Follow-Up to Big Smoke

The Del Barber deer story and my own Blackbird story from yesterday's post led me to think of this powerful song.

I Hung My Head
(Words and Music by Sting)
(Performed by Sting – listen here and Johnny Cash – listen here)

Early one mornin' with time to kill
I borrowed Jeb's rifle and sat on the hill
I saw a lone rider, crossin' the plain
I drew a bead on him to practice my aim
My brother's rifle went off in my hand
The shot rang out, across the land
The horse he kept runnin', the rider was dead
I hung my head, I hung my head

I set off runnin' to wake from the dream
But my brother's rifle went into the stream
I kept on runnin' into the salt lands
And that's where they found me, my head in my hands
The Sheriff he asked me, why had I run?
Then it came to me just what I had done
And all for no reason, just one piece of lead
I hung my head, I hung my head

Here in the courthouse, the whole town is there
I see the judge, high up in his chair
Explain to the courtroom, what went through your mind
And we'll ask the jury, what verdict they find
I said, "I felt the power of death over life
I orphaned his children, I widowed his wife
I beg their forgiveness, I wish I was dead"
I hung my head, I hung my head
I hung my head, I hung my head

Early one mornin' with time to kill
I see the gallows, up on the hill
And out in the distance, a trick of the brain
I see a lone rider, crossin' the plain
He come to fetch me to see what they done
And we'll ride together 'til kingdom come
I pray for God's mercy, for soon I'll be dead
I hung my head, I hung my head
I hung my head, I hung my head
I hung my head, I hung my head


Songwriter: STING; Lyrics © EMI Music Publishing

Big Smoke

Del Barber (composer and performer; album: Praireography, 2014)
(Listen while you read the lyrics) 

Blinded by the city lights
No one can see you stallin'
It's been so long since you've seen the prairie stars
You're not sure you can recall them
But there is something here for you to find
You may have found it once and lost it now 

We used to fly through the woods
On the backs of quarter horses
Pickin' dandelion bouquets for our sister and our mother
We felt like men but we were boys
Too young to know
But we were as free as fire 

And you're lost out in the Big Smoke
Lookin' for a way home
There are no straight paths
There's no easy way 

Brother do you remember
That one September morning we were shooting cans
With Dad's .22 without a worry or a warning
You pulled the trigger down and dropped that deer
And you looked at me with tears in your eyes 

And I never in a million years
Thought that you'd make that shot
And I picture you tonight, with your sights still on something so far off
Wherever you are I hope you're being careful
About the things you think you want 

And you're lost out in the Big Smoke
Without a fire of your own
There are no straight paths
There's no easy way 

(Last year, father and son produced 12,000 bushels. Under the Crow, they paid thirteen cents a bushel to ship it to Vancouver: $1560. Within four years they'll likely be paying twice as much and within a decade maybe five times as much. "If the price of grain would increase, I suppose a guy wouldn't feel it quite so badly; but on the horizon we don't see it, an increase." "Supposing they, ah, say that a few towns down the road - that grain should be here. There goes our elevator and I would think that 20% of the taxes in this town come from the elevators.) 

The sky is getting hazy
It's filling up with grain dust
And it could be in a year the bank finally gets the best of us
But our cows are fed and the bins are full
We're hoping to see you before the snow 

You're lost out in the Big Smoke
Without a fire of your own
There are no straight paths
No easy way 

Lost out in the Big Smoke
Without a fire of your own
There are no straight paths
No easy way

Wow, this song gets me; or maybe it's that I get it. Every time I listen to it, an artesian well of emotions springs forth. I grew up on the prairies with many of the same experiences depicted by Del Barber in this song. The words in brackets are words captured from a radio broadcast (used in the studio recording) about the plight of the contemporary farmer. It is all too familiar.

I remember a time when, out by myself, I stopped the truck, walked a few feet with the .22 rifle, took aim at a far away Yellow-headed Blackbird, and pulled the trigger. I never thought I'd make that shot. I cried hot tears for a bird that day; and asked for forgiveness from God for taking the life of something so beautiful that had done no wrong.

If I had a brother who moved to the city, I would be able to relate to all of this song. As it is, my heart strongly resonates with this song of city and prairie.

(A further performance can be heard here.)

George Harrison and Copyright Law

There is a common misconception about copyright law. It is often said that one song-writer can sample three bars or less and not infringe the other song-writer's copyright; but this is not the case. As Alan Korn, an expert in copyright litigation says,

"in determining whether one song infringes on another, it is common for courts to look to whether the 'heart' of the song was taken. The heart of a song may be a memorable melody, or an identifiable 2-chord guitar riff or just a few words taken from the chorus. As a result, there is NO truth to the rumor that sampling less than 4 bars is OK."1

The courts may also rule that infringement has occurred without proving that the infringing writer had access to the original song.

"One of the more famous U.S. music infringement cases involved ex-Beatle George Harrison, who was found by a jury to have 'unconsciously' copied the . . . composition 'He's So Fine' in his 1971 hit 'My Sweet Lord.'"2

Take a listen to the two songs involved in this famous lawsuit. "My Sweet Lord" was deemed to be "strikingly similar" to "He's So Fine." What do you think? How similar are the two songs? All of this has become suddenly very interesting to a little known band named "Key of Zed" as we consider how similar our song is to "Angel in Blue Jeans?"

Home
(Lyrics and Music by Mike Charko and Keith Shields - SOCAN 2013)
Written March 16, 2013
Published on Thirst Website (http://hungerandthirst4.blogspot.ca/2013/04/home.html) on April 13, 2013.
Published on ReverbNation, Key of Zed (http://www.reverbnation.com/keyofzed) on April 13, 2013.
Performed at the Heritage Grill in New Westminster on June 3, 2013.
Performed at the Rusty Gull in North Vancouver on June 20, 2013.

Angel in Blue Jeans 
(Lyrics and Music © 2014 Sunken Forest (ASCAP)/EMI April Music Inc. (ASCAP) Stellar Songs Ltd. and EMI Publishing UK Ltd. (PRS). Written by Pat Monahan, Espen Lind, and Amund Bjorkland.)


1 http://www.alankorn.com/articles/copyright_infringe.html
2 http://www.alankorn.com/articles/copyright_infringe.html

Homes and Angels

My friend and fellow song-writer, Mike Charko, was in a store the other day when a song came over the system. He heard the melody of the hook and thought to himself, "That sounds a lot like one of our songs!" He didn't hear the name of the band and so after a bit of searching he realized that it was the new single from the band Train: "Angel in Blue Jeans." The hook of their song matches eight bars/ten notes in the heart of our song: "Home."

On the one hand, it is kind of flattering that we (Key of Zed) came up with a melody in 2013 that the authors of "Angel in Blue Jeans" came up with in 2014 and now it is playing on the radio. On the other hand, it kind of feels like copyright infringement. I will post links to both songs and let you be the judge. How similar are these two melodies? Do we have a case for conscious or unconscious copyright infringement? Should we contact the band? Should we just have fun knowing that our song is a lot like their big hit?

Home Angel in Blue Jeans

Home
(Lyrics and Music by Mike Charko and Keith Shields - SOCAN 2013)
Written March 16, 2013
Published on Thirst Website (http://hungerandthirst4.blogspot.ca/2013/04/home.html) on April 13, 2013.
Published on ReverbNation, Key of Zed (http://www.reverbnation.com/keyofzed) on April 13, 2013.
Performed at the Heritage Grill in New Westminster on June 3, 2013.
Performed at the Rusty Gull in North Vancouver on June 20, 2013.

Home
Home
Home
Home

Follow this lane to the clothes on the line
The garden, the trees, and the hills that we'd walk
The buzzing of summer, the ponds, and the hay
Blossom of thistle, and sweet evening stalks

Home
Home
Home
Home

Driving left hand roads to rivers and sheep

The heather, the wind, and the salt of the sea

Ruddy complexions and hair of light red

This lonely shore she is calling me

Home
Home
Home
Home

Turn up this way 'til I see your sweet face
Gardening gloves and your hair out of place
A smile, a kiss, I'm lost in your arms
Right here with you I have built this space.

Home
Home
Home
Home

(Click on thumbnail image for a larger picture.)

Longing To Reach Home

Part of what attracts me to the writing of C.S. Lewis is the transparency with which he writes. He was a person of immense intellect, but also, immense emotion. He shared these emotions in his writings and prompted his readers to experience similar sentiments. His awe inspiring book, Til We Have Faces, was published in 1956. Towards the end of the book we read these words.

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”

Lewis is expressing his own emotions through the longings of a character he has created for the story. He willingly shares his journey of discovery and the longing that is there in his soul. Perhaps this is what separates the poet from the ordinary person: a willingness to be vulnerable and express emotions, longings, joys, and embarrassments in their own words. In these particular words, Lewis shares that all of his life has been a quest for home and that he will never be truly home until he has left the place that has substituted for home.

I can relate that I have sensed such emotions as well. I have longed for something more than the experiences of this earth. I have recognized that there must be more. I suspect that this might be true for many others even if the sensation has not yet risen to the surface. We long for another place; a better place; a far away country. See if Lewis' emotions stir similar emotions in you. Perhaps today is the day to set your eyes upon the far away country, to set your eyes upon hope.

Flight Behaviour

I just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver's latest novel, Flight Behavior. As usual, this Kingsolver book is about the concept of "home." In this particular narrative, she speaks of the tenuous nature of the "home." She weaves a story that describes the tension between the draw toward home and the desire to fly away to something else. If we are honest with ourselves, we have all experienced this tension. We build ourselves a warm and cozy life only to find ourselves just a little bored and wondering what someone else's life is like. I am convinced that this partly explains the tremendous popularity of movies and other forms of entertainment. They briefly allow us to escape and immerse ourselves in the other life.

Along with the tension of home versus flight, the author looks at "conformity" versus "difference." In one scene, we find the protagonist, Dellarobia, considering her son, Preston, her boss, Ovid Byron, and her best friend, Dovey.

[Preston's] earnest expression and level brow moved Dellarobia to a second sight: Preston would go far. Maybe he'd be a vet, farmers were crying for them around here. Or even the kind of vet that looks after elephants in zoos. For all her worry about his lack of advantages, Preston would be like Ovid Byron. Already he seemed set apart by a devotion to his own pursuits that was brave and unconforming. People were rarely like that, despite universally stated intentions. Most were like herself and Dovey, the one-time rebel girls with their big plans to fly out of here. Her boldness had been confined to such tiny quarters, it counted for about as much as mouse turds in a cookie jar. . . . But here sat her lionhearted son. Maybe it wasn't a decision, something drawn from the soup of birth. A lightning strike.1

Kingsolver shows great depth of knowledge of the human spirit. She tells of Preston, a boy who is "set apart by a devotion to his own pursuits that was brave and unconforming;" and then points out that people are rarely like that. Oh sure, the universally stated intention is that people want to be different from the crowd, but the fact is, most conform to the crowd. That's what makes it the crowd.

How important is conformity or non-conformity? Is this part of our desire to find a comfortable home? If we "fit in," things can be more comfortable for a time; but, what happens when we start to think for ourselves; what happens when we diverge from the herd? I must ask myself, "In what ways do I conform?" "In what ways do I diverge?" "How much am I truly thinking for myself?" These are large philosophical, ethical, theological, and lifestyle questions. Barbara Kingsolver has been successful in drawing me into reflection upon these questions. That is the value of a good book.

1 (Kingsolver 2012, 265, 266)

Work Cited:
Kingsolver, Barbara. Flight Behavior. Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2012.

Follow-up to Home

Two days ago I posted the latest Key of Zed song on this blog. "Home" is a song that captures three impressions of the concept of home. When we use the word "home" it can mean a number of different things. For many of us that grew up in a good family,  "home" can be that family of origin and that place in which we grew up. Think about your own childhood and the sense of home which comes to you from this.

Home can also be that ancestral place; the place from which our family heritage comes. Many of us identify with our ancestry and recognize that, despite the fact that we may not have even seen the place from which they came, our ancestors and the place in which they lived has an influence upon the people we have become today.

Of course, the strongest sense of home is the home we build ourselves. We build a home with our spouse, our children, our family. This kind of home is independent of any location. Home is where we build significant relationships with others. In this sense, the song "Home" is a love song about the home my wife, Maureen, and I have built.

Home

Home
(Lyrics and Music by Mike Charko and Keith Shields - SOCAN 2013)
(Click here to listen while reading the lyrics)

Home       
Home
Home
Home

Follow this lane to the clothes on the line       
The garden, the trees, and the hills that we'd walk
The buzzing of summer, the ponds, and the hay
Blossom of thistle, and sweet evening stalks

Home
Home
Home
Home

Driving left hand roads to rivers and sheep
The heather, the wind, and the salt of the sea
Ruddy complexions and hair of light red
This lonely shore she is calling me

Home
Home
Home
Home

Turn up this way 'til I see your sweet face
Gardening gloves and your hair out of place
A smile, a kiss, I'm lost in your arms
Right here with you I have built this space.

Home
Home
Home
Home

Home, Hard To Say What It Is

I once again find myself thinking about the concept of home. Home is so much more than a house or a city or a family or a marriage or a collection of people with whom we feel an affinity. Home is at the deepest core of what it means to be human. Coyotes have dens where they raise their young, birds have nests from which they launch their chicks, ants have a communal nest which they will defend with their lives, but we humans are unique in that we have been commanded by our God to "leave our father and mother and be united"1 to that other person with whom we will form a new home. Yet, we still have difficulty expressing the concept of home. Barbara Kingsolver has said,

I’ve spent hundreds of pages, even whole novels, trying to explain what home means to me. Sometimes I think that is the only thing I ever write about. Home is place, geography, and psyche; it’s a matter of survival and safety, a condition of attachment and self-definition. It’s where you learn from your parents and repeat to your children all the stories of what it means to belong to the place and people of your ken.2

Her latest novel, The Lacuna, is about a man with no home at all. Separated from his biological father, Harrison Shepherd lives with his mother who is so busy smoking cigarettes and trying to find the next man who will "take care of her" that she has little time for her son. The men who come into his life are distant and transient. His country, the one to which he feels the greatest loyalty, is Mexico. Yet, he has only adopted Mexico by virtue of spending his youth there with his mother and with a man who was not his father nor his mother's husband. Mexicans see him as a little gringo and on occasions when he lives in Washington, DC, he is seen as a foreigner. He truly is a man with no country and no home. Even his name, too awkward for Mexicans to pronounce, is lost and he is called by whatever nick-name others choose to give him. This lack of home results in a man who, like the words of a James Taylor song suggests, builds a home behind his eyes and carries it in his heart.3

Yet, his is a very broken home. For, with the concept of home, it is "hard to know what it is if you never had one."4 As I continue to read the book I find myself hoping that Harrison Shepherd will indeed find home. I am hoping for a great ending like that depicted in another work of fiction, 'Till We Have Faces, where the protagonist comes to the end of her life and can say, with joy,

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.5

1 Genesis 2:24.
2 Kingsolver, Barbara. Small Wonder. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
3 "Oh it's enough to be on your way; It's enough just to cover ground; It's enough to be moving on; Home, build it behind your eyes; Carry it in your heart; Safe among your own." "Enough to be On Your Way" words and music by James Taylor, Hourglass, 1997.
4 "Home...hard to know what it is if you never had one; Home...I can't say where it is but I know I'm going home; That's where the heart is." "Walk On" from All That You Can't Leave Behind, 2000, words by Bono and music by U2.
5 C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1980.

Homeless

As I watch new stories of the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, it is sad to realize that my own hunger for things made from oil is part of the problem. Brian Walsh and Steven Bouma-Prediger (in their book Beyond Homelessness) speak of ecological homelessness and its causes. They describe ten such causes.

The tenth (and last) reason for ecological homelessness is anthropocentrism. The belief that we humans are at the center of the universe contributes both to the degradation of our home planet and to our own sense of homelessness on earth. Many now recognize that the so-called developed world’s worldview is overly human centered. Norman Wirzba puts it this way:

The eclipse of divine transcendence, once understood to be the source and goal of the world, created a hole that would be filled by human beings who now position themselves as the center or source of meaning and value. No longer microcosms of the creation, people are the autonomous beings who, in an expression of rational freedom, chart and direct the fate of themselves and the world. Again, the history of this development toward autonomy is complex. But what emerges is a self cut off from the world of which it is a part and a world shorn of all remnants of final causality. Nature, a self-regulating mechanism, stands as the arena on which reason and technique can be exercised.

Having banished or pacified God, we enthroned ourselves at the center of things. Following Protagoras, we believe that we humans are the measure of all things. With ourselves at the center and the world a machine, nature gets reduced to the status of an object – merely a resource to be used and, if necessary, abused. It is not difficult to see how such a perspective on the world and one’s place in it sanctions the despoliation of the earth. Viewing ourselves as autonomous creatures, fundamentally unrelated to either God or the rest of creation, we have shaped a culture, an economy, and a built environment subject to no principles beyond our own self-aggrandizing aspirations and with no sense of kinship with other creatures or their habitats.*

Your appetite and my appetite for oil leads drilling companies to dig it out of the ground many meters below the ocean surface without regard for the danger this process poses for a multitude of God's creatures who rely upon a clean ocean for their food and well-being. We rationalize that we need this oil and we gamble with the lives of the other species who have no need of oil but also share this fragile planet.

*Bouma-Prediger, Steven and Walsh, Brian J. Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), p. 182, 183.

Hard To Know What It Is

Home... hard to know what it is if you've never had one
Home... I can't say where it is but I know I'm going home
That's where the heart is

And I know it aches
How your heart it breaks
And you can only take so much
Walk on, walk on
- Bono, "Walk On", All That You Can’t Leave Behind, 2000.

Bono sings of those who are truly homeless for they have never had a place that was a home. They may have had a roof over their head, they may have had biological parents and siblings, but they have never known home. Brian J. Walsh, in his excellent book Beyond Homelessness, tells of volunteering at a youth drop-in centre in Toronto and how the kids all wanted to play Ping-Pong with him.

They wanted to play Ping-Pong with me . . . because I was an adult about the age of their fathers. Most of these kids had never, or at least very seldom, had this kind of experience with their dads. I was the dad-guy at the drop-in center. But not the dad who was responsible for their discipline. Not the dad they ran away from because of abuse. No, I was the rec-room, Ping-Pong-playing dad these kids, mostly young men, had always wanted.
Whenever I would talk to the kids in any depth, it became clear that even though “home” had been a site of such pain, such rejection, and such hurt, there was none-the-less a deep longing to go home. They still even referred to that place they had fled as home. And if they couldn’t go home there, they would long for experiencing home in some other place. (Bouma-Prediger 2008)

There is hope for a home for all. "I can’t say where it is but I know I’m going home." We can hold out the hope of a true home for all who are homeless.

Bouma-Prediger, Steven and Walsh, Brian J. Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008.