Tennessee Music Blog by Candace Corrigan

I write songs. That is something I have always done. My mother is a songwriter, and in my earliest years I held the strange belief that everybody wrote songs, or at very least played the guitar, or the piano, or maybe the mandolin. Sometimes I write songs for other people. My friends were aware of that when they asked if I could take a look at a song that a neighbor had written, and see what I could do with it.

That is how I met George West. George West lives down the road from a close friend of mine who has been embroiled in a fight to save their part of the world from urban sprawl. I had lived out that way for awhile, and was amazed at how close it was to downtown Nashville, and yet remained so refreshingly rural.

It is only a fifteen minute drive, which is great, and also a problem. It is in Davidson County, and has been tempting developers for years. This latest fight to “Keep it Country” has turned into a battle, with 92 % of the locals against elaborate plans to build a new city center in a bend of the Cumberland river known as Bell’s Bend. The plan calls for a new bridge and highway to the area, to the tune of at least 100 million dollars, but the developers are determined to have the new town center, dubbed “May Town”, whooping cranes and bald eagle estuary be damned.

George West is a farmer who owns land in Bell’s Bend. When I talked to him on the phone, he told me he was out on the tractor when this song came to him. So I went out to his house to meet him about a month ago. It was a lovely summer afternoon when I pulled into his driveway, past the ripening wheat, and drove over the creek to his house. He was playing the fiddle when I knocked on the door, always a good sign. He offered me a cold drink as we sat at his kitchen table and talked about songwriting, country life, and farming.

Bell’s Bend

The West House in Bell’s Bend

Our house, built in 1910, faces east. As the sun comes up, it fills up the house with golden light, refracting through the transoms and windows. The rain that we have been fortunate enough to get these last few days has passed, and taken with it the 90 percent humidity. The result this morning was so delicious to wake up to. Drinking coffee on the front porch, watching the light filter through the plants, my thoughts turned to Bastille Day.

As far as I know, I am not French. But some of my best friends are. One of them holds a party every year for “the fourteens of Julys”, as she says. This year, like other years, she asks me, (or I offer), to come over with my sewing machine to recover cushions, make new pillows, and freshen the house. Although we talk about it for weeks or even months ahead, we never seem to get to it, until the last minute. So… yesterday was that last minute.

She has a very eclectic style, to say the least. But there is a kind of wisdom in that. By being open to all kinds of things that might fly in her door, she has collected paintings from Africa, furniture carved in her native Normandy, German china, French chandeliers, Victorian vases, Persian rugs and a rather motley collection of well used but originally well made sofas. Every nook has the possibility of conversation. And most have some place to sit down that I have helped her to fix or paint, but mostly to recover. She once said that I have taken care of the places where her guests “put their behinds”.

Driving home from Franklin today, big white clouds in a 6 o clock sky, rain clouds to the north, I watched a farmer’s truck pulling a trailer, working with his tractor and hay fork on a side road. He was loading big beautiful round bales of hay. Looks like they will get it in before the rain, if the rain makes it here. Last year’s hay looked fairly pitiful as I recall. Farmers were even baling corn stalks. It looked like “hard times are here again.” This year’s looks like a bumper crop, but then, these days I only see it from the road.

Years ago, when I was a young woman living at Spring Hollow Farm, down the Galen road, one of our neighbors, needed some help getting in his hay. We had just bought the old Jesse Ragland farm that Winter, and we let it be known that some of us would come and help. Seems like about ten of us went over in jeans and long sleeved shirts that sunny late June afternoon, and began to pile out of a couple of trucks, ready for work. I think our neighbor was a bit surprised. There were a few of us young women in the bunch, but we all got right to it, following behind the truck and bucking the bales onto the flatbed just like the men.

This week, a friend of mine needed some help with some closed captioning for a video project, something I have had to learn how to do. It is painstaking, exacting, slow work, so when you say that you will do an hour long show, you had better like that show. This show is a simple video of a lecture, but the lecturer was anything but simple.

The lecturer is a grammy award winning percussionist, Dame Evelyn Glennie. She was in town to perform with the Nashville Symphony a few months back. She is lively on camera, a very positive person, and she is profoundly deaf.

I have my own definition of the beginning of summer. Some of the elements of my definition of summer are subtle… the spring wildflowers give way to the summer wildflowers, the sun rises over the church across the street well before 6:00 am, filling our living room with a golden light, and the moist heat returns from wherever it has been hiding, putting my world in a slowed down state as all creation rushes toward the zenith of solstice.

