Shadowbahn(62)

tracks 22 and 23:


    “A Change Is Gonna Come” and “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted”


The first song because any national discography that excludes it invalidates itself, and the second because when the singer sings, As I walk this land of broken dreams, it becomes clear that the thing breaking his heart is the very land itself that he walks.





tracks 24 and 25:


    “Oh Shenandoah” and “O Souverain”


Both songs are recorded by the most famous singer who ever lived on the night of either February 23 or February 25, 1971—although it’s not clear if both are on the same night or over the two nights—near the end of the singer’s third engagement at Las Vegas’s then-named International Hotel, later the Las Vegas Hilton. No physical recording, as far as is known, exists on vinyl, disc, or tape, the performances only surfacing on YouTube without visual accompaniment but for a still photo that may or may not have been taken before the performances disappeared into thin air as ruthlessly and mysteriously as they appeared. There is no accompaniment other than the singer playing piano, and speculation has it, based on the regrettable sound quality, which suggests a rudimentary tape recorder and too much plush carpeting, that this rendition of the songs occurs in suite 3000, his hotel penthouse. Given the singer’s release the following year of a track called “An American Trilogy”—a mash-up of spirituals and national folk tunes including “Dixie,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “All My Trials”—it’s somewhat surprising that the singer never committed to more professional documentation “Oh Shenandoah,” the great national metamorphosis song, originally a musical bulletin from the American future sent back to the nineteenth century from across the wide Missouri River, a hundred songs in one depending on who sang it or when it was heard over the past two hundred years: pioneer song, sailing song, slave song, Confederate song, French trader’s love song for his Indian bride. The flip side, “O Souverain,” is as startling as “Oh Shenandoah” seems obvious and arguably the single strangest recording made by the singer, even acknowledging formidable competition from the likes of “Yoga Is as Yoga Does,” a 1967 duet with a sixty-five-year-old British actress best known for playing the Bride of Frankenstein three decades earlier, and 1968’s “Dominic the Impotent Bull” (Moo, moo, move your little foot, do) from a forgotten movie called Stay Away, Joe. As far as is authenticated by any historical log or record, no indication exists in the form of personal or written testimony or any witness’s account that the singer would in any way be familiar with a fin-de-siècle French aria that’s part prayer and part plea, even as an excursion into the European quasi-classical isn’t unprecedented; upon his discharge from the army a decade before, he turned a Naples serenade into what was, at the time and under a different title, his biggest hit yet and reportedly his favorite recording, and then turned another classical piece written before the French Revolution into an even bigger hit, also under a different title. The Neapolitan “O sole mio,” however, not only was already familiar to American audiences [It’s now or never, sings the presidential candidate to himself, having heard it on his balcony falling like rain from a missing piece of the sky] but already was Americanized in an earlier version by another singer at the end of the forties, while the French “Plaisir d’amour” has a hymnlike melody to which one can’t help falling in love, so haunting as to have inspired through the centuries composers and authors from Berlioz to Hesse. “O Souverain,” on the other hand—a musical bulletin from the American future sent back to the twentieth century—won’t attain currency with American music fans in any configuration until another decade later and after the singer’s death, and then not by way of the singer’s rendering, unknown for still another thirty years, but rather the interpretation of a female performance artist from the Midwest who translates and assimilates the aria into a larger eight-minute surrealist soundscape that itself is part of an eight-hour opus titled United States. Twenty years after its release and thirty years after this subterranean recording by the singer so famous that it seems nothing in his life or music could still have been subterranean, the same performance artist from the Midwest performs the song in the same city where she recorded it, just days and miles from the obliteration of that city’s World Trade Center, to audible gasps from the audience when she sings the lines, Here come the planes, so you better get ready. Is the most famous singer who ever lived gripped by a prophecy he doesn’t know, voicing this aria that he has no reason to know—or does he decide, as well he might, that the true prophecy remains “Oh Shenandoah” (Roll away, you rolling river), a conclusion reached by the singer only upon finishing the song, closing his eyes, closing the keyboard on the piano, exiting the suite, making his way in his private elevator down to the Vegas Strip, stepping into the limousine waiting for him, and, from the backseat, hearing the sound of a train in the distance. Turning to the window and for a moment forgetting that his other half is nothing but a fetal shell once curled in an old shoe box on a kitchen table beside the bed where his mother gave birth to her sons, and for a moment forgetting all the times over the years that he has visited the small, unmarked grave back in Tupelo’s Priceville Cemetery where he would wonder how it is that he’s the one who made it instead, he whispers “Jesse?” so inaudibly that he cannot even be certain whether he hopes his brother answers.