as a strange request to make, since for a long time, next to the Pharaoh, Joseph was the most powerful, the most honored, and the wealthiest man in Egypt. But it was not his home, our Word of the Week . And yet, where was his home? When his brothers sold him into slavery, they were in the vicinity of Shechem, a town ā then only about three hundred years old ā in a narrow defile between two mountains, and thus fed by streams, always precious in so dry a land. Tradition has it that one of the mountains was where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac his son, when the Lord, who had thus proved Abrahamās faithfulness, prevented him. But thereās no sense that Joseph had any longing for the place, for the wild flowers, the birds, the look of the hilltops in the sun, the salt breezes coming in from the sea. That would be a human longing, sure enough. But what Joseph seems really to have wanted was to be with his people, in the place to which God would lead them. We might say that he had not had a home since he was a boy, and now he wanted never again to be parted from his kin, because they made the place a home ā actually, it was God who made the home for them. Support Word & Song w/an Upgrade Said Thomas Wolfe, āYou canāt go home again,ā and though I donāt care for the novel in which his main character says so, thereās a sense in which heās right, especially in our time. People move from one place to the next, and the more often they do it, the less likely they are to know their neighbors, much less that families should know other families over several generations. And buildings are torn down, others sprout up, woods are cleared, businesses disappear, even landmarks come to dust. When I go back to the small town where I grew up, it feels like home, and it doesnāt. At the corner where there used to be my barberās house, across the street from where there used to be the townās only inn, thereās now a sprawling gas station, such as you can find anywhere in the United States or Canada. I donāt recognize it. Thereās a fair chance, though, that if I went in and the owner was around, I might recognize him ā if I got his name first, because otherwise I might knit my brows and ask myself, āDo I know this fellow, or not? Isnāt he the kid I used to play baseball with? Or his brother? Or am I just imagining it?ā The home is more than a house ā we all know that, right? You can have the finest house in the world and still have no home; while a lot of nomadic people have homes who donāt have a roof over their heads, because they have places they love, and they love them mainly because that is where their people roam. Letās concede, though, that home implies something like stability. That would be in keeping with the wordās origin. Itās one thing to live and breathe and move about, but another to dwell, and thatās suggested by Proto-Germanic haimaz, which can mean a house or home, but it also means a village. Of course, because who could live alone two thousand years ago, unless he was content to live like a brute? We see the -home particle in place names all through the Germanic lands; in England (Notting- ham ), in Germany (Hildes- heim ), in Norway (Trond- hjem ), and so on. Itās elsewhere, too. Its cousin is ancient Greek kome, which meant a village as opposed to a town; towns have walls, and villages donāt. Or it could mean a part of a city, a neighborhood, as people in New York used to say that they lived in Canarsie or Bensonhurst or Harlem: those were home. Give a gift subscription The Albanian cousin, komb , doesnāt refer to a place, but to the people who live there: a community, the folk. The Irish cousin caoimh, pronounced KEE-veh, describes what you think about such a place or such people: they are dear, you treasure them. If your name is OāKeefe, itās a cousin too. But Icelandic heimur opens the idea of home to include all the world. Whether thatās because the Vikings sailed and roved everywhere raiding or trading, I donāt know; Iām rather inclined to think that if you live in Iceland, it may seem to you not that the world is home, but that your home, Iceland, such a strange and marvelous place, is all the world. I think that for man to be without a home is worse than being without eyes; it is to have something missing from the heart. But where is that home? Moses called his first son Gershom, for, he said, āI have been a stranger in a strange land.ā Did he mean Sinai, where he was dwelling at the time, or Egypt, whence he had fled for his life? Or is our true home here at all? āI go before you to prepare a place,ā said Jesus to his apostles. Share this Post āHome in the Woods,ā Thomas Cole. Public Domain. Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks . Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and on-demand access to our full archive, and may add their comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song! Learn More About Word & Song Browse Our Archive Remember, our archive of over 1,000 posts, videos, audios is available on demand to paid subscribers. We know that not everyone has time every day for a read and a listen. So we have built the archive with you all in mind. Please do browse, and please do share posts that you like with others. And thanks, as always, for joining us in our effort to restore every day a little bit of the good, the beautiful, and the true.ā¦
