The Last Troubadour of Henry Street

It's over. I'm nearly sure that it is.

The whole idea that some god or another will
come along and dole out final justice is one
that holds no water anymore. The hoarders
have too many stone walls between their food
and those whose starving, thirsting mouths cry
out for bread and rain. The bastards.

The torch is out, and fire no longer legal.
You dare not sleep, dare not lay your head.
They have fed a thousand sparrows to the eagle.
The last troubadour of Henry Street is dead.

I read about writers and singers who shape a set
or a record in such a way as to keep open their
opportunities. Everybody needs to eat. Well, it's
helpful, though you can go a while without food.
I read how subtly they've learned to rage against
the dying of the light. So subtly, in many instances,
that they're singing in the dark.

If you ever get a chance to read a biography about
Phil Ochs called Death Of A Rebel, take it. Phil was
an idealist who loved the promise of America. He was a
patriot in the old sense of that word, before its true
meaning was cut and dried. It really was about love,
of having the willingness to stand up on your father's
(pater's) grave and uphold his dignity. There is no
father in America any longer.

Ochs had his own demons, but his growing paranoia for
the demons that surrounded him had substance. The
theatre of his life became so literal, that he no longer
was able to leave the stage. So he invented another
version of himself, John Train. At some point, the center
could not hold, the falcon could not hear the falconer,
and Phil Ochs hung himself in Far Rockaway.

I think of Victor Jara, who played for fellow prisoners,
freedom fighters, in the Santiago stadium until the
guards cut off his fingers. He kept singing, strumming
his guitar with bloodied stumps. The Pinochet coup,
funded from the U.S., was yet another example of the
song, a people's song, being bled out of them. Murdered.
Victor Jara is the quintessential folksinger. I don't
think he lived long enough to grow subtle.

Christy Moore is another who won't behave, even in
his advancing age. He still troubles them with his cry
for justice, for long memory. I find so much resonance
in his songs. He's sung about Henry Street, the days
of the strike at the Dunnes Stores when local workers
refused to handle South African goods as a way of
expressing their solidarity with oppressed South African
workers who'd called for a boycott. Christy Moore
recalls "their picket line standing cold and alone in
an atmosphere of hostility and apathy in Dublin..."
Later, their anti-apartheid actions were applauded by
Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.

Woody Guthrie. There's another. For a brief moment,
Bob Dylan. There's Si Kahn. Roy Bailey. Steve Earle.
Buffy Sainte-Marie. Leon Rosselson. Billy Bragg.
Dick Gaughan. Eliza Gilkyson. David Rovics. Others,
if you look and listen...

At some point, when it all got projected on to the larger
screen, it lost its legs. The community experience that
had created the people's poet and troubadour no longer
looked to its own for sustenance, but instead to an image,
an iconography. The village became a global network.
Ego became attached to a public service. Fine, except
the managers were thieves. And, just as common worker
pants - jeans - were made into a fashion so their makers
could charge four times as much for the same pants, so
too music has been made into a fashion until one's own
neighbour couldn't possibly be worth half the value of
the item advertised on the big screen. So it seems in the
corporate chain of McDonald's-Walmart-Starbucks that
a more subtle way of dying is attained.

I'll be heading out on the road in two weeks time. I'm
going to Iceland. I'm going to Norway, to England, to
Ireland, to the wilds of Scotland, too. Some part of my
soul feels more at home in Europe and the U.K., where
the age of things hasn't yet disappeared, where the
countryside is not one long mall, where the cultures
still manage to keep the long memory alive. Or so I
like to believe...

The torch is out, and fire no longer legal.
You dare not sleep, dare not lay your head.
They have fed a thousand sparrows to the eagle.
The last troubadour from Henry Street is dead.

When I'm in Dublin, I'll go to Henry Street. Maybe I'll
seek out old Frank Harte, who in the course of his life
has collected some 20,000 street ballads. He's alive.
Last I heard, he's still singing, too, unaccompanied, his
voice taking on the voices of the departed.

There might, in those far villages, still be hearty souls who
keep a crumb or two of bread in their pockets just in case,
in the rain of that other world, a few relentless sparrows
of the heart are still out looking for a meal.

In the spirit of the dead troubadours, I return.

DL