TIM ERIKSEN

     I associate this old New Hampshire song Jolly Tinker with Silas's great grandmother  After a lot of digging through the archival material that survived the Pumpkinton Library fire in 1959, I'm almost certain that Absence Wing's mother, who raised her single-handedly, was imaginary.  But the story that came to Silas from his great uncle, Josh Billings Jr., is that Absence Wing's father, although she never met him, was real. 

     If you stand by the Congregational church, facing the green, off to your left will be the West Road. Not the Main Slanderville Road, but the dirt one that runs by the cemetery. If you follow that into the trees, after about a quarter mile you come to the old covered bridge, or what’s left of it. If you can get across it, or through the river, you’ll be in what used to be a neighborhood called Lightning Bug. There’s nothing there now but a bunch of cellar holes, some boulder walls, and the feral woods crawling back into the meadow from the river. There’s a good rock for sitting though, supposedly an old sacred one, where you can watch the lightning bugs like shooting stars, or even like snowflakes sometimes, as it was last year on Juneteenth. It depends on the weather and, I guess, some insect reasons. I wrote Every Sound Below remembering times I’ve watched the moon come up over the meadow, sometimes all the way until it went down behind the hills in the west. (Though not in Pumpkintown, obviously- way down in Nissequogue, where I grew up). 

     There’s a kind of aphorism that, if you have to tell the story behind a song, the song isn’t done yet, which is fine, but it could just as easily be the other way around- if there’s nothing beyond what’s sung, it might not be worth singing. Of course that whole conversation assumes the importance of stories over stuff. (As Homer Simpson once said “Oh Marge, there’s no meaning. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened”). I heard, from someone who knew him, that Frank Proffitt had a story about Song of The Lost Hunter that he wouldn’t tell on the record. I won’t tell it here, but you can probably imagine. 

     I don’t know if sea monkeys have ever been available for sale in southern India, but our friend Kshama told us that when she was growing up there she saw ads for them in comic books. Years ago I sent the Sea Monkey people a video Peter shot of me playing A Tiny Crown sitting on our friend Rick’s Harley Davidson one night after the Tuesday singing, and they sent me a tic-tac-toe game and a keychain. Last time I looked, the video was still up on YouTube, which was kind of a place where you could put electronic audio-visual material for people to look at. 

     The proximity of love to violence is an attribute of popular song that people have complained about for a long time. In 1839 a correspondent to the Boston Musical Gazette, calling himself Roderick Rondelay, wrote disparagingly about a visit to the “village of B” where one of the rustic village girls asked him to sing “a pretty love song about murder.” But even the sacred music Rondelay preferred could be pretty bloody. We still sing the hymns of Isaac Watts championed by Peter’s 18th century cousin Jonathan Edwards and the other “River Gods.” Maybe there’s something about the feeling of gravity that’s attractive as an antidote to going around as if everything was fine. I wouldn’t call Two Sisters a beautiful song, and I remember a tour in England on which Peter and I used instruments borrowed from someone who was “away for a while” after having taken the story too much to heart. But, along with As She Sank She Rose Again, I think it resonates sympathetically with bits of Shakespeare and old comics- probably manga too, which my son Iś likes- and it has a chorus.

     The horror of The Fitchburg Tragedy feels more present than literary, but the song attracted me because I was born there, about an hour’s drive from where I live now, and another thirty or forty minutes from Pumpkintown depending on which Dunkin you turn at.  I hope Amelia provides some hope and a respite, which was part of the design. It started out a long time ago as a detail in an architectural drawing I made as part of a performance piece exploring local history and resonance, under the influence of composer Alvin Lucier and architect Ben Ledbetter. I went to Wesleyan University to further my study of Karnatak singing with the great T. Viswanathan and in hope of studying with Alvin, but ended up mostly focusing on shapenote music and a study of a nineteenth century New England singing tradition called the “old folks’ concert.”  Although I didn’t do as much “new music” there as I meant to, I eventually got to take a class with Anthony Braxton, T.A.’d by Tyshawn Sorey, and for a while I rode around on a bike from a tag sale at Alvin and Wendy’s in a pair of David Tudor’s motorcycle boots, rescued from a dumpster with the help of our composer friend Matt Rogalsky. I’ve told the story of my encounter with Amelia Clark elsewhere. The song I named for her is in a couple of shapenote books that people like singing from. 

     In the Spring of 1777, Timothy Connor set sail out of Boston on a cod fishing boat, and when a storm made it impossible to get back into the harbor the crew voted to sail east and go privateering off the coast of England instead. They apparently did alright for a while, until a much larger British man-o-war overtook their little nine-gun boat. I’ve always thought nine cannons was a lot for cod fishing, but what do I know. Connor wrote down words to I Wish The Wars Were All Over and Boston in the diary he kept while incarcerated at Forton Prison in Plymouth, and I adapted and wrote some music for them. I believe he came home alive for a while. Some of Connor’s story appears in A Sailor’s Songbag by Professor Carey, whom I knew a little when he lived down the street from Peter’s dad’s place on Juggler Meadow, where we used to practice in the basement.

     Sometimes I think Aber Dojde Donke is the best song I know. I had hoped to include it on the album Drumovi by another band Peter and I played in, Žabe I Babe, in collaboration with the Macedonian group Ansambl Teodosievski. But they only had a couple of days off in the middle of Esma Redžepova’s tour that summer, so we had to do it all in one day. We recorded it up in Shutesbury, of all places, and driving there through Leverett the trumpet player, Zahir, asked in broken Serbo-Croatian “where the hell are we going? In Šutko there’s a recording studio on every corner!” Any bits I understand of Macedonian are filtered through my poor command of Serbo-Croatian, but the general idea is that the girl gets a letter from the Aga summoning her to his court. The other girls will eat onions and vinegar (“luk i ocet,” the same in a bunch of Slavic languages), but she will eat young lamb with the Aga, in the tower. It’s often the penultimate song in the magic lantern show, Pumpkintown, that Peter and I do with our painter friend Susan Brearey. I guess you have to begin to end somewhere.

     This morning I booked a flight to Dublin for a tour singing the songs and celebrating the life (ongoing!) of our dear friend and inspired musical thinker, Martin Carthy, with his daughter, and my bandmate, Eliza. Of course, I’d rather be listening to him sing those songs. Hopefully next trip. Meanwhile, I’ll have to settle for audio recordings, and I’m glad Martin has made a bunch of them. (One of Braxton’s watchwords was “document!”) I’m glad Peter and I have made some too: some old folk songs with Steve Albini, punk rock with the great Mark Alan Miller, the Bosnian stuff we did in Shutesbury, a couple of film scores, the Naamaara sisters’ Oromo gospel music we recorded in my basement in Minneapolis, stuff with our preacher friend Dwight Diller, whose focus and groove remains a beacon. There’s even one album, Josh Billings Voyage, that features Silas and his cousin Patience (Pat) on a few tracks, although it’s hard to come by because it was only ever available in places where we hid it. As far as I know there’s still a couple in a banyan tree at the botanical garden in Singapore, one under the Androscoggin Bridge, in a cactus in Milis, Sardinia, one near the grave of Rev D. H. Mansfield- a bunch of places. I wrote my address on them, so drop me a line if you find one.

      I’m glad Barry Diament asked us to make this recording, Absence and her sister, and I love how he recorded it. Singers and bands and whole styles of music have come and gone since the last recording. Something that’s always bugged me is how come we all seem to recognize the difference between an apple and a picture of an apple, but not always the difference between music and a recording of music? It’s strange. 

     Tim Eriksen. Amherst. February.