Shadowbahn(52)

tracks 18 and 19:


    “Stormy Weather” and “Where or When”


Written during the great national crisis of the thirties, both are answers to the great national crisis of the forties, whose other songs so palpably and desperately promise “I’ll be seeing you” and “We’ll meet again,” when no one can bring themselves to reply, You won’t, and We can’t, except on some Other Side of love or life that’s either celestial or earthly. The human heart commits its greatest treachery by healing. It commits its greatest treachery by surviving the love that was supposed to last forever, that was supposed to be the heart’s burden into eternity, only for that burden to be laid down by too much time and, worse, too much banality, too much of everything that’s beneath love, not good enough for love. Though “Stormy Weather” is composed at the depths of Depression gloom as the New Deal is being born, its signature recording comes in a year when the country goes to war, the singer a former Cotton Club chorus-line beauty who’s part black, part white, and part American Indian, a great-great-granddaughter on her mother’s side of John Calhoun, America’s most virulent defender of slavery before the Civil War. Since its melody is written by a Jewish kid from New York—like so many other American Songbook authors—who also writes “Over the Rainbow” and “Come Rain or Come Shine,” it would be logical to assume he has meteorology on the brain, but he doesn’t pen the words (or titles) of any of these songs, so something in his music with its portents of clouds and precipitation and shimmer would seem to bring out the climatic in his three entirely different collaborators. (It might also be noted that the composer is the surviving twin of a brother who died within twenty-four hours of childbirth.) Striking a chord with an America yearning for the “innocence” that subsequent commentators always suggest the country has “lost” but that never was there to begin with, “Where or When” channels the lexicon of recollection that becomes bittersweet only when you’re finally as old as I am and your time is marked most by the children who follow, like my children mark mine. “I think,” I tried to tell my son once, “that even as the body ages, the psyche settles into whatever was your best moment, the moment when you most came into your own and fulfilled your clearest sense of who you are, when everything about you fell into the best alignment it will ever know” [Parker has no recollection of this conversation, and wouldn’t know what his father was talking about in any case]. Maybe it’s the same for a country, its psyche clinging to whenever was fulfilled its clearest sense of itself. On Broadway, “Where or When” is originally and inexplicably sung by someone too young to sing such a song. But then, from my increasingly wintry perspective I’ve come to realize that all the great songs are sung by someone too young, who can’t remember that once romantic love, as opposed to a parent’s love, seemed so powerful that he thought he could die for it, only to realize in the lengthening shade of the coming end that some such loves nearly have slipped memory altogether. Seems we stood and talked like this before . . . but I can’t remember . . . All the young singers, what the f*ck do they know? But sometimes the songs know more than either the young singers or the young songwriters, those teams of boys writing the Great American Songbook, pairs of young men always from New York writing the great musical album for a white, Manhattan-male nation, writing all they know of a nation’s longings and dashed fulfillments—which is to say there’s a shadow songbook somewhere, clandestine in plain earshot, written from other parts of the country also in plain earshot, of other genders and colors. When black fifteen-year-old Eleanora Fagan from other-side-of-the-Hudson Philly by way of Baltimore, the daughter of a single unwed mother and undetermined father, sings “I’ll Be Seeing You” (from yet another musical written by yet another pair of young New York men), you can hold her singing to the flame of whatever candles flicker at the Alhambra club or Pod’s & Jerry’s in Harlem and there burns into earshot the words and melody of that other songbook along with the singer’s shadow name—Billie—which overtakes her real one like wildfire. She dies in a hospital under arrest, handcuffed to her deathbed, her legend the one thing that can’t be taken into custody. Writing and singing these songs while confronting the greatest human conflagration the world has known, was everyone already grown old? Was everyone already weary beyond their years? And what then of the songs on this millennium’s birth, that second-to-last Tuesday morning of summer in that first year of the twenty-first century? Is anyone now really old enough to write or sing them?





the near song


A couple of months from now, long enough after returning to Upper Saskatchewan that they might almost forget the Twin Towers ever were in the Badlands, or that the couple ever drove the thousand miles to see them, Traci wakes one night to the song that she and her wife heard there. She sits up from her bed in the dark trying to determine where it comes from. It sounds so near as to almost be next to her, she thinks.

? ? ?

Then she realizes that the song is next to her, when she looks over at Linda, her head on the pillow and sightless eyes wide open, lips pursed and the song curling from her mouth like smoke. It really gets bad ’round midnight, memories always start. In terror, Traci bolts from their bed and to the edge of the room; the song from Linda’s mouth isn’t in Linda’s voice or any voice that Traci recognizes. It has no gender or race. The song is in its own voice.