Category Archives: Story-telling

After Midnight, Labor Movement, Melancholy music, Music, Story-telling

Every Musician Has Stories …

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Every musician has stories. It comes with the territory. Here are two of mine.

In the years before I was with After Midnight, I was a member of the Waco Musician’s Union. I was in good company – Don Henley was a member in Waco, too. The late Johnny Vanston (another drummer) and his wife headed up the union until it finally closed and was folded into the Dallas/Fort Worth Music Union about 1996.

My day job back from 1978 to 1986 was as arts & entertainment editor with the Waco Tribune-Herald, back when it was still owned by the wonderful Fentress family. One night, I was assigned to cover a fund-raiser for The Art Center. It was held in an aircraft hangar on the TSTC campus. In addition to an auction, there was a dancing – provided by a big swing band made up of top Waco musicians.

It was an easy assignment. Get a few interviews, describe the decorations, food, and auction items, wait for the final tally on the auction, then phone in the story (or physically drive back to the paper – this was the days before portable computers, of course – and write it up there). I quickly finished the interviews and was enjoying the various food stations when Johnny came up to me. The bassist for the big band, for whatever reason, hadn’t shown. Would I sit in on drums? Johnny switched to bass.

So, for the one and only time in my life, I got to play in a big swing band. We did everything – Glenn Miller, the Dorseys, Benny Goodman, Guy Lombardo – and I had a ball. The bassist never showed, I filed the story, and I hummed “Chattanooga Choo Choo” for weeks. I’m sure Bob Sadler at the paper knew, but he never said anything if he did.

Story #2:

If you’re a member of the union, periodically you’ll get offered “transcription” gigs. This is one of the things the musician’s union negotiated with the big corporate publishing houses years ago. Essentially, it offered bands the going rate to play places that otherwise couldn’t afford a live band.

In those days, I was in a country-pop band called Bits & Pieces (don’t ask). I don’t remember the names of the lead singer/keyboard player (a gal) or the lead singer/guitar player (a guy), but the bassist was a friend and college buddy from several bands in those days, Scott Pelking. One evening, the guitarist called and said we had a transcription gig that weekend at the Waco VA Hospital.

If you’ve never been to the older buildings in the back of the Veteran’s Administration complex, there is an old-school amphitheater. We set up, did a sound check, and waited. After a while, nurses began to lead dozens and dozens of old soldiers into the auditorium. Some were ancient – clearly veterans of World War I. Many – too many – were grievously injured. A few were pushed into the hall in wheelchairs.

The vets crowded around the stage in front of our female keyboardist.

After a few more minutes, a bus pulled up and out came about 20 middle-aged women. I didn’t recognize any of them, but one of the nurses said that every three months, a number of women from Waco volunteered to dance with the old soldiers. Many wore the “blue stars” of Blue Star Moms – meaning they had had children who had served in the armed forces.

There were many more soldiers than there were volunteers, but each man waited patiently for his turn. On the slow songs, some of the volunteers took the men in the wheelchairs out on to the dance floor, where they slowly swayed and rocked together.

As you might imagine, the guys and gal in Bits & Pieces were speechless. We played every song we knew, especially the old ones. We played songs that I’ve never heard since, songs from the ‘20s and ‘30s. (Our two leaders had done this gig before and came prepared with massive “cheat” books.)

When the dance was over, the old soldiers filed out and the volunteers boarded their buses and went home.

I’ve never forgotten that evening, those men, those women. It was a lovely evening, but a troubling one. As the son of a career officer in the Air Force, I’m sensitive to how we as a society treat those who have given so much on our collective behalf.

Our little gig clearly meant a lot to the men who danced that night.

But very quickly I came to realize how pitifully little it was … and how little I’ve done since.

