Since lockdown I have noticed that a lot of people have been taking to social media to sing their favourite songs, and I can’t decide whether this earnest and heartfelt gesture is a blessing or something that makes a bad situation worse. There is an old Yiddish proverb, which I know I have quoted before that says, “A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the accordion but doesn’t.” Possibly something similar is true of this online phenomenon, but I suppose people have to do something to cope with isolation. All I would say is you might think about exhausting other possibilities before launching yourself onto other people’s ears – try gardening, painting, indoor football, throwing cards into a top hat, writing a novel, and musical appreciation before you record yourself and if you must make a recording, think about your neighbours. Will the sound of your dulcet tones coming through the wall fill them with good cheer or will they think some birds have fallen down the chimney and are now squawking for their lives?

As I write this, I am started to get used to the relative silence of Cheltenham. Where normally at this time I would be getting the sounds of car engines and people returning from work coming through the window, today the birds dominate, chattering musically away perhaps about how much the humans have improved recently. In the Groundhog Day era of isolation there is a great deal to be stressed about and yet there are moments like this when I have an experience of something being better than it normally is, so I feel momentarily good about it and then guilty because it feels wrong to appreciate that good moment when so many people are suffering. This undoubtedly is the same kind of adult logic that made no sense to me as a small child when I didn’t like something on my dinner plate and my mother would remind me that I should eat it because there were starving children in Africa. I would reason that I was happy to send my food to them, but that suggestion never went down well. Eat your dinner; remember people less well off than you; think yourself lucky; feel bad that you’re glad that you’re better off than someone else.

I decided that over the next couple of weeks, I would present through this blog, some music from the Kevin hymn book, by which I mean, songs that are not in hymn books that I know, but songs that have spoken to me over time. So I invite you to put on some headphones, and listen first of all to a song that resonates with the current moment, and in particular our tendency to feel bad about ourselves, the things we do and the thoughts we have.  It’s a song from 1995 by Marcus Hummon, a song of guilt and self-reflection and it gets me every time.

I first heard that song at university in 1995 at a time when I had come out as a country music fan. Indeed, years later, when I moved in with my wife Tracey, my love of this genre of music was something we had to have a conversation about, and she graciously told me she loved me as I was and then bought me a set of headphones. I think she was trying to save herself from being subjected to the country music hall of pain for this is a genre of music that is not always helped by its stereotypes, which are reflected in ridiculous song titles like You Can’t Have Your Kate and Edith Too, My Wife Ran Off with My Best Friend and I Sure do Miss Him and I’m so Miserable Without You it’s Just like Having You Around.

Chris ‘in the morning’ Stephens, a character in the excellent 90s TV series, Northern Exposure celebrated the sense of myth in country music, explaining that “There’s heroes and villains, good and bad, right and wrong. The protagonist strolls into bar, which he sees as a microcosm of the big picture. He contemplates his existence and he asks himself, ‘who’s that babe in the red dress?”

For me, though, country music at its best takes me to places I have been and realities I have lived; it’s three chords and the truth, raw exposed emotion rendered even more raw and emotional by the sound of a mournful fiddle and a three part harmony. If you want to wallow in misery, country music lets you do it more woefully than any other musical genre so the grey mood of a Sunday when the shops were shut in my adolescence was translated into the much darker hues of Kris Kristofferson’s lyrics:

Well I woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt

And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad so I had one more for dessert

And I fumbled in my closet for my clothes and found my cleanest dirty shirt

And I combed my hair and washed my face and stumbled down the stairs to meet the day….

…On a Sunday morning sidewalk, I’m wishing Lord that I was stoned,

‘Cos there’s something in a Sunday that makes a body feel alone…..

This is a phenomenally miserable song, up there with Ralph Stanley’s O Death and Merle Haggard’s Misery and Gin.

Country music songs can sometimes be positive, though often only in a backward looking way that pines for a simpler past that never was (hence the joke about what you get if you play a country song backwards – your mother back, your dog back, your truck back). This is particularly true when it comes to spirituality, a word that isn’t in the country music dictionary because in this genre it’s all about that old time religion: a boy leaves home and his parents send him off with A Bible and A Bus Ticket Home, Ricky Skaggs reminisces about the childhood Little Mountain Church House where he heard the word he based his life upon and so on.  Liberal religious sentiments are rarely heard so the exceptions stand out, which is absolutely the case with Iris Dement’s classic, Let the Mystery Be, a song that embraces the things we don’t understand with memorable lines like:

Some say that they’re coming back in a garden, bunch of carrots and little sweet peas;

I think I’ll just let the mystery be.

I heard a variation on this theme in a sermon many years ago in which an extra beatitude was suggested that Jesus never said. ‘Blessed are the cracks for they let in the light.’ Life doesn’t give us all the answers but if we are open to them, amidst the strangeness of life and all the things that don’t make sense, there are moments of illumination. If we use them well, that may be enough.