Iāve been holding a place for todayās Sometimes a Song for a very long time. And when we were discussing a choice for our Word of the Week , I mentioned to Tony that someday heād have to give me an chance to use āGeorgia on My Mind.ā So, he immediately piped up with the word, farmer! Iāll take that challenge (but I do think that Tony should have offered me our occasional alternate āwordā category, Whatās In a Name) . Well, he did throw in a mention of St. George, from the Greek word for āfarmer.ā And so here we go. How long have you known this song? Iām sure that I first heard it as a child in the unsurpassable recording made by Ray Charles, which earned him two Grammy Awards in 1961 and one of his four Number 1 Billboard hits. And it was the biggest hit of his career. Before recording this song, Ray Charles was well known, but more for his work in the R&B vein, with some cross-over C&W songs, and for his part in developing the musical style called Soul. Yet Ray Charles brought fans from across the musical spectrum together with his rendition of a 30-year-old song which was then becoming an āEasy Listeningā standard. āGeorgia on My Mindā was inducted into the Gramma Hall of Fame twice, once in in 1993 for that 1960 Ray Charles cover, and again in 2014 for the original 1930 recording by the composer himself, Hoagy Carmichael. Rolling Stone placed it at the #44 spot in their list of top American songs. Upgrade to Support Word & Song Iāve written about Hoagy before, for another of his super-hits which became immediate standards, āStardust.ā In fact, four of the best-selling and most-frequently-covered American songs of all time were written by Hoagy Carmichael. The estimate is that he composed about 500 songs in his musical career, and that 50 of them were bona fide hits, for him and for a string of singers for the bulk of the 20th century and beyond. Even spread over a period of nearly 100 years, 1100 recordings is astounding. (Not to knock our song this week, Hoagy Carmichaelās āStardustā has been recorded almost 1300 times.) The story about āGeorgia on My Mindā is just a small one today. The question that naturally arises about the song is whether itās about Georgia, the place, or Georgia, a woman? When I was a little girl and heard this song, I assumed that it was about a lady named Georgia. What did I know? I was from New Jersey. I had an Aunt Georgia who was a very pretty redhead. Why wouldnāt someone sing a song about her? Well, it turns out that Hoagy Carmichael did have a younger sister named Georgia. Where did the idea for the song come from? Evidently Hoagy and his lyricist partner at the time, Stuart Gorrell, had gotten a suggestion from sax-player Frankie Trumbauer that they write a song about Georgia, the state. He jokingly suggested that it could being with the words, āGeorgia! Georgia!ā Of course Hoagy and his friend, Stuart worked on the song together. Gorrell insisted that he wrote the song with Hoagyās sister in mind, and Hoagy said he couldnāt hear the words āGeorgia, Georgiaā without think of his sister while he was composing the tune. So thereās a little confusion about the original intent, but then, Stuard did know Hoagyās sister personally, because he and Hoagy had been friends since college days. And they were both from Indiana. Give a gift subscription Still .. people do think of places they love in this kind of longing way, when they are looking back with nostalgia from a distance of years and miles. And guess what? Ray Charles WAS indeed a Georgia boy. When he sang the song, who knows what it meant to him, but it could be taken as a yearning for home. However it came about, āGeorgia on My Mindā is a mighty American song and one of the biggest hits of the mid-century. And in 1979 the Georgia legislature decided to make it their own, and they adopted it as the state song. Ray Charles, of course, was invited to perform the song at the State House that year. And I am sure that they had Hoagyās permission to do that. For today Iām including the best version of āGeorgia on My Mindā ever recorded, by Ray Charles, who truly made it his own. And for some added sweetness, I give you an appearance Hoagy Carmichael made on the Tennessee Ernie Ford television show, playing piano for Ernieās very fine performance of the song. And last, I give you Hoagyās original recording from 1930 ā to let you experience the song in its original form. Hoagy was no singer, you will hear, but what a gift to American music he was. Please Share this Post Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks . Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and on-demand access to our full archive, and may add their comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!ā¦
