“Folk in the forest”

The last post was timely, given that the question "performance or community?" remained at the fore of the next event I attended.

Weeks back, maybe earlier in April, but in the supremely difficult period of caring for mum and for dad that took such mental, physical and emotional toll, I had a wonderful and vivid dream.  

There was a community of people in a clearing in a wood. The trees were mostly beech. A beech wood is not necessarily the best place for a gathering. The branches are known to fall without warning hence the sobriquet “widow-maker".  I have since wondered if the appearance in the dream of beeches was prophetic, given that dad was soon to die.  But I love beeches. It is odd they have acquired this byname because it makes them masculine, and yet to me they are so feminine. The trunks, are a smooth and sombre grey, but strong and elegant. The leaves are light and vibrant green, beautiful and delicate, when the sun shines through them.  At the end of the year, beech masts and warm russet leaf litter is thick on the ground, the epitome of autumn. 

The people in the dream-wood were musicians. They seemed part of the the place, as though they lived there though I remember no encampments. They belonged there in the sense that  it was as though their "real" lives, when they were most themselves, were in that place. At least some of their instruments seemed part of the wood, made from the materials there.

I was dismayed to realise, during the dream that I was in fact dreaming, because of course dreams end. I remember feeling almost frantic to stay in the dream. There was nothing of particular narrative moment. Overwhelmingly, the feelings which remained were of extraordinary vividness and a sense of meaning. Things felt good and right, in a spiritual way of being absolutely fitting.  This was linked to three things: the music, the feeling of community and nature.  The latter was not just about nature in itself but also of human relation to it: a feeling of respect for and communion and cohabitation with the natural world.

Awakening, I had an intuition that I should find, in the day to day world, a community like this. Why was not clear, it just felt like blind instinct but I cannot remember a feeling so insistent, arising from a dream, certainly not one upon which I subsequently acted.  I knew this dream was good for me. It is obvious now that were I to do something about it in the real world the reason would be in the hope of encountering something similarly beneficial. At the time there was no such realisation.  I was simply too caught up and immediately preoccupied every day upon waking with the need to look after my own family, my mum with Alzheimer's and my very sick father.   Besides, there was an incumbent sceptical disposition impeding such a possibility.

I went as far as to look up "musicians in the forest" on the and was surprised when the results threw up “Folk in the Forest”, a monthly meeting in the Lake District, a famously beautiful outcrop of north western England. It is part of the large administrative district  of Cumbria, which they are now again calling by the old name, Cumberland, known in the wider UK for its sausages.  I had driven past on the M6 dozens of times but never seemed to have time to stop.

It was easy enough to nearly push the feeling aside.  Who, in our culture, does anything but forget about dreams? Besides, caring took up my time and energy.  Mostly I was just existing, living day by day, looking after my parents at their home, visiting dad later, in hospital, making food to take to him twice a day, feeding him, playing him music, telling him about the concert I had taken mum to. He loved hearing the music and about the concert. I think it was some of his best times in that awful time.   Then one day, in the early hours of his 84th birthday, dad just died. I said goodbye to him the previous evening and when I woke up he was gone.  I hoped and thought he probably would get better but he was always so stoical and he just didn't.  

I discover with dismay that a death can, for so many families, turn into a morass of self-interest, furtiveness, lies, obfuscation, obstructiveness, shock, anger, vindictiveness and conflict. But I  hadn't forgotten the dream. With hindsight, maybe without knowing it was exactly the right time that I decided to respond to it.   Much later, after I made the decision and travelled to the event, I discovered in a poem connected to one of the songs I heard these lines:

Respond to every call
that excites your spirit.

I had never acted on that kind of impulse before, or, not for a long time. I had children now, had looked after them, mostly alone, was if not entirely responsible, as responsible as you have to be to bring your kids up, alive.  In itself, that path into the unknown exerted a pull.  Finally last weekend I headed, last minute-ish, to the Lakes. The drive in during the late afternoon - and you do drive in to the Lakes, there is a distinct transition -  was breathtaking. That Tennyson composed La Morte D’Arthur here makes perfect sense. The blueish green mountains exhaled a sense of Celtic-ness, whatever that means, of fairytales, nature and mystery. I pulled off the A66 at a tiny picturesque village full of what looked and felt like well-to-do people from southern England on holiday. There was a proper English country pub, The Royal Oak, naturally. Pubs aren’t generally the same somehow, in Scotland. They usually look and feel more urban, more scrappy or like drinkers dens. This is a generalised prejudice to which I remain alert.

