It's a totally different order of things when someone dies whom you did not know personally, or with whom you have no personal connection - celebrities, figures in the news, those sorts of people. It's almost obscene, possibly is obscene, to mention those sorts of passings in the same post with this photo of little Zoie, whose death is causing such unbearable pain and anguish to a dear friend and his family, but I feel moved to mention two deaths this week of people whose music was part of the soundtrack of my high school years and all the time since. The first was Clarence Clemons, the Big Man, saxophonist in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band - I was lucky enough to see them play live four times (back in the late 70s and early 80s) and loved the clear and obvious love between those men as it washed out from the stage along with the music.
The other death was of a less well-known musician but one even more important in my musical life, and my life, period, than Clarence: Mike Waterson, a Yorkshire singer whose singing with his sisters and cousin, and later with his sisters and brother-in-law, and later still with his children, nieces and nephews, was a revelation to me in the 1970s when I came across it, and, without my knowing it, provided a taste of the Sacred Harp singing that would later change my life: the Watersons' 1977 record Sound, Sound Your Instruments of Joy contains renditions of several songs from the Sacred Harp, although if I read the liner notes closely enough to register the mention of it back then, it didn't stick. When I heard Sacred Harp singing for the first time, in 1983 when the Word of Mouth Chorus sang from the book on a broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion transmitted live from the chapel of Middlebury College as I sat in the balcony being electrified by the sounds from the stage, something in my brain knew they were going to sing "Idumea" before they did, even though I had only heard that song on the Watersons LP and, as I say, I didn't remember the liner notes' mention of the Sacred Harp. And when they did indeed sing that song, my heart was already hooked on the sound of the singing, the power of it, and the spark of needing to have it in my life was lit.
And as we know, sixteen years later I met Jerry Enright at a Sacred Harp singing.
I was lucky enough to attend a concert by the Watersons in 1987 in Minnesota, before the death of Mike's sister Lal. They all had colds and complained about them throughout the show, but sounded great, as I remember, nonetheless. They, as much as anyone, helped put me on the path that has resulted in my being a widow in Illinois, for the good of that and the pain. Everything in a person's life leads to everything else in it, I suppose - even little Zoie's death, even that, I wouldn't have had as part of my experience if I hadn't heard "Idumea," if I hadn't followed up this esoteric singing form (in pre-Internet days no less), if I hadn't gotten involved in it and gone to Alabama and met Jerry and moved to Illinois and married him, if he hadn't been stolen out of my life, if I hadn't had to look elsewhere for work, if I hadn't found friends at the place I landed up working, if one of them hadn't been Dave, who adored his little grandniece and talked about her and finally invited me to participate in the 5K last month (in his family's team in memory of Zoie's uncle Eddie, who died of a cruel degenerative disease four years ago at the age of 13), where I got to meet Zoie. Never, ever, ever imagining that she'd be gone the next month. Never.
A memorial site for Zoie is here.
