In Memoriam / Silent City
My father died last week. He was the best man I have ever known. You can read an obituary here.
I can’t stop thinking about my father’s life, and the mix of history and mythology I hold in my mind regarding his childhood, the town of Junction City, Ohio, where he grew up, and our ancestors there.
I think of his childhood home, situated on a hill overlooking the town below; and across the road is St. Patrick’s Church and Cemetery, which my family referred to as “Silent City,” full of sleeping friends and neighbors and family; the “Mud Mill,” where my dad (briefly) and grandfather worked, firing clay tiles and pipe; the Top Hat, a local restaurant where my uncles ate every day; and of course my grandfather's apple orchard, with barns and tractors, apple pickers, sorting machines, and cider press, and filled with many old varieties of apples, including my favorite, Winesap.
My first memories are of that place, of walking among neat rows of fragrant trees, indulging in as many apples as I could handle. And of ever-present bees, attracted to the sweetness of slowly fermenting fruit. And, the solitary game of running through and dodging my grandfather’s spent tobacco in the grass. And, the often-told story of my grandfather, walking home from St. Patrick’s, and quietly lying down and dying in his front yard, sleeping in the driveway.
It was this mythology that shaped Silent City, an album I released in 2009 on Atavistic Records. I began to think of Junction City and its environs as a mythological town, one filled with personal and family history, and at the same time open to larger ideas and connections. I was thinking of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County and Wendell Berry’s Port William and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio — all fictional places based on both memory and imagination, and used as a novelistic canvas the authors came back to again and again. (I continue to work in this way with more recent projects stemming from Shawnee, Ohio, in the same county and only a few miles away from Junction City.) I also thought of W.G. Sebald’s uncanny ability to bring together history and fiction and memory and photographs into a world at once curious, playful, and melancholic.
"Sleeping in the Driveway" from Silent City
In Silent City, I imagined myself in the buildings and fields of Junction City, in cars and juke joints and churches, and I imagined what kind of stories might transpire in those places. I often thought of moments late at night: times just between being awake and asleep, when your mind is both tired and open, and of the unexpected gifts those times have to offer. I also thought about musical drones and sustained tones as a means to evoke this in-between world of quiet trance (see Ted Gioia’s recent article on the beauty of drones in music here).
Some of the tracks feature singer Will Oldham, and our collaborative process included sharing fragments of hymn tunes, and my memories and writings alongside Will’s own, and assembling them together to make new stories, rooted in both memory and fiction, turning in new directions.
And still other tracks are peppered with sampled recordings, largely from the Berea Appalachian Sound Archives in Kentucky. I had been working in these archives for several years, and even though they are not geographically “authentic” to Junction City, they nevertheless evoke the tenor and sentiment of radio and rural life, and of songs shared and played in the first half of the twentieth century. I even recorded my dad on the track “Well, there are a lot of stories,” as he told tales of playing baseball with prison inmates, and stubbornly sassing back to his granddad after working in the fields; two memories that seem to evoke his personality perfectly.
"Some Glad Day" from Silent City
Of the two videos shared here, the first, “Sleeping in the Driveway” was filmed with my father in Junction City. The DIY amateur video is shaky and of grainy quality, yet it still captures the tone of the places we visited: the cemetery, my great grandfather’s farm, my uncle’s house, and driving along route 668. The second, “Some Glad Day,” was filmed in Mt. Vernon and Columbus, Ohio, and Whitesburg, Kentucky; again, despite their geographical distance, they all somehow conspire to become part of this mythological place.
Here are the lyrics for “Some Glad Day”:
Mudd Mill
Tobacco in the grass
Some glad day we’ll all arrive
This sweet comfort
Is had
Even here
I bid my anxious fears subside
And they will
Until
Brick-making prison
Tobacco in the grass
Some glad day we’ll all arrive
This sweet comfort
Is had
Even here
I bid my anxious fears subside
And they will
Until
Apple orchard
Tobacco in the grass
Some glad day we’ll see we all arrived
This sweet comfort
Would be had
Even here
I bid my anxious fears subside
And they will
If you are interested at all in this music, please please just send me a quick email (brian@brianharnetty.com), and I can send you a code and link to download Silent City on Bandcamp. I would be so happy to share it with you as a small gift, in memory of my father.
If you don’t use Bandcamp, you can find the album on Spotify, Apple Music, and so on.
Once again, a heartfelt thank you to you for your interest and support of this music and sound.
Be well — Brian