From an interview conducted with Kenneth Hallenius at Notre Dame’s De Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. Original article here. Due to the strictures of space, they could only use some of the quotes—my full answers are here.
1) How did you first come to encounter Flannery O'Connor's writing? Did she play a role in your studies as an English major?
In undergrad, a few of us had an afternoon reader's theatre--I was reading stuff like Tolkien's Homecoming of Beohrtnoth Beohrthelm's Son (based on the Battle of Maldon, which I later wrote and published on), and a friend brought O'Connor's "Good Country People." The next semester, Dr. Gene Veith had us read "Revelation," "A Good Man is Hard to Find," and The Violent Bear It Away for a class. I could tell right away that O'Connor was good, but I wasn't sure if I liked her.
After I graduated, I worked part-time while I waited to go to Infantry School with the Army, so I had a lot of time on my hands and took the opportunity to read the rest of her short stories, Wise Blood, and her letters and essays. Mystery and Manners was a revelation for me and fell in line with what I'd been reading in Benedict XVI's Spirit of the Liturgy--for someone who was raised on 90s evangelical art, it was a gigantic shift from a salvation narrative-driven art to the confidence that the union of flesh and logos in the Incarnation baptized all human action. This opened up a much wider realm of artistic exploration. I decided I did like her, and her essays and short stories particularly.2) There's been a resurgence in interest in O'Connor lately, with a 2019 documentary, a 2023 PBS special, your album, and an Ethan Hawke-directed movie on the way. From your perspective, why is she so fascinating?
There are a lot of reasons she's fascinating to creatives in general--she's also had a lasting influence on songwriters over the decades (Irwin Streight's recent Flannery at the Grammys goes into this in-depth). Bruce Springsteen wrote his Nebraska album after an O'Connor binge and cites her as an influence; Lucinda Williams does, as well (and she once visited Andalusia with her poet father while Flannery was still alive). I can also think of a rapper, a German EDM group, an indie-rock artist, and a hardcore rock group that reference her, with varying depth. Martin McDonagh gives her a subtle but clear shout-out in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
I think her influence lies in her focus on and mastery of dealing with huge themes in the microcosm of real people--I like to oppose her to Faulkner in parallel with John Prine v. Bob Dylan or Robert Frost v. T.S. Eliot. Like Prine and Frost, O'Connor is content to simply tell the stories of people and let their actions and language--and she had a mastery of the spoken language around her--speak for them, without feeling the need to mythologize them or even tie them explicitly or implicitly to bigger ideas she had in mind. As she wrote in Mystery and Manners: “When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it." Where folks like Eliot, Faulkner, and Dylan defamiliarize by means of language and image, O'Connor, Prine, and Frost do it by forcing the reader to look at the parts and people of everyday life we tend to ignore.
Now, her willingness to use the language of everyday folks can also get her into trouble, and was at times problematic--or just plain wrong. I was asked during the presentation at Notre Dame why, given recent controversies (the unspoken part was "controversies over the depth of her racism"), she is still relevant. I do think it's an important question, and I don't think O'Connor's a saint. While she was happy to make fun of the KKK and Gone with the Wind and even undermined some racist attitudes in, say, "Revelation," her letters betray some attitudes that I don't think can be explained away. I also find it significant that she will, quite often, edit her characters when they're "cussing" (Bailey Boy in "Good Man," Parker in "Parker's Back"), but is fine with quoting them using "n_____." All that to say, I don't think she's anti-racist, and this is a worthwhile discussion to have--better folks than I, like Alice Walker, Hilton Als, and Amy Alzenauer have written on this carefully and with more complexity than I can here.
For myself, I would like Tarwater to be seen not as an outright celebration of O'Connor, but as a tribute to her for the influence she's had on me and so many others in forcing us to see--both what she's forced us to see (which is limited in some ways to her time and place), and how (which extends on into our time and beyond). Writing the songs was fairly easy--growing up Pentecostal with rural Southern family, I know or have been a lot of her characters at one point or another, and the songs take the characters' perspective, while also picking apart their internal conflicts.In the sense of broader cultural worth: I'm fine with taking her off some of the pedestals, but I do think she's worth studying, both in a historical sense for the wide-ranging influence she's had in the arts, for the moment of cultural shift that she lived through and exposed, and for how she explicated her artistic vision and its ties to both faith and region. Her literary strength was also her social weakness: she was concerned with what is, and largely ignored the consideration of what could be in a society. But good Lord, did she see clearly that what is.
3) Your album, Tarwater, features at least two songs that are directly inspired by the story "Parker's Back." What is it about this particular story that fascinates you?
