{"id":31303,"date":"2012-05-18T15:06:24","date_gmt":"2012-05-18T19:06:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=31303"},"modified":"2012-05-18T20:28:19","modified_gmt":"2012-05-19T00:28:19","slug":"a-mark-so-fine-joe-henry-and-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/05\/18\/a-mark-so-fine-joe-henry-and-you\/","title":{"rendered":"A Mark So Fine: Joe Henry and You<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photograph by Michael Wilson.<\/p><\/div>\n

In November of 2001, I picked up Joe Henry<\/a>\u2019s album Scar<\/em><\/a> and was stunned by the opening track, a slow blues number <\/strong>called \u201cRichard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation.\u201d Henry, <\/strong>a white man, sang from the point of view of the black icon, expressing the comedian\u2019s love-hate relationship with himself and his audience. Henry had the audacity and sensitivity to pull it off, with help from a spiraling, dipping, dripping saxophone solo by Ornette Coleman.<\/p>\n

Scar<\/em> was released in May of that year. Henry couldn\u2019t have known how tearful the nation would be that fall. He closed the album with these lines from the title track, sung in a careful, mournful tempo:<\/p>\n

\n

The blade of our outrageous fortune,
\nLike a parade, it cuts a path.
\nLight shows on our foolish way
\nAnd darkness on
\nOur aftermath.<\/p>\n

If I love you, to save myself
\nAnd you love me because we are
\nSo fool to think that our parade
\nCould leave a path
\nAnd not a scar.
\nAnd I love you with all I am
\nAnd you love me with what you are,
\nAs pretty as a twisting vine
\nA mark so fine
\nBut still a scar.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The album resonated with me throughout that first post\u2013September 11 holiday season, more than Dylan\u2019s \u201cLove and Theft\u201d<\/a><\/em>, which was released on that particular Tuesday, a coincidence that generated new claims of clairvoyance from Dylanologists. Henry\u2019s album cuts deeper. The \u201cI\u201d and \u201cyou\u201d of his songs <\/strong>are more enigmatic than those of any songwriter working today. They have, by turns, represented <\/strong>two lovers, God, an anonymous carnie, a whole nation or civilization, centerfielder Willie Mays, saxophonist Charlie Parker, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, and sometimes several different people <\/strong>in one song.<\/p>\n

The song seems also to borrow from Robert Browning\u2019s \u201cBy the Fire-Side\u201d: \u201cIf two lives join, there is oft a scar, \/ They are one and one, with a shadowy third; \/ One near one is too far.\u201d Along with his literary operation, Henry employs a remarkable band: pianist Brad Mehldau, drummer Brian Blade, bassist Me\u2019shell Ndeg\u00e9ocello, guitarist Marc Ribot, saxophonist Coleman, and eight members of the New York Philharmonic. The final track ends and a minute of silence follows, the album apparently finished. But just when you are about to hit Eject, it reawakens with eight untracked minutes of Coleman noodling on saxophone, alone in an eerie, airy soundscape, with the faint wailing of electronics and distant machines that could be from an apocalyptic sci-fi movie or a coal mine.<\/p>\n

Over the past decade I\u2019ve learned that my immediate transfixion with the Richard Pryor tune was an unusual entry to Henry\u2019s work. His music requires patience; it rewards repeated attention, like writing by Sebald or Anne Carson. There are few hummable hooks or refrains; the seductions must be earned. His lyrics are compassionate, sad, and sometimes devastating, but never confessional; the blows are complex, more ambiguous, easy to feel and hard to see. His lyrics reference epic topics\u2014love, war, and other inexorable plights and disasters\u2014but his subject is the human response to those forces, not the forces themselves.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Joe Henry's studio in Pasadena, California. Photograph by Michael Wilson.<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

In late winter, I drove three and a half hours from Chapel Hill to visit Joe Henry\u2019s parents in their home outside Shelby, a town of twenty thousand people in the foothills between Charlotte and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Jerry and Mary Henry, both originally from Charlotte, moved often with their four kids before Jerry\u2019s advancement with Chevrolet landed them in Rochester, Michigan. After Jerry retired in 1992, they moved back to their home state. They live on eighteen acres in a farmhouse built in 1945. A self-taught blacksmith, Jerry\u2019s shop is in a barn out back, and his work is in evidence throughout the house: door handles, light switches and socket covers, cabinet knobs, curtain rods. There is even a five-hundred-pound chopping block in the center of the kitchen.<\/p>\n

Mary made all the rugs, quilts, seat covers, and anything else in the house requiring fabric. When Joe married Melanie Ciccone, a childhood friend from Michigan, Mary made her wedding dress and the bridesmaids\u2019 dresses. For thirty years, Mary made Jerry\u2019s suits for work, two each year.<\/p>\n