 

History, Self-Discovery, Story-telling, Writing

She Waved at a Japanese Pilot

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It was in an obituary in The San Antonio Express-News on July 9. Her name was Gloria Chisholm and, according to the obit, she was a “breathtaking beauty” and a big band singer in San Antonio in the years before World War II. But then Gloria (then Swanson) met air cadet Lt. Henry “Hank” Chisholm on their first and only date. They married shortly thereafter. The young couple’s first posting was Hickam Field, Hawai’i, near Pearl Harbor. They lived in a residential area near the base. Shortly after arrival, on that fateful Sunday morning, when Japanese Zeroes roared out of the sky, the air was filled with explosions and the bitter smell of acid smoke. Like the other dependents in the neighborhood, Gloria ran to their front porch – trying to comprehend what was happening.

And this is where the obituary takes a fascinating turn. As she stood there, the waves of Japanese planes wheeled to make another base on the burning battleships. One pilot flew so low that he was barely above the treetops. And, according to the obituary, the American housewife and the Japanese pilot locked eyes for a long moment and Gloria – perhaps still in shock — waved. Then the pilot abruptly pulled upward, heading again for the carnage at Pearl Harbor.

The obituary doesn’t say anything else about the incident and Hank and Gloria lived a long and happy life together. The obituary doesn’t add what she thought when her eyes met the gaze of the pilot, what she felt. Perhaps Gloria told those things to her friends and family in the years and decades that followed, perhaps not.

I don’t know the Chisholm family. But Gloria’s spontaneous reaction to the eye contact with her unnamed, unknown Japanese pilot fascinates me. The story must have intrigued her family as well, since it was included in her obituary amid all of the other important facts of her life.

Regardless, in her surprise at that moment, Gloria did the human thing. She waved at a fellow human being. Perhaps later, when she discovered the horrors of the surprise attack, she wished she’d given him some other universal symbol of defiance or anger. Perhaps not.

As for the pilot, here was someone who had doubtless just contributed to the deaths of thousands of people, many of them dying horribly from the flames or drowning. I’d like to think that there is a chance that Gloria’s simple wave impacted him somehow. Suddenly, he wasn’t bombing and strafing faceless foreign devils. He was murdering human beings. People like Gloria, the “breathtaking beauty” who impulsively acknowledged their shared humanity.

And perhaps … just perhaps … that gesture and that eye-contact shook him. And on his next pass, he purposefully kept his finger off the trigger of his machine gun. Or perhaps he dropped his last remaining bomb too soon, away from the hundreds of helpless human beings beneath his bombsight.

It’s probably wishful thinking on my part.

But then, that’s part of what obituaries are for. Yes, they’re written to celebrate a life. Yes, they provide closure to those who have been left behind. But sometimes they also generate “What if?” and “Why not?” stories. Everybody has a story. Sometimes lots of stories. As writers, it is our job to recognize and write those stories.

Wherever they are found…

Thanks to Gloria’s family, the first two acts of a great story were saved. It’s now up to the artists and musicians and writers to create that great third act.

 

Stephen King, Story-telling, Teaching, Writing

Thinking About Writing

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Last week, I received the following email from a former student:

Hey Professor Darden:

I wanted to know what books I should read to become a better fiction-writer? I want to try and write fiction books.

A.T.

This was my response:

Dear A.T.:

Glad to hear you’re writing! I always recommend the same two books for people who are serious about writing:

Anne LaMott, Bird by Bird

Stephen King, On Writing

But since I’m a professor and what I do best is professing, here’s some general advice as well:

Continually read the best writers in the genre you want to write in.

Don’t write what you know. Write what you WANT to know. Writing will help you figure stuff out.

Think BIG.

Tell a story, first and foremost. Everything: dialogue, description, action should be designed to help tell the story. Exclusively. Avoid unnecessary dialogue, description, and action that are designed to show off your writing skills.

Write stories that YOU want to read.

Work from an outline.

One of your main characters must CHANGE by the end of the story.

Write for the sheer joy of it, not for getting published (that will happen if you do). Write every day. Write when you don’t feel like it. Just write. Get something on paper/get some pixels on a screen.

Use strong noun/verb sentences.

Do your homework when it comes to finding a published home for your writing.

Know that you’ll get lots of rejection letters/emails. It’s OK. It’s what we do.