The road climbed steeply and twisted to a heart-stopping view over what was probably Bassenthwaite lake. At the visitor’s centre I was greeted by Dave, friendly, quiet, enthusiastic. I had booked for the wrong month but that was OK. Relieved, I said that was lucky because I had come a long way. From where? From Scotland. Was I there for the weekend or...?, he asked hesitantly, not wanting, I suppose, to pry. It was my turn to hesitate.  Usually, hesitation signals a warning: Don't do it, or Don't do it yet or Be careful!  Uncharacteristically, I told him I had come because of a dream. He seemed immediately interested which in turn meant that I felt, instead of ridiculous, welcome, almost relieved.

Over the years I have written often here in published posts and forgotten, as yet unpublished drafts on hosting. Dave was the best kind of host. He introduced me to someone in the cafe queue, who then invited me to sit with them, whose partner then saved me a potentially treacherous trip later over the mountain by suggesting another route. I have no doubt Dave did similar things for others. To the audience he deftly complimented the local knowledge of a photographer among us, giving the guy's business a boost. Photos.

In the open session inside later he quietly invited me to contribute. I said while I very occasionally sang songs in Spanish I was not persuadable.  Instead his choir and his people sang happily, easily, the Colombian folk song, El Mochilón. I later remembered I’d heard the 1958 version by the Cuban band La Sonora Matancera with Colombian singer Nelson Pinedo. Curiously, it is another of those Vamonos pa'l monte songs about going to the mountain, to heal, to escape, to be refreshed.  As it happens, in this particular song the trip includes making music and, because the merengue is so bailable, probably to dance.

Llevo también, mi tamborcito
pa entonar, un buen merengue

(I also carry my little drum

To play a good merengue)

We should heed the repeated hints: that travel, mountains, refuge, respite, music and dance are healing. 

A good host creates good feeling. The vibe of a place always emanates from the host. This is easily called a woo-woo statement.  There is no known scientific evidence to measure, still less explain the vibe - of a person or a place and yet, curiously, we all understand what it means. Again and again in shops, in milongas, in organisations, in families, wherever there are groups of people there are different vibes. It is often to do with how relaxed, enjoyable, friendly a place or a group feels - or the absence of these things. It is to do with the host, the group, the physical surroundings.  

This gathering had much good feeling. There was a sense of cross-currents and connections between people, of community. Chatting afterwards to a woman from the enthralling female quartet, Quickbeam, it turned out her partner was at the heart of the boisterous 'Shanty Lads' group. Quickbeam incidentally, means the mountain ash or rowan, because it is where they met outside, forming the group during Covid. Hearing them reminded me of Aca Seca harmonic trio's Pobre mi negra although they sang the much happier Sing for the morning.

Many people knew each other partly through Dave's singing groups: 'Sing Owt' and 'Wild Chorus'. For readers abroad "Owt" is a pun on “out” the former meaning “anything” in northern English.

Most of the evening was on the deck of Whinlatter Visitor Centre, high on the hill, against a backdrop of evergreens and birdsong. There were performances by  individuals and groups, some professional, some not, some scheduled, some floor spots taken on the night. Some were more like offerings. Now I remember, the evening was pay-what-you-can, which is more like offer-what-you-can or what-you-will. It is less transactional, less overtly about the money or at least the money is not put first. I know that it was the free events I ran that I most enjoyed, that had best feeling, least pressure, despite the chronic unreliability of the room booking system. Money complicates and corrupts. But money gives more certainty. Events usually need shelter, warmth. People can want food and drink. Sometimes sound equipment is needed and people rarely (can) share all these freely. As soon as you offer money, these things suddenly appear or become much more reliable.

Dave's harmony group, 'The Lonnings' and 'Quickbeam' were the two particularly special parts of the evening.  Both groups seemed to give themselves up to the music. Harmony requires a fading out of ego because the individual is at the service of the group. The whole is greater than its parts. When the listener senses that the music created subsumes the individual creating it, the same becomes possible for the listener.   

The lack of ego reminds me of a contrast, something I have written of before: a tendency towards ego in European tango DJ's.  This is at the expense of the music and therefore at the expense of the people that music is for - in this case, tango dancers. [DJs like spoons  / Headbanging to Pugliese]. So when the ego disappears in music, we might expect the opposite: more power in the music, greater connection between musicians and listeners, a more holistic experience for everyone. 

It was no coincidence that The Lonnings sing songs to heal. Lonnings, in that area, I discover means ancient paths, so the songs, I suppose could be thought of paths as healing.   To the hypothetical question What symbolic image has been with you through your life?, my answer would be a path.  I had the image decades before I realised it had a metaphorical sense and even then, I never understood why the path or the track was my particular image.  I still don't exactly, but for those preoccupied with exploration, less physical than in other ways, and with freedom, it makes more sense now.

