Mixtures

Odd, but Country Music, the Ken Burns documentary, continues to amaze. From last evening’s episode, for example, I learned that the classic song Me and Bobby McGee, written by Kris Kristofferson, grew from his admiration of the 1954 Italian film La Strada (The Road) directed by Federico Fellini. Now that’s the magic of the whole Ken Burns series wrapped up into a single song. It's a country rock number written by a West Point instructor/Rhodes Scholar, based on an “artsy” foreign film, and turned into an immortal bit of Americana by a drug-crazed blues singer who rose to fame from  west coast hippie venues.

It just doesn’t get anymore entangled in modern cultural vines as that, now does it?

They say though, that the most moving songs, especially in the country genre, are those that make you feel they were written just for you. That’s Sunday Morning Coming Down for me. When I first heard it, I was stationed aboard the USS Hunley (AS31) in a desolate mooring five miles up the Cooper River from Charleston, South Carolina. Having finished a year-long tour in Southeast Asia at the invitation of my country, I thought maybe the Navy had wrung the last ounce of worth from me and that we should maybe part ways.

No such luck, they sent me to a worse berth. I had saved enough money overseas to buy an old Chevrolet car, though. So on Sundays, after a night “on the beach” in bars and cheap trailer parks, I’d drive into Charleston, careful to avoid direct contact with the honest folks there who seemed, for some reason, to hate American servicemen far more than the citizens of Da Nang had.

When, therefore, I heard the lines,

In the park I saw a daddy

With a laughing little girl

He was swingin

And I stopped beside the Sunday school

And listened to the song

That they were singing

it sure made me feel like "something I had lost somewhere along the way." I had never met Kris Kristofferson, but I knew that he knew what loneliness was. Man, did he know.

I made it through South Carolina, as I had made it through Vietnam. They didn’t try to destroy you with guns in Charleston, they just tried to make you disappear with bitter indifference. The wounds last, nonetheless. Later though, I met Brenda and things got better, a lot better.

This is still one of my favorite musical pieces in the world, though, that and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Maybe I’m as mixed up, but not as talented at expressing it, as Kristofferson.

Mixtures often turn out well.