Finally, Bird by Bird is so beautifully written, it is hard to extract quotes from it. On Writing, on the other hand, like most of Stephen King’s work, lends itself to anecdotes. Here are some of my favorite excerpts, some of which I Xeroxed when the book first came out. I can’t find my copy of the book (probably loaned it to someone), but I still have the Xeroxes:

Get the first draft done quickly…

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave during a period of severe sunspot activity.

On rewriting…

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.

Second drafts can only help so much…

“A movie should be there in rough cut,” the film editor Paul Hirsch once told me. The same is true of books. I think it’s rare that incoherence or dull storytelling can be solved by something so minor as a second draft.

Formula for success: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%…

Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggest cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings)…

I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: “Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.”

Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading, or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic.

Some meaty detective-fiction similes…

My all-time favorite similes, by the way, come from the hardboiled-detective fiction of the forties and fifties, and the literary descendants of the dime-dreadful writers. These favorites include “It was darker than a carload of assholes” (George V. Higgins) and “I lit a cigarette that tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief” (Raymond Chandler).

On writing seminars and the desire for “the right writing environment”…

In truth, I’ve found that any day’s routine interruptions and distractions don’t much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.

What scares the so-called master of fear?

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

I’ll end with a truism. In my classes, I have good writers and I have young people who want to be good writers. Invariably, when I talk about books, the good writers have generally read those books. Good writers read. Lots. Always have.

One last quote from King’s On Writing:

It’s hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.

Amen and amen.

 

 

 

Black Gospel Music, Civil Rights, Connections, Spirituals, Story-telling

High John de Conquer and Holy Laughter

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From Zora Neale Hurston’s The Sanctified Church:

High John de Conquer came to be a man, and a mighty man at that. But he was not a natural man in the beginning. First off, he was a whisper, a will to hope, a wish to find something worthy of laughter and song. Then the whisper put on flesh. His footsteps sounded across the world in a low but musical rhythm as if the world he walked on was a singing-drum. Black people had an irresistible impulse to laugh. High John the Conquer was a man in full, and had come to live and work on the plantations, and all of the slave folks knew him in the flesh.

The sign of his man was a laugh, and his singing-symbol was a drum. No parading drum-shout like soldiers out for show. It did not call to the feet of those who were fixed to hear it. It was an inside thing to live by. It was sure to be heard when and where the work was hardest, and the lot the most cruel. It helped the slaves endure. They knew that something better was coming. So they laughed in the face of things and sang, “I’m so glad! Trouble don’t last always.” And the white people who heard them were struck dumb that they could laugh. In an outside way, this was Old Massa’s fun, so what was Old Cuffy laughing for?

Old Massa couldn’t know, of course, but High John de Conquer was there walking his plantation like a natural man.

You never know how or when the threads of your lives intertwine. I have written three books in recent years and, upon reflection, I see that they are inter-related: People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music, Reluctant Prophets and Clueless Disciples: Understanding the Bible by Telling Its Stories, and Jesus Laughed: The Redemptive Power of Humor. And now that I’ve begun work on Nothing But Love in God’s Water: The Influence of Black Sacred Music on the Civil Rights Movement, I see where they all connect. They’ve all helped prepare me for this moment.

I wrote Jesus Laughed in part because of the visits Mary and I had made to black churches in the course of writing People Get Ready. Black churches resound with laughter before, during, and after the services in a way that the white churches I’ve attended do not. Where did we lose that capacity to laugh?

I’m writing Nothing But Love in God’s Water in part because of the ways black sacred song — from the spirituals through the union movements through the Civil Rights movement — has continued to irrepressibly bubble up and envelope black people at their times of greatest need … as if this music is always there, always available, always waiting for a moment like this.