The Shanty Lads sang shanties again with harmony that people could join in.  They sang with such heartfelt gusto and pleasure the sheer enjoyment carried them along and touched the rest of us.  

One of The Lonnings' songs was about breathing about being in the moment.  It was good to hear.  Dad had died less than three weeks before.  Folk in the forest was on Saturday.  The funeral had been on Monday.  Dad, was fun but he hadn't been young. He had been sick. He had suffered.  And now it was over.  That was the end.  We should move on.  I knew it all, rationally, but everything touched me, felt raw: the lyrics of songs, the music, in general, for dad loved music.  With his characteristic gentle humour, his only request for his funeral had been to play his hero, Bing Crosby's 'Beautiful Dreamer'.  

Gone are the cares of life's busy throng

Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

Dad liked Bing because he was a cut above, but understated, not as flash as the younger Rat Pack.. He had a supremely lovely voice and he was light-hearted, relaxed. You hear it in the banter with Louis Armstrong, in High Society, in Well, Did you Evah with Sinatra in the same film. It was a life-long love affair, that endured decades after Bing went out of fashion and was only heard, tritely, at Christmas.

Even Jake Thackray reminded me of dad. I 'discovered' him the week or two after dad died.  Likewise a Yorkshireman, born within a few years of that singer, with a similar great love of musical comedy, of language, in all the conversations about music we had, how could dad not have mentioned him?  I could almost hear his humorous, lightly scoffing dismissal: A reactionary? No, too scruffy, too anti-establishment, by which he probably meant Too intellectual.  Or maybe he genuinely hadn't heard of him. But now I couldn't ask, that was the thing.  Dad was the person of whom I still asked many questions.  And now, with mum's memory gone, yet his still so prodigious he could pull out a shiny anecdote from 60 years ago as if it was yesterday, he was the sole keeper of the family memories. All of that, along with the humour, the knowledge, the shrewdness, the way of interacting with the world, just startlingly gone.  It is a consolation that I have many recordings of dad, singing and telling stories from recent years and I urge anyone with parents they value who are still alive, to do likewise.

The next day, in the grounds of Mirehouse beside Bassenthwaite lake, I smelt then saw a yellow azalea that dad had loved.  It was his favourite colour, I think for its optimism.  

He had a keen sense of smell, loved gardens, flowers and azaleas particularly.  I can remember us all smelling one beside the Tay in Dunkeld three years ago, almost to the day.  It was such a happy walk.

Dad loved the spring.  It was his favourite season whose early beautiful sunshine this year he hadn't been able to go out to enjoy.  I brought in photos of the camelia in his garden instead, which delighted him. 

At Whinlatter, the song about breathing came on the heels of a recent entry on that subject.  I had, not for the first time, the sense that I was in the right place, not least because Dave introduced the song as being about "savouring every moment".   Years ago, it was something a tall, older man I saw rarely but loved dancing with, said in a milonga in Beeston, Nottingham: 

He said the loveliest thing: "You savour every moment don't you." What else would anyone do?   (Correspondence, 2016)

The song began:

Take some time to breathe
So that you know how it feels
Simply to be breathing
On the earth
Every lungful of air is its own universe
Of possibility,

But you'll have to hear it for yourself because it was the music and harmonies that carried it. 

Another song was also about being present, about savouring special moments

Crickets sing

.....Sweet nothings on a Sunday afternoon.

It was a song that conjured long lazy, Sundays and the pleasant moments of such days.  There was, too, the reminder that these things are special because they are not eternal: 

Until the rain comes.

At the end of the piece, this line was sung in a round between the three singers and it sounded uncannily, mesmerisingly, like raindrops.

No-one ever goes there' (version with another of Dave's groups) was a poetic song about, I think hiding in days 

Between the dawning and the dusk there is a space to climb into

....or natural places 

Across the stream and up the valley where the deeper silence hides'.

Perhaps these are places where others don't go, secret places that we might know where we can go maybe to hide, to heal, to reflect perhaps on the harm we do to ourselves:

Down in the earth you hold your breath and eat the damage of your deeds

...and one hops, eventually to be renewed and restored.

Lyrics

One of the most powerful songs in terms of the combination of music and lyrics was 'Lowland' perhaps not surprisingly since it took its starting point as this Rumi poem.  It is worth remembering that Rumi lived in the thirteenth century in what is today Afghanistan, yet the words are startlingly relevant.

