It Don’t Mean A Thing Just Cause You Can Sing “Amazing Grace”-With The Music Of Judy Collins In Mind 

 

CD Review

 

By Zack James

 

American Folk Music, Number Four, various artists, Ducca Premier Records, 1999

 

Bradley Fox one day decided that he would check on Facebook to see if he could find out whatever happened to Sally Soren, whom everybody called Sal once she had come to Gloversville just before her freshman year. Every guy in the school, a few not in school as well, took dead aim at her right from the start, although nobody got any place until Bradley took matters into his own hands and by a simple devious method got her talking to him, got him past first base if it came to it. The reason that guys were all taking dead aim at her almost from day one was that she was a beauty-not your Hollywood ice queen beauty but more the homespun wholesome girl beauty. Which Sal was since she had come out of the heartland, come out of Ohio when her father had transferred to Massachusetts where his company was involved in computer startups back when that industry was in its infancy and had landed in Gloversville not far from the plant.

 

The reason that nobody ever got anywhere with Sal also had to do with her parents, Phil and Nancy, who were devout members of the Brethren of the Common Life and frowned, deeply frowned on her associating with “heathen” (Phil’s word) boys around town. Things did not look good for Sal since the closest boys who were Brethren lived out in Western Massachusetts and as far as she knew were what non-Brethren would call “goofs.” Didn’t look good for Bradley either but he was a resourceful lad then when some good looking girl got on his mind.    

 

The way Bradley had gotten through to Sal was both ingenuous and simple. One day he had passed her house on the way home from hanging around with his corner boys at Vinny’s Variety Store Thornton Street and she had been sitting on her front porch rather absent-mindedly singing Amazing Grace. No, not absent-mindedly really but singing to make the angels weep for their inadequacies against that heavenly voice. That happenstance had given Bradley his “hook” as he called it. The next day as he was passing her locker in the first floor corridor at school he stopped and mentioned that he had heard her sing the day before on her porch as he was passing by and that he was very interested in such hymns-did she know more? Did she know Higher Love and Great God Jehovah and a few others that he could not remember now. She immediately smiled and said she knew many such hymns and asked, naively asked, how he knew such songs, was he a Brethren she had no knowledge of. Bradley shook his head in confusion never had until that moment heard of the Brethren. He said, he lied, that he was into church hymns from his own church, the Unitarians. That was enough to get him a hearing, and for Sal to give him a concert after school at his request at Tilton Park. From there it was easy.

 

Kind of easy once he got pass the Phil and Nancy gauntlet, the question of whether they would let a heathen, well, half heathen which is the way they always treated him whenever he showed up in their presence. He was able to con them enough that first time spouting all the damn hymns he could gather in. See Bradley didn’t know anything about church music as church music since he was basically left to the wind by his religiously indifferent parents. He had lied to that extent. Unitarian seemed the right choice of an esoteric religion that might pass muster (it didn’t since Brethren thought all other denominations were “heathen”). What Bradley knew, what he knew as a child of the new breeze coming into his generation (and Sal’s too if she let it), this search for “roots” music that the better part of the generation was looking for was folk music. And the old time hymns from down in the back country of the South, down in the Appalachian Mountains where the hymns were a form of entertainment on cold Sunday mornings were “roots” music. So Bradley was able to convince Sal’s parents, Sal too that he was taking her to a church social of some sort. What he was actually was going to do was take her to Harvard Square over in Cambridge to see a folk concert at the Café Blue, a place he had discovered one night when he was investigating what this folk thing was all about.

 

In any case the deception worked, worked enough to make Sal laugh, and not be too mad at him. Worked in that she/they enjoyed themselves and their cups of coffee (she had never had coffee before since the Brethren frowned on stimulants) and shared brownie. (One of the great attractions for Bradley of folk music was as a poor boy he got by on cheap dates, that is if the girl was interested in folk music otherwise he was like every other poor boy wondering how the hell he was going to grab some serious dough to meet expenses.) More importantly Sal was very interested in what Bradley had to say about folk music and while that night not one hymn passed anybody’s lips he sensed that she like him was attracted to the simplicity and power of the music, the root. Sal was impressed when Bradley was able to quote chapter and verse the history of various hymns and others songs as they were transported by immigrants to the new landsway back when.