And now I stumble across Zora Neale Hurston’s essay on High John de Conquer, a mythic black figure who pre-dates John Henry and Stagger (or Stack-o) Lee. High John’s weapons are laughter and song. And speed. High John is fast, as Hurston writes:

Maybe he was in Texas when the lash fell on a slave in Alabama, but before the blood was dry on the back, he was there. A faint pulsing of a drum like a goat-skin stretched over a heart, that came nearer and closer, then sombody in the saddened quarters would feel like laughing and say, “Now High John de Conquer, Old Mass couldn’t get the best of him. That old John was a case!”  Then everybody began to smile.

It’s about story — a story that came from Africa that sustained the slaves and their descendents for generations. It’s about song — songs that came from Africa and enveloped the best of the Christian faith and withstood the dogs and water cannons in Birmingham. It’s about laughter — laughter that came from Africa and enabled blacks in the Jim Crow south to laugh secretly at those who spent most of their waking moments trying to figure out ways to crush High John and the millions like him.

It is no accident, Hurston writes, that High John de Conquer has evaded the ears of white people. They were not supposed to know. You can’t know what folks won’t tell you.

And so it is with Nothing But Love in God’s Water. I’m teasing out from the songs and singers HOW this music helped them get over. WHAT this music provided that enabled them to challenge the most powerful nation on the planet armed only with love and justice. It’s all there in those on spirituals and those unstoppable gospel songs — the stories, the laughter, the music. The trouble is, of course, is that I’m seeing (and hearing) through a glass darkly. 

And armed this knowledge, once again, I pray for strength every day to do that song, that laughter, that story justice.

Connections, Story-telling, Technology

Perspective …

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coal_hands_g1v4Despite its somewhat daunting title, Gavin Weightman’s The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World 1776-1914 is a bright, fascinating read. I was particularly taken with the stories about Abraham Gesner, the man who distilled a useable lighting and heating oil from coal and petroleum sludge.

For all of the horrible things burning dirty coal has done and is doing to our environment (incidences of asthma and autism skyrocket the closer you live to a coal plant, for instance), Gesner’s  invention is one of the cornerstones of the modern age.

And yet, in his own account of the process, he refuses to take credit:

“The progress of discovery in this case, as in others, has been slow and gradual. It has been carried on by the labors, not of one mind, but of many, so as to render it difficult to discover to whom the greatest credit is due.”

The deeper I get into the research for Nothing But Love in God’s Water: The Influence of Black Sacred Music on the Civil Rights Movement, the more profound that statement becomes. I stand on the shoulders of giants.

It would make a good opening paragraph for my book, I think.

Christmas, Story-telling

In the Bleak Midwinter

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winter_sunIn the bleak midwinter,
frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

 

            This is my favorite hymn of Christmas.

For hundreds of years – through the early part of the 20th century – Northern Europe endured what would later be called a “mini-Ice Age.”  Heavy snows at Christmas were common. That far north, the wan sun rose late and set early. And in the hamlets and hovels, common folk shivered, praying for spring.

            In those times, the Winter Solstice had special meaning. Just when it seemed that the night would win, relentlessly slicing off moments of precious daylight until only a few remained, on this day, the bleeding stopping. And, moment by moment, day by day, the sun returned.

Sol invictus!

            Alone of the popular songs of Christmas, “In the Bleak Midnight” captures the desperation of nations crying for salvation, praying for the end of the darkness, the yearning for the light.

            Our faith-ancestors wisely coupled the pagan Solstice celebration with the Christ mass. Beyond the obvious linguistic connection between “sun” and “Son,” they also captured a deeper understanding, a deeper magic – the Return of the Sun/Son King to save a darkened land.

            The birth of Jesus, as Jeff Johnson notes, is the “centerpoint” of history, when – like a spearpoint – the divine explodes into the profane. The darkness that had prevailed so long could not withstand this moment, brighter than a billion billion supernovas.

            Jesu Christo invictus!

 Our God, heaven cannot hold Him,
nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter
a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

             Advent is the waiting, the yearning. The dark night.

But on Christmas morning, our long wait is over.

