Labors of Love

It has been a mighty long time since I made an entry here, but the time for procrastination is over. Truly I had no idea school would be so time-consuming (what was I thinking??) and I have been focused on swimming competitively for the past 6 months. I did some serious training as I prepared for the gay games in Chicago. It, too, was a labor of love but I’ll write about that some other time.

Today, while it’s fresh in my mind, I want to draw a portrait of an artist for you. The young have so much to teach us older artists. And certainly we have experiences to share with them. I feel privileged to have recently been a part of just such a lesson, on both the giving and receiving end.

I was in Dallas, TX this past weekend visiting my sister and her family and saying goodbye to my 18-year-old niece as she prepares to leave for her freshman year in college. The adults all suffered from a sense of sadness as she graduates from this final stage of girlhood, while she herself can hardly wait to be off on the greatest adventure of her life. The house was astir with excitement occasionally dampened by a few wistful tears, but always as active as a beehive during honey-making season.

Now the soon-to-be-departing niece is, quite naturally, the center of a lot of attention. These are the farewell days and there are so many goodbyes to say, not to mention the endless preparations for living in a dorm room and away from home for the first time. Her younger sister, at 16, feels overlooked a lot of the time. She is fairly good-natured about the imbalance of attention, but it can and does get on her nerves. She keeps herself occupied with her music, which serves the dual purpose of increasing her aptitude while drawing attention to her many talents at the same time. She performed a little concert for us the first day of my visit.

Now, Sally has only been playing guitar for 6 months and she is entirely self-taught. Not only that, but she insists on playing songs performed and written by artists she admires, some of which are quite difficult to learn. I hear Patty Griffin, Nancy Griffith, and Iris DeMent performed darn near to perfection. Can this possibly be the same niece who patiently plucked and picked her way through her first songbook at Christmas time?

I also notice that she is singing in a rather nasal voice, using a lot of twang, much the way her favorite singers do. In other words, she is imitating them. It is, after all, the way we learn. We imitate our favorite poets, painters, dancers, musicians. That is, at first, the way we learn to play, paint, write, perform. However, I happen to know that my young niece is naturally gifted vocally. She has a beautiful voice all her own. And that voice, excuse my prejudice here, has it all over any of the singers she is presently imitating.

After I’ve been around awhile and the strangeness has worn off a bit, Sally and I find time to talk about her music and her singing. I tell her how astounded I am at how well she has learned to play in just six short months. We talked about music as an art form and about creativity and the possibility of her writing a few songs of her own. This is hard for her to imagine, what with listening to all those great singer-songwriters on her IPOD. So I told her how I put off writing anything of my own for 25 years because I “could never be as great” as the authors I was reading--Dickens, Dickinson, Frost, Steinbeck. Good Lord, the list goes on and on. What I hadn’t realized until much later is that what is artistically crucial for all artists is authentic work written in their own voice telling the story they most wanted to tell.

Soon we got around to discussing her singing. I told her she wasn’t using her talent to its full potential simply because she thought someone else’s voice might sound better. I mean, after all, they were big stars--they had to have something going for them, right? And I explained that the sound of those voices were authentic and original to those artists. They might not have thought much of them when they first heard themselves sing. Maybe they wanted to sound like Joni Mitchell or Joan Baez, but it put a strain on them to try and be like someone else. I suggested she try one of her songs singing with her “regular” voice, the one she used for chorus and choir.

It was difficult at first because she had learned the songs a certain way and practiced them over and over. I suggested a few new songs she might learn later, a few by men and some by women I thought she’d like. I named a few songs I thought might be more difficult to imitate. To her credit, Sally dealt well with what could have been perceived as criticism. She GOT IT.

Now you know it ain’t all that easy to receive advice when your 50, so imagine hearing this after you’ve worked your tail off learning something a certain way and you’re only sixteen! Plus your whole world is changing around you as your sister leaves home, leaving you alone with the parents and no ally. But Sally proved herself a true artist, a dedicated musician. We listened to several songs from a handful of CD’s. She picked out a few she liked. And then she got to work. She put her head down and picked and plucked and strummed and hummed and sang those songs over and over. Right there in the middle of chaos, with relatives running all over the place, with the last couple of weeks in summer left to hang out with friends, swim in the pool, sleep late--Sally worked like a rock star who had two days to cut an entire album.

In a single day, she learned three new songs, among them Neil Young’s “Old Man” and Gillian Welch’s version of “Tear My Stillhouse Down.” And she had to transpose Young’s song completely in order for it to suit her voice. No formal training. No one holding her hand or making her do her homework. She was in love with the music and this was not labor, but passionate play. Best of all, she was using her own voice and style in a way that made my heart break. These songs I had heard hundreds of times became new to me. I couldn’t believe what that young woman was able to do in such a short amount of time.

If only all of us were willing to work at what we love with such grit and determination. If only each of us could accept suggestions, even criticism with such open-mindedness. Sally reminded me what a labor of love looks like, feels like. She showed me again how much we can accomplish when we set our mind to the task and set everything else aside even for a few short hours. Devotion--that seems like a word you use for relationships or religion. But that’s what I saw in Sally this past weekend...a trait that can go missing if we don’t practice it often enough. Devotion---that’s what a labor of love looks like. Devotion.

Thanks for the lesson, Sally.