Now are come the days of brown leaves
They fall from the trees, they flutter on the ground,
When the brown leaves flutter they are saying little things.
They talk with the wind.
I hear them tell of their borning days when they did come into the world as leaves. …
Today they were talking of the time before their borning days of this springtime.
They talked on and on and I did listen on to
What they were telling the wind and the earth in their whisperings.
They told how they were a part of earth and air before their tree-borning days.
And now they are going back.
In gray days of winter they go back to the earth again.
But they do not die.
The diary of Opal Whiteley, age 6
Sung by Anne Hills, music by Michael Smith
W
e have clocks to let us know that time is driving forward, and the sun rises and sets on another day, bookended by dreams. But none of this has quite the impact of the year turning from summer to fall.
For some, the changing season kindles excitement. The cooler air brings them out of their summer torpor. They feel alive again, eager for the holidays.
But for me it engenders elegy. Autumn signals the dying of what I love: the life that burst forth so hopefully just six months aft.
Not everything I love is dying, however. Last Thursday, on the evening of the autumnal equinox, Anne Hills performed in the Veterans Room of the public library, providing a gentle reminder of how much I love folk music.
Most musical genres maintain an uneasy relationship between words and tune. With rap, words are dominant. In opera, the emotional exhilaration of the aria is seldom matched by the lyrics. With rock and roll, words often seem an afterthought, almost a necessary evil. Musical theater establishes a better balance, but true fusion takes place in folk music. Melody, voice, and lyrics blend with equal value.
Folk songs aim to capture the sacredness of the ordinary (as Joyce put it), chronicling the lives of the kind of folks Garrison Keillor read notes from during Prairie Home Companion. Folk songs, or as Hills calls them, storysongs (or was it songstories?) celebrate nature and the seasons. They convey a strong yearning for justice, saved from scolding by self-humbling humor.
I don’t know if I would love folk music so much if I heard it often, but I don’t. Whenever I come upon it, therefore, the effect is tonic, soothing, a reminder of how creative unpretentiously simple music can be.
Other genres have their place and claim on my affections. The previous Saturday evening, I spent a pleasant hour listening to Nikki Lane, the final act of this year’s Oaktoberfest. Louder, bluesier, accompanied and amplified, Lane’s forceful voice commands attention. That night summer reigned, the aroma of stale beer and cigarettes hanging in the air, evoking memories of baseball stadiums.
Hills’ effortless contralto, on the other hand, is never overpowered by instrumentation (guitar alternating with banjo), her content more poetic, less driven by all that remains unresolved in the human heart. Rock and roll chronicles the internal storm, folk the calm after. It has more in common with the poet’s solitary daily walk along the ocean, emotion recollected in tranquility (as Wordsworth put it), but set to music.
And it evokes that elegiac mood I feel each fall, intensified now by age.
Most of the hundred-plus in attendance this equinox evening had grey in their hair, as does Hills. Her appearance was one of a series of folk concerts made possible by Nancy Clark and her late husband Peter, a gift to the community.
Occasionally, Hills encouraged clapping, but I was there to luxuriate in her voice and the shared consciousness she taps. We’re not that different, one from another, the songs seem to say, though some of us have harder lives. The need to come together, to tell and hear stories through song, is ancient, and just as strong as in our storied past.
I wonder if our songstorytellersinger realizes the spell she casts, which happily we huddled under. The consensual act of listening and witnessing helps us understand our lives better by hearing what strangers sing about theirs, momentarily raising the lives we lead to the level of art.
This is one of the reasons major holidays are meaningful — because we know so many others, in some fashion, are celebrating them too. That’s why it’s more meaningful to “go to” movies instead of watching at home alone — because we view them in community.
Life is more meaningful when we raise our eyes from the sidewalk or from our smartphones and notice that our path has room for multitudes, room possibly for everyone.
The year is turning toward winter, the season of deep sleep mimicking death, buffered by autumn, the season of enlivening and dying. Fixed as we are in the seasonal cycle of death and regeneration, that’s not a problem. It’s only an issue in a cycle that runs from birth to death, which happens to be where our lives seem stuck — until we experience some small hint of regeneration that makes us wonder if, or tempts us to believe that, there might be a larger regeneration awaiting all of us on the far side of dying.
Squirrels scurrying to bury nuts seem to believe. Sandhill cranes, flying south in November and north again in March, seem to believe. Leaves, which burst into color then fade to brown, seem to believe. Roses, still flowering into fall, seem to believe.
Storysongs and songstories, too, capture our borning days of springtime and whisper softly of regeneration.