 Come, o come, Emmanuel …

 

           

“In the Bleak Mid-Winter “
Words: Christina Rosetti
Music: CRANHAM (Gustav Holst)

 

 

Gospel, Story-telling, Teaching, Writing

A Little Love for King Saul …

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The Witch of Endor, the Ghost of Samuel and King Saul
The Witch of Endor, the Ghost of Samuel and King Saul

People who know me know I’ve been kicking around the idea to write a novel based on the life of King Saul, my favorite Old Testament character.

            A little love for King Saul, if you don’t mind. Remember: Here’s a guy who didn’t want the job as King of Israel. He spent his entire reign hounded by that weasel Samuel. He never personally profited from his position. He unified 12 feudin’, fussin’ tribes into a nation. He was heroic in battle.

            And he was a good dad.

            Really.

            Today, King David gets all of the good press. By if you line them up side by side, David’s sins dwarf Saul’s. (And Saul always genuinely repented.)

            And there’s the business of the children. But more on that later …

            When Samuel publicly announced to the Hebrew people that Saul had been chosen as their first king, they found hiding behind the luggage (1 Samuel 10:22). Afterwards, instead of demanding a lavish new tent or mansion, he simply went home.

            When the evil Nahash the Ammonite besieged the Hebrew people, messengers found their new king quietly farming with his oxen. (1 Samuel 11:5)

            Saul declined to mercilessly slaughter his defeated enemies. And when he triumphed in battle, he always shared the spoils with his people. Thus by example, King Saul slowly built a stable nation.

            Throughout it all, Saul remained modest and obedient, eschewing the trappings of wealth and power, always trying – despite his many failures – to do what’s right.

            Which brings us back to the dad business.

            We don’t know much about Mrs. Saul. But we know a lot about Saul’s son, Jonathan. Beautiful, loyal, courageous Jonathan. He’s one of the few characters in the entire O.T. who gets a free ride from the chroniclers. He’s always shown in a positive light. And we know David loved him.

            Saul, apparently alone among his kingly successors, managed to keep a good balance between work and family. When he was king, he was king. When he wasn’t protecting the entire nation of Israel against hordes of iron-wielding Philistines, he was back home farming and spending quality time with the kids.

            Jonathan doubtless noticed.

            We can guess from Jonathan’s life that Saul tried to provide a good example, as best he knew how.

            Even during Saul’s darkest days, when faced both with David’s rebellion and the external threats from a dozen powerful neighboring kingdom states, he behaved with moderation and restraint.

            God eventually chose David and so Saul’s reign came to a bloody end. But even then, Saul’s innate nobility and decency shone through. In the time of his country’s greatest trial, he consulted the Witch of Endor, desperately seeking advice on how to save his people. Not for his own benefit, mind you. He risked damnation to help his people. But even from beyond the grave, Samuel chose instead to taunt and humiliate him. (1 Samuel 28: 1-19).

            Some people need to just get over themselves.

            In the end, a massive force of Philistines overwhelmed the loyal soldiers who remained. On that awful day, King Saul stood virtually alone on Mount Gilboa with his sons Jonathan, Abinadab and Malchishu. He could have taken his sons and have fled with the royal treasury. And his sons could have slipped away the night before.

            But they didn’t. They remained steadfast and shared their father’s fate.

            There is more to the story, no doubt, more to Saul we just don’t know:

             The Bible says that Saul died because he was unfaithful to the LORD; he did not keep the word of the LORD and even consulted a medium for guidance, 14 and did not inquire of the LORD. So the LORD put him to death and turned the kingdom over to David son of Jesse. (1 Chron 10:13-14)

        Um, doesn’t that seem a little extreme?

        Think what you will of King Saul, but he must have been a worthy, loving father for those closest to him to remain faithful unto death. How many kings of Israel will be able to say that in the centuries to come?

            And in that, if nothing else he is an example to us today: There is no difference between your life at work and your family life. You can’t be ruthless, corrupt, and dictatorial at the office and yet be gentle and loving at home and expect your friends and family not to be impacted by your example. You are called by God to be equally responsible in both.

There is no separation between the two.

There was no separation during the time of King Saul and there isn’t any such separation now.

It simply can’t be done.