Time for a comedy for our Film of the Week ! For a while after World War II, when a lot of soldier boys were going back to the farm they missed or they dreamed of carving out for themselves, there were a lot of comedies set out in the country. They were mostly good-humored, with some merry laughter at the supposedly simple ways down on the farm, and some merrier laughter at the really simple ways of city folk once they show up at a farm. On television, you had The Real McCoys, with a family transplanted from West Virginia out to California, led by the whistle-voiced old grandpa Amos (Walter Brennan), and all their misadventures, or The Beverly Hillbillies, one of those zany comedies that boldly marches right over the border of plausibility ā with transplanted log-cabin Tennesseans, suddenly rich from an accidental oil strike, moving out to California with their rickety old truck and their shotguns and their down-home naivete and generosity and (in skinny little old Granny of happy memory) fire-sparking readiness to fight, especially with Yankees. Or it was The Andy Griffith Show, with the town of Mayberry, NC, where Otis the town drunk can expect a decent bed in the sheriffās jail, and Barney the deputy is allowed only one bullet for his pistol, but heās got to keep it in his pocket, and Floyd the barber spreads all the chatter a town needs to keep up its social life, and Barney and the sheriff Andy have to pretend to like Aunt Beeās pickles, which requires a lot of pretending! City people laughing at farmers, and farmers laughing at city people ā thatās not as old as the hills, but as old as cities, anyhow. What happens when farmers go to the city is one thing. How about when city people try their hands at farming? Long before the absurd Oliver Wendell Douglas left his law practice in New York to go to Hooterville (and nobody knows what part of the country Hooterville is in) to get misty-eyed over some scraggly ears of corn, in that maddest of all mad sitcoms, Green Acres, we had our Film of the Week , The Egg and I, starring two of our favorites, Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert as a young married couple, Bob and Betty MacDonald, who are starting out on a brave enterprise: theyāre going to run a chicken farm. Heās all enthusiastic about it, and she, well, she goes along and tries very hard, and of course the house he buys is about as ramshackle as the one that Mr. Douglas in Green Acres bought from Mr. Haney the comical con-man and peddler. Eggs! Thereās a fortune in them! Help Word & Song with an Upgrade to Paid Sure, weāve got to have bumps on the road ā and pretty big bumps they are. Bettyās not exactly delighted at having to deal with ornery animals, the brave hunting dog and guard dog Bob buys is afraid of his own shadow, thereās a swanky divorcee whoās got a place down the road and she seems to have her eye on Bob, and you never know when a big storm is going to break out, or a fire, what with all that hay and other sorts of tinder in a barn. And then there are the neighbors! They are ā in fact ā Ma and Pa Kettle, and their eleven ā āOr is it twelve?ā Ma asks ā children. Or maybe there are fifteen ā who knows? Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride delighted the audiences so much that Universal Studios turned them into a regular franchise, making nine Ma and Pa Kettle movies, and they needed them, too, because those crazy comedies, with the big-boned and hoarse Ma and the lazy slow-drawling Pa, saved Universal from going bankrupt. Give a gift subscription So then, if you like the Ma and Pa Kettle movies, which my father loved, hereās where those worthy characters first show up, in The Egg and I. But thatās not to say that they carry the film. Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert were terrific comic actors, and Fred, believe it or not, actually did run a substantial farm and vineyard in northern California, and itās still going strong, as you can see . But then, a lot of those Hollywood people in those days had ranches or farms. You might say, āWell, Iām not surprised that Joel McCrea had a ranch, what with his doing all those westerns.ā How about Claude Rains, working a 340-acre farm in Pennsylvania for 15 years, up to his ankles in mud and delighting in it? A few years ago, I was riding in a car through central Illinois, and my host pointed my attention to vast fields of soybeans, nothing but soybeans as far as the eye could see, and he said, āMost of the time, itās corporations that run these soybean farms, and nobody even really lives there.ā What a thing. Give me Old MacDonaldās farm any day. Share this Post Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks . Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and on-demand access to our full archive, and may add their comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!ā¦
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