Yes, two distinct songs, one recorded twice in very different ways. I think what first caught me about "Parker's Back" was how it embodies her entire artistic philosophy, which followed from her centering the Incarnation in her theology and the Sacrament in her practice. Again, for someone raised Pentecostal and Southern Baptist (with a sojourn in conservative Presbyterianism), this was a revelation.
But I think what stuck with me is the characters. I've been Parker in many ways--a returned veteran (my discharge was honorable, though) and worker of odd jobs. He's running from the folks whose love was on their own strict and religious terms, in search of a love that would receive him and make him whole--the external actions that got him closest couldn't match up to him owning himself as himself.
And it's hilarious, even when it's grim. But then, I thought Moby Dick was hilarious when I was 12: like O'Connor, "I was a very ancient twelve; my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran."4) Several tracks on Tarwater, particularly "A New Tattoo", remind me very much of some of the best of Dwight Yoakam's discography. Who would you say your own musical influences are?
Identifying influences is always entertaining--I've recently been compared to Dwight Yoakam (several times) and Ray Wylie Hubbard, neither of whom had I listened to before that. But I suspect we're working off of similar roots, which has been my creative research philosophy for a long time: when I was younger and wanted to write like Tolkien, I didn't study Tolkien, but the sagas and Eddas and Old English poems and the Kalevala and the Enuma Elish.Little of that medievalism stuck past my twenties, but I took that same philosophy over to songwriting. Old Crow Medicine Show and Furnace Mountain and Johnny Cash became doorways to Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie and Jimmie Rodgers, who led to Ola Belle Reed and Blind Willie Johnson and the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Joe and Odell Thompson and innumerable anonymous or uncredited writers of the American folk tradition. It's less artists and more songs (and, in the folk tradition, their variations): "Dink's Song" is an absolute favorite (Furnace Mountain's is a recent, but favorite recording), I've known "John Henry" since I was 4 or 5, and "Swannanoa Tunnel" is a recent favorite.
But I can say that "Parker's Back" was absolutely written after a John Prine binge.
Articles on O'Connor and race
Hilton Als: "This Lonesome Place"
Alice Walker (From "Beyond the Peacock"--the whole essay is well worth a read)
Amy Alzenauer
Songs:
"Dink's Song" (Recording)
"John Henry"
Foc si Muzica cu Prietenii
I've been in Romania for the last week, visiting friends in Cluj, Sibiu, and Fagaras.
Many thanks to Dusty Blake for arranging shows at the Beer Cafe and Restaurant in Fagaras and Imperium Cafe in Sibiu--a basement venue with some awesome vaulted brick ceilings. Dusty is one of the few Americana artists in an area dominated by EDM, and he's got good taste, ranging from covers of Johnny Cash, Hayes Carll, and Leonard Cohen (not Hallelujah).
I managed to land in Sibiu just in time for the International Theater festival, and we were treated to a spectacular fire show and experimental musician who made music with everything from his electric guitar and looper to a drumstick run across the grill of his mic, to a set of contraptions dangling from the gazebo, while a bunch of metal figurines spun their legs crazily and reflected the light of the surrounding flames. During the day, dancing troupes and their crowds filled the streets.
Sibiu's old town is rows of red-tile roofed buildings, centered on the fan-cobbled Piata Mare (Great Square), with the town hall at one corner and the Sfante Treime (Holy Trinity) Catholic church flanking it, while the high steeple of St. Michael's Evangelical Church dominates the whole town, surrounded by the old city walls.
It's been good to get back into the practice of the limba Romana; I'd forgotten more than I realized, but it came back quickly. Linguistic mishaps go both ways--a friend laughingly asked me why I was asking for "onion of the pig"--ceafa for neck, not ceapa--but then he pointed to an apartment and said, "I live in that erection."
Today I walked the 2 miles out to Astra Park, which is full of restored traditional buildings from around Romania, from the crosses carved with roping, to roofs of split shingles or thatch, walls of stone, wood, or wood and plaster, and fencing made of woven withes. At 7.50 lei (about 2 dollars), it's well worth a visit for anyone, whether you're interested in folk styles of construction or just looking for a large area where the kids can let off some steam while you have a nice walk.
You might even see a donkey.
Hitching and Hiking and Mulling it Over
I picked up a few hitch-hikers in Romania last year, got proposed to by a few single mothers, and so decided when I landed on the Isle of Mull that it was worth giving it a go myself. That and the bus to Tobermory’s youth hostel had just left and the next wasn’t for another 2 hours.
I started walking with my pack, banjo, and guitar on my back, and then I saw the road sign for Tobermory. 21 miles. Well, at least it wasn’t raining—I knew better than to say this out loud, but I was certainly thinking it.
