On today’s show—the concluding show of the series—Alabama poet, visual artist and musician Jake Berry discusses his family’s interest in music (both his mother and father—a preacher—were musicians) and his own development as a musician growing up in Florence, Alabama (birthplace of W.C. Handy) and near-by Muscle Shoals. (“Since the 1960s [Muscle Shoals] has been known for the ‘Muscle Shoals Sound,’ as local recording studios produced hit records that shaped the history of popular music”—Wikipedia.) Presenting some of his own compositions, Berry sings “Fire in the Garden,” “Alabama Dust,” and the dreamy, apocalyptic “November”:
There’s a ram in the thicket
and a boy on the altar
and voices in the storm argue
which one should be slaughtered
There’s traffic out on the freeway
locked up in the freezing cold
and rifles up in the hills
aimed at the village below
There’s a cardinal in the maple tree
singing for the thaw
and a man with a knife standing at the door
whose threshold is the law
November, November
trembles like a woman
dying in her bed
while Orion rages across the sky
with a bullet in his chest
November, November
Gray doves are gathering
in the light where evening fell
and a cat on the window sill
is falling back into herself
Roots go clawing underground
burning for the heart
where the skulls of some forgotten race
are barking out their poison art
Rain pours down the gutter
The straw man crumbles in the great dissolve
shakes off his coat and falls asleep,
dreams his dust in muslin cloth
November, November
November goes out weeping
down into the day
I’ll see you across the river
was all she had to say
and walked away into the dark
November, November
*
Jake Berry on “the sweet agony of being alive”: “of being a little speck and knowing the vital importance of it, of being true to my little speck nature and living my role as part of the universe. I saw two roaches the other night, caught them fucking, locked in, in the cabinet—I felt their intense hunger to do what they were doing and I thought—yep, that’s me—I’m in the bed with my wife and it’s no more or less significant than this—then I sucked them up with the vacuum cleaner. —I loved them—I was them—but I killed them—life goes on and the world never runs out of roaches to send into my cabinet. Is this depressing?…to most people maybe—but to me it’s like being a part of a great hymn being sung—we’re all singing it full voiced to each other…You know, the sun rises, the cycle continues, you just gotta keep moving.”
Recorded in Florence, Alabama.
Part Four of Four.