Melanie, whose sister is Madonna, told me, \u201cI grew up within the practices of Catholicism in an incredibly dramatic family. Mary and Jerry were modest Christians, without pretense. I\u2019ve learned so much from them. They are the least judgmental, least assuming, most accepting, most forgiving people I\u2019ve ever met. They practice their religion in a rare, pure sense. It flows through everything they do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joe Henry has said many times that what the Bible means to his parents the American songbook means to him. Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Dylan, numerous blues artists\u2014they taught him how to understand and live life. As a young boy he would sit in front of a record player for hours, singing along without his conversational stutter. At age fourteen, his parents recall, his first gig was in the school cafeteria, standing alone in front of a microphone with a guitar. It\u2019s a different impulse from wanting to be in a rock band, and a surprising one for a stutterer.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

At City Winery<\/a> last February, Henry and his rhythm section played his latest album, Reverie<\/a><\/em>, in sequence. The audience was filled with fans, among them Gloria Steinem, Elvis Costello, Diana Krall, and Jolie Holland. David Byrne attended one of the sets, after which he told me that he \u201cwas deeply moved.\u201d\u00a0\u201cIt was good for me to see him and hear him,\u201d he added. \u201cIt raises the bar as far as my own songwriting goes. There\u2019s a very personal and emotional storytelling going on, with a little bit of Faulknerian or McCarthyesque wordplay that is maybe a curse for some, but I really enjoy it.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Reverie<\/em> was released, I put it aside after several listens, couldn\u2019t find a foothold in it. Six months later, when I began listening to it again, preparing for the City Winery shows, I came to understand it as his mid-career masterpiece. If it were a Cormac McCarthy novel it would be Suttree<\/em>, the language and rhythms coming together like an ancient swamp and new fog. McCarthy was forty-six when that novel was published, and his popularity would come only later, with more mainstream books. Henry was fifty when Reverie<\/em> was released, and there are no signs of compromise.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Joe Henry at City Winery. Photograph by Kate Joyce.<\/p><\/div><\/center><\/p>\n

\u201cJoe\u2019s poetry is fueled by the deepest humanity,\u201d Roseanne Cash told me by e-mail, \u201cand that\u2019s what moves me so much. But he makes you come to him, which I really respect. He creates cinematic scenes, and within them are these gems of poetry. I let lines of his wrench me open. He has an ability to jar me out of my smallness. I went to see him at Lincoln Center a few months after I had brain surgery in 2007. I was so miserable. I was so uninterested in writing or performing, but he sang \u2018Our Song\u2019 from Civilians<\/a><\/em>, and I was moved to tears. I wanted music again.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOur Song\u201d opens with an improbable encounter: \u201cI saw Willie Mays \/ In a Scottsdale Home Depot \/ Looking at garage door springs \/ At the far end of the fourteenth row.\u201d (The musician Peter Mulvey told me there are twelve thousand songs lyrics in his digital library; he can search for many of the proper nouns in Henry\u2019s work, and the only results are Henry\u2019s songs.) <\/p>\n

Then Henry sings overheard lines from Mays to his wife:<\/p>\n

\n

This was my country
\nThis was my song
\nSomewhere in the middle there
\nIt started badly and it\u2019s ending wrong<\/p>\n

This was my country
\nThis frightful and this angry land
\nBut it\u2019s my right if the worst of it
\nMight somehow make me a better man.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But as the song continues, the narrator casts doubt on himself.<\/p>\n

\n

That was him,
\nI\u2019m almost sure,
\nThe greatest centerfielder
\nOf all time.<\/br><\/p>\n

He\u2019s just like us,
\nI want to tell him,
\nStooped by the burden of endless dreams,
\nHis, and yours, and mine.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is vintage Joe Henry: He offers the image of Willie Mays, he sings in the voice of Mays, and then he unravels the image with the possibility it wasn\u2019t really him. Then he offers a third perspective\u2014the listener, you<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Henry once wrote Allan Gurganus a fan letter and asked him to sign his copy of the writer\u2019s classic story collection, White People<\/a><\/em>. Gurganus became a fan.\u00a0\u201cSympathy<\/em>,\u201d Gurganus told me, \u201cmeans being available to others\u2019\u00a0experience. Empathy<\/em>\u2014a rarer gift\u2014means literally becoming them. Joe does not just sing about others, he sings as<\/em> them. His various voices, his inward kinds of knowing, place him in\u00a0company with our finest fiction writers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sam Stephenson<\/a> is at work on a biography of the photographer W. Eugene Smith.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In November of 2001, I picked up Joe Henry\u2019s album Scar and was stunned by the opening track, a slow blues number called \u201cRichard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation.\u201d Henry, a white man, sang from the point of view of the black icon, expressing the comedian\u2019s love-hate relationship with himself and his audience. Henry had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1187],"tags":[3401,4219,6235,2555,7603,7605,46,7601,7604,6592,7602,7606,1259],"class_list":["post-31303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-music","tag-anne-carson","tag-bob-dylan","tag-charlie-parker","tag-cormac-mccarthy","tag-mark-ribot","tag-meshell-ndegeocello","tag-music","tag-ornette-coleman","tag-richard-pryor","tag-robert-browning","tag-roseanne-cash","tag-suttree","tag-willie-mays"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Mark So Fine: Joe Henry and You<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 18, 2012 \u2013 In November of 2001, I picked up Joe Henry\u2019s album Scar and was stunned by the opening track, a slow blues number called \u201cRichard Pryor Addresses a\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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