Every time I heard the hum of a car’s wheels behind me, I turned, flashed out the thumb, and watched them go by--Audis, Peugeots, Skodas, BMWs, camp vans, etc. I just sort of grinned and enjoyed the scenery. The flowers were blooming, it was cool, cloudy weather, and it wasn’t raining.
I’d covered about half a mile when I saw the next bus stop and re-checked. That’s when I noticed the bus didn’t even stop at this point, but did at the next stop. Well, I thought, that could make things interesting.
The Dun da Gaoithe, “Fort of the Two Winds,” stretched high above to my left, sloping from high, rusty ridges down into green fields and dark conifers until I reached the broadleaf forest spotted with purple flowers and the occasional dark green of the gorse, decorated with golden flowers. Waves from the Sound of Mull slapped against the rocky coast. After about a mile and a half, I came to a large stand of gorse, sweet-smelling as coconut macaroons, and then a golf course, signs for eagle-watching, and a parking lot with a few cars for bird-watchers to park.
I heard a Scottish voice to my right: “Where are you heading then?”
A lady was standing behind her car, waving at me.
“Tobermory.”
“Come on then. Come on, we’ll give you a ride.”
Gratefully, I headed on over. “Paula’s my name,” she said, extending her hand, “and this is my husband, Glenn.”
“I’m Colin; thanks for the lift.”
“Aye, we saw you back there and figured if you still wanted a lift, we’d give it to you.” She grinned.
“Well, that’s kind of you!”
So we chatted on the way, as the road wound higher up on the shoulders of the hills (that would have been a lot less fun to walk), and we knew some of the same places in York and Virginia both.
“Well, you’ve got guts doing that,” Glenn said. “My dad and I used to hitch hike all the time, but no one does that anymore.”
“Well,” I said, “I figure you meet a lot more interesting people that way.”
“Ha, that’s true,” he said. “And it makes sense when everyone’s heading the same way anyway.”
They dropped me off at the hostel. “You already have a bed?”
I grinned. “Not yet, but I’ll sort it. Thanks, and I’ll see you about town. Just look for the guy with the banjo.”
"Right then. It's not supposed to rain tonight, either."
UPDATE: The hostel had a bed. And I got a gig at the bar across the bay on Thursday.
The Strait and Narrow
Growing up, you probably heard a lot about “staying on the straight and narrow.” About the time of my life I took a flying leap off that path, I also realized two things: 1) I liked driving back roads and 2) the original phrase is “strait is the gate and narrow is the way.” “Strait” like “narrow like the straits of Gibraltar,” not “straight like an arrow.”
I quickly figured out, thanks to those Virginia backroads, that the narrow way is rarely straight. It winds along the shoulders of hills and down creekbottoms, shoots up a ridge and leaves your stomach behind as it dives down the other side, is closed in by trees, then opens up into a meadow where you can see clear to the folds of the Blue Ridge. You pass old stone houses, time-blackened hog parlors, and country stores that advertise “Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and Bait.”
I took back roads from Charlotte to Durham yesterday and stopped in Randleman to see the grave of “Little Omie Wise,” after whose murder in 1807 one of the most famous American ballads was written. After an overnight stop to hit an open mic with an old friend, Alan Barnosky (whose Old Freight, by the by, is a fantastic piece of songwriting and flatpicking both), I started heading north to Virginia. I stopped at the Lawson Family graves, at the corner of Brooks Cove Road and Rt. 8 in Stokes County. Listen to the Stanley Brothers tell the story here.
I’m still on Route 8, stopped at the Floyd Country Store for lunch as I’m passing through the heart of oldtime music territory. I’ve got a head full of songs and am doing my best to capture them on paper.
Collecting Thoughts
As a writer and English major, I’ve made a hobby of thinking about the concrete meanings of phrases, but it wasn’t until the last couple months I started thinking about the phrase “collecting my thoughts.”
Thoughts are sort of like luggage on a long roadtrip. You pack the night before, underwear neatly folded and placed beside your rolled socks and shirts and jacket, your duffle bag beside your backpack and a box of snacks with a water bottle and thermos of coffee. Your guitar and banjo fit perfectly in the back seat.
After a couple days, you realize that dirty socks are starting to poke out of corners of your duffle bag, there are crumbs on the carpet (or there would be if the Walgreen’s and Hardee’s bags weren’t in the way), and you’re not quite sure where you put your flashlight.
The next morning, you discover that the neighbor’s cat stowed away, the thermos is on a countertop somewhere in west Texas, dirty socks have started crawling from underneath your seat, you’re eating grubs, and the engine has started sounding like an 80s punk band.