The poem and the song urge us to acknowledge our pain.  It is something, in our modern timers, that only the most recent generation seems to have much facility for, though perhaps also most need.

All medicine wants
is pain to cure.
And don’t just ask for one mercy.
Let them flood in. Let the sky open under your feet.

The poem ends

Cry out! Don’t be stolid and silent
with your pain. Lament! And let the milk
of Loving flow into you.
The hard rain and wind
are ways the cloud has
to take care of us.
Be patient.
Respond to every call
that excites your spirit.
Ignore those that make you fearful
and sad, that degrade you
back toward disease and death.

To act on the exhortation does not come easily to Anglo-American culture, still less the over thirty-fives but if we don't acknowledge our pain, what happens to it?  In Latin America they sing out their joys and their pain.  I am reminded of Doña Ubenza, a sad song with a charming animation. It is by Mariana Carrizo who I have written about before (The ultimate companion), also here (Strangeness and Awe).  The song has a disconcertingly upbeat melody.  It begins in a way that, hearing the music, you would never guess, but that is rather the point: 

Ando llorando pa' adentro
Aunque me ría pa' afuera
Así tengo yo que vivir
Esperando a que me muera

(I go crying within 

Although I laugh on the outside

Thus must I live

Waiting to die)

Some of Enrique Rodriguez's tangos are like that too such as El Encopao (The Drunk).  The lyrics are desperate but you'd never know it, from the melody and the elegant way it is danced. 

Y no piensan que él que mata
su rabia entre copas
tiene su razón.

(And they don't consider that he 

who murders his rage among drinks

has his reasons)

The lyrics of the Lonnings songs ran deep but the music was poised, elegant, delicate and airy, almost sacred.  For balance there was a song 'Tired of London' that was a wry, irreverent dig at that great, sad city.  It's noisy, dirty,  gives you the pox, fevers the mind and is full of anxious, unfriendly, suspicious, secretive people.  Given that there are no streets paved with gold, they won't hesitate to aprovechar de ti, with their beady eyes and light fingers. This was all put infinitely more poetically. 

After The Lonnings and the superb Quickbeam, a woman with a floor spot sang alone with great feeling and some hesitation caused by an upwelling of emotion.  She seemed to want to share that feeling and experience, more than perform. She lived those lines,

Cry out! Don’t be stolid and silent
with your pain. Lament! And let the milk
of Loving flow into you.

I thought how courageous she was and am quite sure as she sang that many hearts reached out to her, souls stretched to embrace her and stood around her.  The next singer said she had been moved to sing by her predecessor's gift. This next woman sang at first tentatively but with a magnificent, professionally trained voice that grew and seem to gain in confidence. Thanking her in the car park later I told her, maybe because I sensed she might need to hear it, about the collective “Wow!”, the communal intake of breath at the end of her song and how I had had chills as she sang. These things are hard to judge when you don't know the people but again, despite the trained voice she too seemed to want to share more than perform.

Following the various scheduled and impromptu songs on the deck there was a more traditional folk session inside the wooden centre. There was 'Bring us a barrel' (recorded here outside a pub window!), 'The Nightingale'  (traditional) and 'Down to the River to Pray', led by the American woman with the professional voice.  Dave, who was sitting just in front of me, fell immediately into seemingly effortless harmonies.  

The songs were for the most part communal, like El Mochilón, where everyone who knew it sang, or chorus songs. People joined in the chorus while someone who remembered the verses sang the remainder. A woman who played the spoons and fizzed with musical energy, but later spoke quietly said she liked to choose the chorus songs precisely so that people can join in. 

Perhaps chorus songs are the way for reluctant singers to get started. But even in my local pub, often other singers don’t join in the chorus even when they know it-  unless it is a song like Stuck in the Middle with You, which seems to get everyone singing. Yet in Whinlatter many joined in, sang, lustily. I keep circling back to the question: Why that difference?  I think it is connected with community and the connections between people. Dave was clearly that community leader, the magnet, the glue, whatever it was that brought everyone together.  He seemed to fit the role perfectly.

The trip was unquestionably worthwhile. Was it "...the place remembered in your dreams" ('No one ever goes there'). The sense of community and connection that was in the dream, was also there at Whinlatter. There was too, the feeling of having witnessed and participated in something meaningful. 

But there were also, and I realise it now more, looking back, much unexpected serendipity: things that came up in the songs or their preambles that resonate in my own life and I am sure in the lives of others: lonnings / paths, dreams, breathing, healing, special moments and savouring them.  Hurt and healing, joy and pleasure, song and connection are after all, the elements of human experience, no matter when or where.