The real day that summer begins for me, is the first day we swim in the river. And that day was today.

I love to swim, and go regularly to a pool throughout the fall, winter and spring. But to swim in a moving body of water, with swallows flying over head, dragon flies flitting here and there, white billowy clouds above as you float on your back. It’s not swimming to improve your stroke, to flatten some area of a body at this age that doesn’t seem to want to be flat, or to write down a distance in an exercise log.

Of course it is a welcome relief from the heat. But swimming in the river is more of a religious experience for me. It’s swimming to wake you to the glories of the moment, and simultaneously every other glorious swimming moment.

I couldn’t swim in the river this afternoon without remembering our swimming hole at Spring Hollow Farm in Macon County. One late spring day, Anthony would use the backhoe to dig a swimming hole, last year’s usually having been washed out during the winter. It was a place after a hot day of canning tomatoes, or pickles, or picking sweet corn that called your name. And if you were picking okra… you probably ran there.

Where we swim now was once Cherokee country. And rivers were sacred to the Cherokee. When you were sick, you went to the river, to bathe in its cool waters. When you were in need of solace you went to the river, to soothe and honor your melancholy. Your town was on the river. The river gave you life.

The song this week is from a Cherokee Cane flute, made from the river cane that grows in brakes along the Tennessee rivers. It was traditionally played by a man, usually as a courting instrument, a love song for an intended sweetheart.

I got this flute at the Sequoyah Museum, Vonore, Tennessee, not far from where we were married, at Chota.

This is a song played by my husband. He is not Cherokee in the least, but he plays this flute like it was made for him.

May all of you who swim outside this week be blessed. Even if it is in a cement pond.

the path to Stones River

Stones River

Photos by John Seward

When I first came to Nashville years ago, my friends took me to Radnor Lake, a state park that is located in the south of the city. It reminded me very much of living in the country in Macon County, but with maintained trails that ring a natural lake.

Radnor Lake soon became a beloved place in all the world to me. Some years I walked every morning, watching the every day change, delighting in my favorite woodpeckers or owls, a new born fawn, a yearling just beginning his rack, turtles on the path, or a rare glimpse of an otter. I also loved the sight in the spring, the new wildflowers covering hillsides, the intense leaves, first young green, then mature, then red and yellow, and then brown, and some years quite covered in snow.

Some of my favorite walks were with friends. Some by myself. At one point a musician friend who was living in Scotland came through, stayed at my house, and we took to the trails one morning. “Ah, it is as lovely as any Loch. And so peaceful. I think if you walked this everyday, you might never grow old.”, she said.

I was amazed in those early years as I approached a certain bench. It always had fresh flowers on it. They were laid next to a plaque on the bench that said:

In memory of
Shawn Adam MacDonald
1970-1986

I wondered who might have left these flowers.

Is it mother or a father
      leaves these flowers here
Or sister brother or a sweetheart
      every day for all these years.
In honor of a memory
      of true devotion lies
In the beauty of this wooded place
      for a love that never dies.

I did ask a park ranger at one point, but he told me the policy had changed and the flowers were no longer being left by family members. Curiously, there were flowers on the bench this afternoon.

As we walked the lake trail, the air felt saturated, the thunder warning us that a shower was coming. Still, we stopped often to take pictures, and spoke about the endurance of nature, the ever present constancy, timelessness, and recurring patterns of the woods.

How wise of the government and the Friends of Radnor Lake to preserve such a place. It is one of the gems of middle Tennessee.

I wrote this week’s song and recorded it with the help of my friends. My gift to you on this June first night. All of the pictures can be saved as Desktop backgrounds, if you click on them to get the large version, and then right-click to download. Please, be our guest.

Photos by John Seward

One of my friends is a songwriter named Daniel Market. He is a devoted songwriter, very interested in the craft of writing. He is passionate about music, and he is also known for cracking himself up when he writes a funny song. We don’t always agree about songwriting, or recording, or what is the best thing to do in a kitchen remodel… in other words we talk to each other frequently, listen to each other’s songs, disagree and even argue often, much like a brother and sister.

I hadn’t heard from him for a couple of weeks, so I got in touch with him, and he sent me a note saying that his 84 year old mother had contracted a flu, which developed rapidly into pneumonia, and she had passed away. After the funeral, he came down from Indiana on his motorcycle for a visit. After some discussion, he said he had some furniture there that he thought we might like to have. We need more stuff around here like we need a hole in the head, but I said I would drive, he parked his BMW at a friend’s, and I secretly welcomed the time that we would spend together.