By the time you get home, you start to smell the offerings the cat left in your glovebox, your shirt is in rags, and you’re barefoot. And the car’s on fire.
Anyway, our thoughts get scattered when we’re stressed or constantly on the move, and we often don’t have or make time to capture the things we’re encountering, or think about where we're heading. I’ve been on the road or in planes or in school pretty constantly for the last 3 years, and I’m just now sitting down to collect my thoughts—to clean out from underneath the seats, throw away the stuff that needs trashed, clean off the flashlight and put new batteries in it, return my neighbor’s cat, and actually take the photos off my camera and put them in an album, and put the memories onto paper. That’s it’s own adventure.
On another note, we were joined at our almost-snowed-out show at Greensboro's Common Grounds by an Ohio native you should check out. Gretchen Pleuss is one of those songwriters who manages to encompass worlds. The music and singing is at once grounded and ethereal, solid and airy, with her acoustic guitar work underpinning sound samples, hypnotic electric guitar riffs and chimes. Her songwriting is both intricate and insightful, with lines like:
Days pass like kidney stones around here
But each new year comes faster than before
Do feelings change with passing time
Or age like wine for richer or for poor? ("Noah and the Ark," From Birth, to Breath, to Bone)
Further, she freely jumps from the mythic ("Waves Like Drums") to literary ("Jane Eyre") to the local ("Noah and the Ark") and embodied ("The Unknown"): from Moher to Ohio to "The parts of me that neither one of us can understand/ It's in the way I hold my head and how I clench my hands." I'll be listening to From Birth, to Breath, to Bone, and Out of Dreams for a while.
On the Road Again
The Peacock Feathers EP tour is off to a roaring start. It opened with a Saturday show in the upper room of Jack’s Run Brewing, a block from where I used to live in Purcellville. The building’s ghost only flickered the bathroom lights a couple times during the show.
On Sunday, I gave a presentation on the history and influences of Appalachian folk music, including a sing-along of “Tom Dooley,” because every kid needs a murder ballad in their repertoire. Also, while doing some research for the presentation, I found that the writer of one of my favorite Sacred Harp tunes, “Idumea,” was a Virginian. Ananias Davison was from Shenandoah County and published Kentucky Harmony in Harrisonburg in 1816 (no word on why it was called Kentucky Harmony).
Getting to play Richmond on the Camel stage was an awesome opportunity to meet some other songwriters and hang out with some Army buddies. I did the tourist thing the next morning with a visit to the VMFA’s display of the terra cotta warriors of Ying Zheng, emperor of the Qin. The 8 figures were striking in their detail—the fired-clay robes still had folds in them, and the archers were tense. If you’re around Richmond, definitely stop in.
After a stop at the Blue Note Grill for BBQ and dancing with a friend, I got into Greensboro just in time be snowed in, but the mistakes I made in my early driving in Nebraska served me well enough that I made it to my gig at Common Grounds. Just drop it to 3rd and keep under 25. Despite the snow, we had a full house, as the Rinaldi Flying Circus, Farewell Friend, myself, and new friend Gretchen Pleuss played to folks who walked in from the neighborhood around.
This morning, I worked on a new instrumental, then got a call from a friend to see if I wanted to help shovel snow for a bit of cash. There’s all sorts of ways of making money, some more honest than others. Anyhow, it’s on to Carrboro on Friday, Winston-Salem on Saturday, and Greensboro’s Scuppernong Books on Sunday before a hiatus I’ll spend with family and at open mics. Then Lynchburg on the 26th and Richmond again on the 28th before I head back north.
See you on the road!
A Big, Kickin' Thank You!
"When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business."
~Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being
There are two kinds of humbling experiences I've had--the kind where you're prideful enough that the universe needs to take you down a couple notches, and the kind where you're prideful enough to not believe in what it is you're supposed to be doing, and then you get faced with the evidence that YES, THIS IS, NOW STOP WHINING AND DO IT.
A few years ago, when playing at King's Court Tavern in Leesburg, I had the first kind of experience. I had driven back up after a recent move to North Carolina, and it was my first solo full-length bar gig. A bunch of college and music friends came out, and I'd been playing about half an hour when I looked around to notice that they were all talking and laughing and joking and catching up. But what ran through my head in that moment wasn't gladness that everyone was having a good time, but the cutting thought that "They're not paying attention to ME or to these songs that I wrote."
Yuck, right? I thought long and hard about that for the rest of the show and afterwards and eventually decided that reaction—natural as it may be, because who doesn’t hope to be heard?—missed the point of all that I’m doing. Writers write because we must, and because, not just the skill, but the words and stories are a gift that, if you don’t use them, will eventually wither. As a musician, I’m there to make music and to sing a song—I’m there for the song itself, and to sing it clearly. And the song can be fun background music, or it can also carry a deeper message for those who have ears to hear.
