Thank you, Matt! Your article, by which I also mean you, and John Prine are well worthy of each other.
I had not even known of this singer until I started reading about a few of the people who had been lost to covid, starting last year. His qualities shone the more I read and listened. I found that Bob Dylan was one of his greatest admirers. Originally the only one of his songs I had heard was "Angel From Montgomery", a beautiful and evocative one about an old woman, but soon I had a new favorite, "Lonesome Friends of Science", which you can hear at
I love its humorous, telling combination of the homely and cosmic. He sings,
"The lonesome friends of science say
The world will end most any day
Well if it does then that's okay
Cause I don't live here anyway
I live down deep inside my head
Where long ago I made my bed
I get my mail in Tennessee
My wife, my dog and my kids and me."
What thrilled me was how he said that even if if the whole world ends, that is okay for him because here is not where he lives. Though he says it is inside his head--maybe for the purpose of a rhyme which he says he always tries to do-- the way I'd put it for myself is that the place where I really live is actually my soul, and he just reminded me of this. Maybe this is where each of us truly lives and knowing it gives us a freedom and different kind of grounding, a point of reflection and relationship, that is beyond destroying.
When he was a young man, he worked for years as a mailman and he said that is when he fell in love with old people, the vulnerable, isolated old people he would talk with as he delivered their mail. So he started writing some songs about them, and when people would ask him what his ambition in life was, he would say he wanted to be an old person.
In his life he had to battle free of heavy drinking early on and later, two near terminal bouts with cancer. But mostly he lived as a bard, musician and family man His empathy, compassion, simplicity, depth and humor keep touching people and lifting us up.
