Next Stop, Feeling

There aren't many singers who have it, that ability
to get underneath the bed you're laying in and cause
it to shiver, move a little, as though a train were
passing beneath your house.

I'm not talking about the voice as a musical instrument
of beauty and versatility, but of an authenticity. What I
am speaking of is a commitment to the song that allows
you, the listener, no exit.

This is the meaning of extraordinary rendition that we
ought to know. Of being captured, spellbound, by a song
until it is over.

It's in the way Robert Johnson sang his blues line, like
he'd chewed metal into a midnight gum, and the song
is mineral spit.

It's in the way Sandy Denny took up the contradictory
tenderness and ferocity of every woman, and sang
from the place that fracture was grafted back together.

Dick Gaughan, of Scotland, pictured up top, has one of
those voices.

Over the next four weeks of Better Days, my radio
program, I will be sharing music by singers - and an
instrumentalist or two - whose voices stop what you
are doing, lead you down below.

No exit while the train is moving.

Next stop, feeling.

DL