When A Songwriter Dies

When A Songwriter Dies They come in uhauls dragging their hopes and heartaches. They come on Greyhounds with a bus ticket and a beat up guitar and the address of a friend that has a couch. They come with the certainty of sinners at salvation's gate. Sure that the right musical confession sung with just the right amount of hope and regret will swing the doors open. So they squeeze their talent until the last drop finds its way into their choruses. The Bible says that its easier for a rich man to fit thru the eye of a needle than into heaven. The eye of a needle’s got nothing on Music City. It’s more like a needle in the eye. But still they come and dream and pay some with the loneliness that any dream demands. Sometimes they even suffer. Sleep in a car for a few weeks, get a little hungry in their stomachs and eyes. Each trying to write something elusive and worthy of what they feel ghosting around in themselves. And some, reckoning that their own odds are no better than the lottery, eventually pack up the uhaul or climb back onto the bus. They go home and get married and have kids and begin to dream like normal folks do. In anniversaries instead of three minute slivers. But those that remain stay because they have discovered their vocation. They learn to listen to their own confessions for the hint of some melody. They drag it down onto yellow paper and capture it in the web of six strings. They learn to wrestle the truth from themselves and in so doing touch the truth about any stranger within earshot. They may never break thru to the radio masses. But they move people in ones and twos. In dusty barrooms and deserted writer rounds. Places where, sometimes, against all odds, a listener will feel their toes tap or their throat thicken. Sometimes their eyes glisten. Sometimes they hear part of themselves they had forgotten in a verse or rediscover some sunken faith floating to the surface of a chorus. Old songwriters, the genuine ones, are always a little like priests. Many are married to the music. Most take a vow of poverty. And all are driven by an unending faith in the mystery of creation. Their greatest songs are like prayers. A little holy, a little weary, they ask us to remember what's buried in our memories. Waiting to be resurrected. Ray Sisk was like that. Him singing felt like you were listening to God’s juke box. A small miracle. The fleeting kind. I always liked his song Glory Road. It felt like something beyond him was winking at us all beneath the words. Ray died today. That's a sad thing. This town is a little quieter now. Maybe a little colder too. But though Ray died, he didn’t pass away. Old songwriters, the ones who accept the vocation...who give themselves over to it completely, have a way of remaining. They leave their tracks in small remembered phrases and snatches of melodies that come from God knows where and stay with us God knows how. Don’t tell my church but I’m a heretic. I’m not much for their purgatory or limbo or even hell. I'm not the burn you at the stake kind, though there's probably an executive order for it on the drawing board. I like to think each of us is just some light that got trapped inside dust for a time. The best part of us is slowed by flesh and bone, by the weight of human frailty and it's attendant vanities. Then, finally free from the failures of our flesh, we resume at the speed of light. I've been chasing that light trapped in me for as long as I can recall. So I choose to think of this not as Ray's end, not as his death, but instead as kicking off the training wheels. Getting his soul up to its true speed again. Life may be short, but it's also slow. All this waiting on what's right. Crawling toward what's true. Now he's running 186000 miles per second toward salvation. That's the gospel according to me. King James should add it. The Book of Irish Divinity. So Ray won’t be around, but he won’t be gone either. Not really. He will join the acapella chorus of unheard songs that, far from the Opry stage, fill Brown’s or Bobby’s or the Bluebird. The kind of voices that still echo in bars and alleyways off Music Row if you know how to listen for them. And this week, once more, some wore out innocent will step back up on a Greyhound or rent a uhaul. He will decide this song lottery isn’t to be, or that his three chords will never sound quite true enough. He will decide that 40 hours and a desk somewhere is the price of looking into his child’s eyes. And he will pass the new recruits rolling into town on buses and the interstate, just like it was Glory Road. They will be hopeful and hungry and trying to wrest the very best from themselves, praying in 4/4 time that somehow it will be good enough. And Ray will be here still. Waiting for them all. Quietly singing. At the speed of light. WLM