Annie Gallup
"100 Miles From Music City"
from Courage My Love (Prime CD)
I go back to the old place after many years away
Imagine all the time I spent here just 100 miles from Nashville and never
made the trip
Of course Nashville was a different place then,
Yeah the Grand Ole Opry was platitudinous and corny,
Country music was still hackneyed and banal, not young and hip
And anyhow, we played our own music in the shade of the old oak tree
When the afternoon became too hot to work but not too hot to play guitar
And old John Walters would come down the road and sing the old songs a cappella
In his strange keening falsetto, drink too much of what it was he carried
with him in that mayonnaise jar
And tell us how they found his father in the bathtub on the day when he was
through with wondering when his lungs were going to take him
And then John would sing a song so pretty
We'd all grow quiet for a long long time
While the sun sank towards the chicken barn
100 miles from music city
I go back and the old place is just 40 miles from Mammoth Cave
Just 40 miles away and all the time I lived so close I never even had the
urge to go
I guess it's hard to see yourself give up and play the tourist when you're close
to home
And anyhow the hills behind the house were full of caves you wouldn't even know
were there
Until it snowed
and only then by where the snow was melted back
from where the rock was open wide enough
to slide in on your belly until you found the place
It dropped down to a room so big we all could turn our flashlights off
And sit in darkness so complete that all your other senses were on fire and
you had to taste
The lips of someone next to you and breathe their Dr Bronner's soap and wood
smoke
And the only sound was the sssssss of your down parkas touching and you felt
so giddy
You drop your flashlight, listen while it rolls beyond a ledge then falls forever
till it hits the bottom
40 miles from Mammoth Cave 100 miles from Music City
I go back to the old place, no I never went to see the greyhounds racing
even though the track was only fifteen miles from where I woke up all those
days
And went to sleep as many nights without the wish to see those greyhounds race
around the track
Like an unhappy metaphor for life, if I had ever lived that way
And anyhow, I had a yellow dog and he was smart and irreproachable
In all that time I never put him on a leash or even made him wear a collar
And he only ran off twice, first time he was gone two days and nights
And I have never felt so lonely as when I was walking through that hayfield
and hollering
And hollering and bleeding from the barbed wire fence,
But there he was two mornings later, peppered full of buckshot,
and the second time he ran away, well that was it
He never did come back so I can't kneel beside his grave
Fifteen miles from Coleman Racetrack 40 miles from Mammoth Cave 100 miles from
Music City
Annie Gallup: "Is it an art or a craft? Oh!! I have this fine arts/metalsmithing background and that was the compelling question of the era when I was involved in that world, and I was determined to create art in a crafts medium and sidestep or confound the whole issue. Because isn't the whole world made of blurry lines and the attempt to organize it categorically just about comfort levels or the kind of brain that needs to categorize to control (call it by name and it's yours. yellow shafted flicker. iambic pentameter. art.) what it is and not about how the world morphs through shades of everything? So that everything has it's own sense and there are no rules and you can't actually get through life without thinking after all by playing learnable rules? And the point of creating anything worth creating in any medium is that you have to make choices. And of course you are the sum of all you have ever known or heard or experienced and that is why civilizations build on what preceded them and why as contemporaries we have roots in common..... is it an art or a craft?"
100 Miles From Music City is a masterful example of both, of course - for all its off-handed, rambling style, it's a carefully paced trip to the edge of the cliff of knowledge. Joseph Conrad said that the writer must make an appeal through the senses, and Gallup's songs are full of sensual reality - touch and sound and weather. Each verse of 100 Miles From Music City begins with a description of a kind of public/tourist version of a kind of experience. Then, each time after the phrase "and anyhow," she describes a more personal/real version of the same sort of experience. She moves from observations on commercial Country music to old John Walters singing, Mammoth Caves to the caves behind the house, Coleman greyhound racetrack to her own "smart and irreproachable" dog.
But still, there is more, Gallup insists. At the end of verse 2, Gallup suggests a sense of infinity toward the end of each verse - in the death of John Walters’ father in the first (it's happening to someone else), in the line "You drop your flashlight, listen while it rolls beyond a ledge then falls forever till it hits the bottom" -a child's version of infinity. The author's experience doesn't reach infinity until the ending - there's no reference point for the runaway dog, we don't know if he's alive or dead. Here's an experience which has no marking, a question without resolution. By including her own ignorance in this story, Gallup shows the kind of humility which makes true art possible. She's done something quite bold and bracing here.
-Andrew Calhoun
Andrew Calhoun, founder of Waterbug Records, has released 7 albums of original songs including his most recent, Where Blue Meets Blue and Phoenix Envy. For more info on Andrew Calhoun's music, go to http://www.waterbug.com/calhoun.html