An example of the latter kind of experience came after I gave a copy of Nelson County Wayside to a fellow soldier as a thank-you for some favor, and he told me later that it had gotten him through a hard time. Another time, my fiddling housemate and I were packing up after an evening of busking on Greensboro’s Elm Street. We’d played a while, and a couple people had dropped a dollar in and kept walking. I was latching my guitar case when a homeless couple walked up and asked us to play one more tune. “Sure,” we said, and they sat on their bags in rapt attention, then stopped us with tears in their eyes, thanking us for that bit of beauty in their day. We tried to refuse the dollar they handed us, but we kept it in a Mason jar to remind ourselves of the importance of beauty over money.
Your support on the Kickstarter project was likewise humbling—some friends new to the music; some who have heard these songs once, years before, and then waited for this EP; and some who graciously gave to support both the last album and this one. Thank you, and again, thanks to Joe and Stacey Rinaldi of the Rinaldi Flying Circus and Christen Mack of the Zinc Kings and Kelley Wills of Brain Flower Designs. If you like anything about this album, check out their projects, too!
I’m finalizing the tour schedule, too! So far I’m playing around Loudoun County, Richmond, Lynchburg, and Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and Carrboro. You can check out the tour schedule here.
Thanks again, and see you on the road!
Ever Forward
Life comes in chapters, and sometimes those line up with birthdays. The weeks before my 29th highlight the pages that have been turning in my life lately.
I spent my birthday weekend on a date with Uncle Sam, at one of my last drills with the Virginia Army National Guard. Thanks to him, I’ve spent one weekend a month traveling up or down the Blue Ridge to the armory in Lynchburg (or Bedford or Farmville), explored a bit along the way, spent more time in Blackstone than anyone ever should, been to Georgia, Arkansas, New York, Texas, and New Mexico for training, and worked overseas in Germany, Qatar, and Romania (with stops in 7 other countries on the way). It’s been a good ride, and I’ve gotten to do and see some cool things, from riding in helicopters to shooting sniper rifles to volunteering at Doha school sports days to hearing Romanian folk songs sung on a Transylvanian patio.
Along the way, I got to serve in an organization whose history as the Virginia militia precedes both the Army and the U.S., earned its nickname in the Civil War, its motto in the Great War, its fame at Omaha Beach and the Normandy Campaign, and whose blue and grey patch symbolizes the re-union of a fractured America.
Most importantly, I got to work with some of the best people I’ve ever known, from Iraq and Afghanistan vets to brand-new privates to sergeants who had been NCOs longer than I’d been alive. On the civilian side, they have been everything from college students to counselors to policemen to mechanics to farmers to cell tower repairmen. We’ve shared everything for a little while, from stories that will never be told outside of the ranks, to cigarettes under helmets while the sky came pouring down around us, to soggy plates of Army chow. Thank you for all of that, and everything you’ve taught me. “29th, let’s go,” “Rally on the Virginians!” and “Ever Forward!”
I spent the week before drill in Greensboro laying down tracks for a new 4-song EP that will also feature my friends Joe and Stacey Rinaldi of the Rinaldi Flying Circus. Joe is a fantastic arranger and guitar player, and Stacey is a powerhouse singer who reminds me of Patsy Cline. The songs are based on short stories by Flannery O’Connor, a Georgia author whose works and vision were a revelation to me in college. Kelley Wills, a West Virginia friend whose clawhammer style is what got me to trade in my Marshall amp for a Gretsch banjo, is also a fantastic artist, and she’ll be doing the cover art for the EP's release in early January.
I also submitted my applications for MFA-Poetry programs next fall and the Cambridge English Language Teaching for Adults certificate. Traveling; working with local students, budding writers, and people transitioning from different backgrounds; and publishing and performing my own poetry and stories, whether on page or on stage, is what I will be doing with this next chapter of my life.
I spent the weekend before Thanksgiving with my family at my Granddad’s east Carolina farm. The house was loud, and stories and games went long into the night.
Most of my songs are about running away from home and trying to find your way back. What I’ve learned, though, from this last year and a half overseas, and coming back, and finding love everywhere I went—even filling up the Facebook wall or my cell phone as dear friends from around the world wished me a happy birthday—is that you can find home anywhere you have chosen to love those around you, and have found yourself loved, too. My heart is full.
Thanks for listening. Stay tuned for more details and some sneak peaks on the EP, and come hear the music in Leesburg and Berryville this month!