 

The long and short of the matter was that through the rest of high school and the first two years he was at Boston University Sal and he stuck together. Stuck together even when Sal’s parents refused to let her go to college which she was smart enough to have attended and which Bradley had begged her to try to attend(the Brethren frowned upon too much non-Biblical information in this life as the reader could probably have figured out by now). So Sal was reduced to working for Liberty Mutual Insurance Company in Boston as an accounts clerks. But that was not the end of it for Sal. Being with Bradley she had become very interested in folk music. Would sing from Rise Up Singing, the folk bible, up in her room when her parents were not home, would sing when with Bradley, would sing along when they attended the folk coffeehouses or concerts that were the staple of date nights. Bradley also encouraged her to learn to play the guitar when it turned out that his roommate, Jesse, who would have some local success on the folk scene around Cambridge, had a guitar and would teach her to play.           

 

Things went along as well as could be expected for the first couple of years of college but Sal was getting itchy. She/they/Jesse knew she had talent, could still make the angels weep like that very first time Bradley had heard her that fateful day he passed  by her house. The dime turned though one night at the Club Nana which held a weekly talent search, what would now be called an “open mic” in which each contestant was permitted three songs. The winner to get a feature at the club on a Saturday night in the future. Sal won that night with her god is beautiful version of Amazing Grace which had the crowd singing along like Jehovah was in the room, praise be. Later success at that Saturday night feature and remarks by Sid Lawrence, the manager of Club Nana at the time, that Sal should seek a professional career in music, should go to New York to be “discovered” had her all as she said “betwixt and between.”  

 

One night she told Bradley that she was going to go to New York, to the Village, with Jesse and his girlfriend, Maura, who all were going to live in some shared loft and seek their fame and fortune-or bust. Bradley tried to talk her out of going saying that they could go together right after he graduated in two years but she insisted that she had to go then, go while there was a folk minute to ride to the stars. She never told her parents and just said Liberty Mutual needed workers in New York and despite one final entreaty by Bradley she with Jesse and Maura left for New York.

 

Bradley would talk to her over the telephone and write over the next year but that parting night was the last he saw of her. After that first year they stopped communication both because Sal was having some long hours success as a folk singer under the name Lara Lee and Bradley had moved away from folk music to the new scene, the counter-cultural scene and the turn back to rock, “acid” rock it was called before he was drafted into the American Army for the long trek to Vietnam. He would think about Sal over the years but between this and that after he got back to the “real” world after ‘Nam and an assortment of other problems he never got around to searching for her. Never heard that she made it big, or small, when he was able to check around with various people associated with the dwindling folk scene.

 

Then Facebook came along and he figured what the hell he would try that possibility with a billion people on the site, maybe. He was single now after three failed marriages so what was there to lose going back in time to see what might have been. Just to be on the safe side he tried Sally Soren, no luck, then Sal Soren, bingo, although it was now Sal Soren-Martin which had certain cachet among women affected by the feminist movement in the 1970s who did not want to lose their identities to their husbands when they got married. As turned out Sal after some small success in the Village lost out to the hard fact that the folk minute had ebbed just as she was ready to move in. Same thing with Jesse Martin whom she had married after Maura left him for a rock and roll drummer a couple of years later when they moved to the West Coast. Finally winding up in San Diego. Jesse had passed away a couple of years before but she was the proud mother of three children and seven grandchildren-none of them thankfully Brethren of the Common Life-who kept her busy these days.

 

She made Bradley laugh in one message when she said that she attended monthly coffeehouses out there in San Diego sponsored by the now Unitarian-Universalist Church. “Open mics,” was what she was up to these days to keep the rest of her time occupied. Bradley was not sure what he would be doing these days-whether he would be pursuing his old flame or not. All he knew was that he would always remember that first time he passed her house and she had made the heavens moan with that Amazing Grace she sang.