Here's a higher resolution version of the second video I ever posted to youtube, shot by Peter Irvine on Mount Pollux after the first Sunday singing in October 2007. At the time, trying to make decent quality files without exceeding youtube's limits involved a lot of guesswork, so I hope you enjoy the improvement.
I started making videos after my wife Minja died and I was without work crashing at a friend's house with my two children who were little. The idea was to get out in the world and do something creative, reconnect with the seasons and the place and maybe get some work. KZread acquaintance Wendy M requested Amazing Grace for a loved one who was struggling, and I hadn't thought of singing this version of song with banjo until the moment. It was meaningful to us all, I think, to have this and cool that it found an unexpectedly large number of viewers. It even did help me get some really nice work eventually.
John Newton was known to have such a taste and talent for profanity that the existing words weren't always enough to convey the depth of his feeling. He later brought his way with words to sacred poetry, some of the best we have. This is one of many tunes used for these words of his, and probably my favorite. Like so many others I learned it from a tunebook owned by Amelia Clark 1850-1944 that I bought at a junk shop in Hadley (off to the left behind my head in the video) around the time Nevermind came out.
It's a bit of a leap, but I took the photo at the end the day before yesterday at an unmarked petroglyph site off a country road south of Fayetteville, Arkansas (thanks to Allison Langston for taking me there and figuring out a great weekend of gigs!) Today is coincidentally a national holiday recognizing Indigenous people.
Material culture was and is an important point of entry for me to a lot of the work I do, and my attention is often on liminal presences where the sea comes in "between the earth and the sky" (#Lankum). As a kid I remember thinking "if you're not my ancestors, why are you buried in my woods?" I'm not completely opposed to the "heritage" model, which can be a part of meaningful and constructive work and also figures prominently in most murder. But coming to something like this version of Amazing Grace is, on one or two levels anyway, more to do with leaning about and repurposing flotsam. (And or jetsam- no idea which is which).
I had an insight some years ago talking with my architect friend and former mentor Ben Ledbetter about how I trained myself to work and how deeply and non-metaphorically it was affected by growing up on salt water. Every day the water brought new things onto the beach and if it was high enough or turbulent enough washed old things out of the bank, or up out of the sand. Salad dressing packets, hand blown bottles, 500 to 5,000 year old quartz implements, sea coal, a dead shark. I found a late woodland potsherd with a distinct finger impression, and one time a coconut still in the husk. I don't know if it came to New England on a strange tide or was bought at King Kullen and dropped off the side of a boat. Spending time with the materials, and with help from another set of mentors, especially Cherokee/Shawnee/Scottish "experimental ethnographer" friends John and Ellie White I figured out how to make reasonably good tools from quartz pieces the glacier brought. Whatever the origin of the coconut, I used a quartz blade to make it into a drinking bowl that I still have somewhere. In case I'm coming off as unclear or hasty, the non-metaphorical point has something to do with finding junk, internalizing it and making it into things I like to use and share.