Charlene's Ordination Song?

It's true that, from time to time, I do some creative writing during church services. Stand up and sing a hymn, back to the notebook, take my place in the choir, to the notebook, pick up the French horn for the offertory, to the notebook, to the notebook, to the notebook. It's my own private call and response.

And it's a happy coincidence that today, during the ordination of the new Reverend Charlene Han Powell [WAHHOO HUZZAH!], I finished writing my latest song [YAAAAY]. What's unusual about this song is that it is finished and I still really like it. (Usually, now would be the repulsion stage in my process.)

You know how rappers will often start with an exposition, like "My name is ... and I'm from ... and this is what I'm about ... so I'm here to say..."? It's like that. Sort of. This is definitely an album opener and a show opener. Also you hafta hafta hafta imagine that it opens with a drumline cadence, then perhaps a brass pedal drone and/or a double stop in the violin before the voice comes in. And there's a banjo. And harmonies and lots of strings and drumline action as it picks up.

untitled

my father was a barber / and my mother made our home
in the sweet idyllic country / Wilderness and Locust Grove
honeysuckle spring and summer / maple leaves in early fall
without fail one day the truth prevailed I somehow lost it all

so long I've tried to say it / but I couldn't find my words
displaced Americana / hymn sings and hope deferred
fantasy or pure conviction / you can claim that I am wrong
but i do not need your third degree to put this into song

lay low, let it go
there are stranger works of fiction that I know
since then, where I've been
is the place where grace moves in

studied Carter, Ives, and Barber / dropped the needle one by one
symphony and private lessons / Theory IV and Methods I
it took several years of schooling / just to finally learn one thing
that I do not need a third degree to stand up here and sing

lay low, let it go
there are stranger works of fiction that I know
since then, where I've been
is the place where grace moves in
(repeat)

----- instrumental break w/ much drumline ------


my father was a barber / and my mother made our home
in the sweet idyllic country / Wilderness and Locust Grove
honeysuckle spring and summer / maple leaves in early fall
without fail one day the truth prevailed I somehow lost it all

----- transition to 3/4 time + 4-part harmony ------

I thought it was over
I thought I was done
some kind of an old soul
found out I was young
(repeat x3)

----- end humming the coda + add drumline to finish -----

In the beginning, there was the Word...

...and the Word was with blog and the Word was blog. (No offense.)

Because it is not enough that I am on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace, I have found yet another way to get into YourFace—Spotsylvania's Marching Knights.

As many of you know, I am from a rural county outside of Fredericksburg, Virginia, named after British Lt. Col. Alexander Spotswood. Largely due to the absence of Wikipedia in my youth, I did not know anything about Spotswood beyond his last name until just now when I Googled it. What I did know was that my father drove me roughly 20 miles on winding country roads to get me to my Monday evening piano lessons—45 minutes in each direction—so that Mrs. Massey could run me through 30 minutes of James Bastien. We used to hang our heads out the car window and "moo" at the cows to pass time. Sometimes we'd sing along with some of my dad's favorite musicians, like David Gates or James Taylor. Usually Mrs. Robinson, wearing her bandana and standing with one fist on her hip, would wave from the porch of her candy store. Every Monday from elementary school through my sophomore year of high school we did this. My father is a kind and patient man.

Another thing that I knew was that anyone who knew anything about where they lived, relied on our high school fight song to spell the name of our county. You could see it on people's mouths at the bank or the DMV, whenever it came time to fill out their address forms: S! P! O! T! S! Y! L!—V-A-N-I-A! If you were on the inside, and you watched closely, you could see people laughing at themselves after habitually mouthing the word "FIGHT!" after chanting the letters— a common and local compulsion.

Marching band was a Big Deal in my world. The very youngest of four children (Girl ... Boy, Boy ... ... ... Girl), almost everything my older siblings did was of epic proportion to me. When Christi played clarinet (or was she a majorette? why do I remember her having a painfully cool baton??) all of the girls seemed so very very with their cigarettes and their band room. And when David played Bugler's Holiday with the veritable boy's club of first trumpets under direction of Mr. Millhouse, my 10-year old mind could not have fathomed a world larger and more powerful than the one compressed into those rotating, expanding, and contracting "boxes" that snapped into exhilarating "company fronts."

Have I lost you yet? Watch this Santa Clara Vanguard action and get nailed at the 7th second:

And so now, decades into my musical journey but only just beginning the expedition into my own musical voice, I launch said expedition with a blog named in honor of where it all started: Spotsylvania's Marching Knights.

I hope you'll stay for the show.
~Virginia