So we left early in the morning, early in the week. On the other side of Nashville, heading north, I pulled over and asked him to drive. I hadn’t realized how exhausted I was. I slept soundly as he drove. When I woke up we were traveling along the Kentucky Tennessee border, and on a whim, we turned off the highway to take some back roads to Evansville. As we drove through the wooded lanes, past the ponds, past the fields, through some very small towns, we talked a bit about the funeral, but mostly we talked about his mother, how he used to joke with her, what her opinion was about this or that.

“The worst thing is not being able to call her”, Daniel said.

This is a comment I have often heard my friends say after they have lost their mother.

Indiana

Daniel’s Father and Mother

And neighbors did come down to visit the graves of relatives. Neighbors who by all rights might not have been too sure about these young people who had bought the old Raglan farm. And yet they seemed not to judge us for our strange clothes or long hair or Yankee accents. They looked us in the eye, gave us a good handshake, and recognized that though we might not yet know much about farming, we were fixing to try to learn. People who have known hard work can appreciate someone who is not afraid of it.

A few weeks ago we were up in Macon County with a friend and his daughter, and we wandered around the back roads and found our way back down to the holler and the graveyard. This time of year a lovely wood poppy was in bloom. My friend, who in his early days played college basketball and football, a man I always thought of as strong and fearless, admitted that, back when we lived there, if he was alone at night after crossing the creek on the swinging bridge, and turned that corner next to that graveyard, he would take off running for home. “I couldn’t explain it. I didn’t ever tell anybody about it, but there was something about that graveyard.”

There are years in Tennessee when spring is a brief transition between coolish and downright hot, punctuated with a series of brief cold spells that my neighbors in Macon County used to call redbud winter, dogwood winter, and blackberry winter. It took me some time to realize that each of the winter titles refers to blossom times. Luckily, this year is not one of those years. Yes, we have had all these “winters,” and in fact we may still be in blackberry winter this morning

Click here to listen to the public radio 10 minute piece about Emma Bell Miles that includes her song.

I have taken to walking in the early mornings, along the greenway next to the river. After our recent rain this week, it is lush with new green leaves and blooming trees, the river high and moving quickly over the rocks and spillway. Somedays I walk listening to music. Today I walked listening to the birds and thinking about my weekly column/blog for the Macon County Times, and thinking about Emma Bell Miles. I wrote a song about her using her words that began with:

She wrote a simple note to a friend in spring 1907, describing her Tennessee home, “There are flowers in the shelter of every rock now and a rippling chorus of frogs… the thickets are alive with bird song, and the waterfalls so lovely after the winter rains…”

Walking past the falling water this morning, more than a 100 years later, it is not difficult to imagine the Tennessee woods as Emma saw them. She was an artist and author, and had a weekly column in the Chattanooga Times in the spring of 1914. I was asked a number of years ago to read her diaries in the Tennessee State archives, and I was surprised by her command of the English language, and her expressive vocabulary.

    Dream back the day
    When my love and I would walk
    in the darkening forest green,
    past the waterfall gathering the flowers.
    Wandering at will, in the perfect mountain air,
    talking of the stars
    Past the blooming of the dogwoods in the evening.

Her unusual diary, and I have studied quite a few, read like a novel. Her first romance to “a mountain man” when she was 18, progressed quickly to marriage in 1901. By 1902, she was the mother of twins. I have a historian friend who calls her the original hippy, more likely to quote Thoreau and watch the sunrise than to have a health plan, or plan for dinner, for that matter

Still she wrote, she sketched, she published, even in Harpers Weekly, all with babies on her knee (she would eventually have five children). She wrote a book that was published by a substantial publishing house in 1905 The Spirit of the Mountains, regarded as a classic look into the Tennessee mountain culture. A later book Our Southern Birds contained charming drawings.

She was a constant and prolific artist and writer. Her earliest writings were full of young wonder and appreciation, that turned tragic with the relentless wasting of consumption, or tuberculosis, and, as she said, “The sin and shame of poverty has beat me down so I can’t stand”. Emma Bel Miles died in 1919 at the age of 39.

    Oh to sleep
    When the sun is coming up
    on the sighing ranks of pines
    in the shadows of the haven I am longing

    In the spirit of the mountains
    I’ll wander once again.

On this spring morning, I couldn’t help but think perhaps she wanders over this way. I would if I were her.

Click here to listen to her song.

Click here to go to Emma Bell Miles’ page, where you can read about her and read the complete lyrics to her song.

Art by Emma Bell Miles used with permission from Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee.