EDITOR'S NOTE: In the summer of 2017, I answered the 30-Day Music Challenge on this blog. I'll be reupping the best of those posts from time to time, starting with this one.
23. A song that you think everybody should listen to.
You've probably heard them all -- done badly on some vocal competition show. Let's get the ones you've probably heard, in their original versions, out of the way. Then, I'll tell you about one I think you probably haven't heard, but should.
Ready? Here goes:
Blue Moon Of Kentucky, Bill Monroe
Man Of Constant Sorrow, The Stanley Brothers
Hoochie Coochie Man, Muddy Waters
Smokestack Lightning, Howlin' Wolf
Boom Boom, John Lee Hooker
Hound Dog, Big Mama Thornton
Jailhouse Rock, Elvis Presley
Johnny B. Goode, Chuck Berry
Satisfaction, The Rolling Stones
Dancing In the Streets, Martha and the Vandellas
Good Vibrations, The Beach Boys
R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Aretha Franklin
Bridge Over Troubled Water, Simon and Garfunkel
Let It Be, The Beatles
I Heard It Through the Grapevine, Marvin Gaye
You've Got A Friend, Carole King
Won't Get Fooled Again, The Who
Good Times, Chic
We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions, Queen
New York State Of Mind, Billy Joel
Billie Jean, Michael Jackson
Welcome To the Jungle, Guns 'n Roses
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, U2
You can keep "Stairway To Heaven". Bruce Springsteen isn't as universal as East Coast rock critics think he is. Even though I can't stand her as a person, Sheryl Crow's "Safe and Sound" should be on this list.
What about the one you may not have heard yet?
It lacks the obvious universality of the others. In these days of niche marketing, and identity politics on both sides of the fence, there are those who would actively hate it, making all kinds of assumptions about the women singing it and What They Really Mean. The sad thing is, everybody's been through this.
You might not see it at first, couched as it is in metaphor. Why on God's green earth are these singers rooting for the downfall -- perhaps even the physical death -- of a lone circus performer, even as they remember, with great fondness, her youth and her youthful genius?
The girl's story is not a happy one:
Well, some guy broke her heart and her heart it did ache
So she went to the tent and the lady of the snakes
Who gave her a potion and she drank it in
After that her heart never ached again
After that her heart never ached again.
Still, they can't wait for her to flop:
Yeah, one of these nights, the old girl's goin' down.
On and on they sing the girl's story, shedding their hearts' blood in the verses, then chanting that woeful, prophetic chorus.
By the time they get to the coda, they're singing at the tops of their lungs. And the word they are singing is "Hallelujah" -- literally "Praise God".
Louder and louder they stretch it and shape it -- an arrow, a battering ram, a boulder arcing through the air. With every volley they crush and crumble stone walls three feet thick. Everything must go in this battle -- everything phony, self-insulating, and self-congratulatory.
As the battle winds down, the singers' voices get softer, slower, more hesitant, and more than a little afraid of what they've done as they gaze down from their lofty perch in the stands at the tiny, crumpled thing on the floor below.
Is it the "old girl", or simply her old self?
The final "Hallelujah" feels like the best funeral oration they could give -- elegiac, with the tiniest flicker of hope.
Of peace.
This is Patty Griffin and Emmylou Harris with "Trapeze".
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