T minus 7 days... 30 Days of Opera is coming to an end.
As tends to be the case towards the end of a gig, I'm excited to go home. I already have plans to hang out with a dear friend (...though the details of said plans might include visiting the Chip Shop... Brooklyn's best place to find friend food. As if I needed more after Memphis... It's cool. I'll just walk the 3 miles there and back...) and have another recording session booked with the Opera Cowgirls (www.operacowgirls.com). I'm excited to ride my bicycle through Prospect Park and to eat really good bagels and drink coffee with my roommate while gossiping about boys... er, men.
But, I will miss Memphis. Another "home away from home", a city I've gotten to know enough that I don't always need my GPS. I'll miss the really, really good BBQ. I'll miss my new friends (though Facebook and living in NYC, the audition hub, is a magical thing for keeping singer friendships alive). But, perhaps most of all, I'll miss the music.
For some reason, my fabulous father, who is 100% of Irish-Catholic decent (read - incredibly white) fell in love with blues music somewhere during his 40s when he picked up the guitar again after about 20 years. I absorbed that by osmosis as a teenager and was proud to be able to rock out some John Lee Hooker despite being a 95lb little white girl.
But what I learned from the blues that I listened to was that music must come from the soul. Or, at least, the good stuff does. The blues is not harmonically complex, but there is an undeniable groove that gets you in your belly (and perhaps other places, which shall not be named here... ) and a power that comes from the voices of the great blues singers, an honesty.
The blues is derived pretty directly from the spirituals and work songs of the African American people during and after slavery. The form, tunes and spirit of this music is of a great tradition as worthy of being honored as Rossini and Mozart, though perhaps in a different way. The "classical" greats might be notable for their musical perfection and innovation, their social commentary and general awesomeness. Classical music, to me, is like a beautiful wine, aged for years to perfection, with its complicated tannins and fruity notes.
The blues, obviously, is straight up bourbon.
Since being in Memphis, I have gone to the Civil Rights Museum... twice. It is haunting and so important that I would impress upon every person who passes through Memphis to go. Constructed as an addition to the Loraine Hotel, the site of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, the museum walks you through the history of African Americans from slavery through the present day. Between the videos of Dr. King's "Mountain top" speech on the eve of his death, to seeing the accounts of the years and years of struggle it took these Americans to even be able to buy a cup of nasty coffee next to a white person, to the slave songs and freedom songs, to seeing the balcony on which Dr. King was murdered... I was in tears throughout much of the visit.
And so, naturally, all I really want to do right now is sing spirituals.
Spirituals are about as close as you get to the blues in "classical" rep, and I want to sing them. And, yet for a moment, at the library in Memphis where the windows are covered by bars that makes it look more like a prison than a place of information and learning (with "30 Days of Opera" we've performed in a number of libraries), I am self-conscious about singing a spiritual for a predominantly African American audience. I want to say to the audience, "I've always love this music... it's not just because I'm here in Memphis or because I want to be accepted by you... I want us to be joined together as human beings who feel the power of this, the power of 'GOD' or whatever it is that I know music does for you and for me and... and... I just think these songs are really funky and awesome and...".... but figured that would be overzealous.
I really wonder what Dr. King would have thought.
Have you ever watched him give his "Mountaintop" speech? It isn't long. It's on Youtube. When he gave this speech, he knew that there were multiple death threats out for him. He famously predicted that he would never reach 40 (an age where my father hadn't even discovered his love for blues music). And he speaks about reaching the top of the mountain and seeing the other side, a side that he would never reach himself, but (I sincerely hope and believe) found solice knowing that it existed... and that his children would reach it. We always think of Dr. King as this saintly, powerful being who was practically a god himself. But in that speech, that one in particular, you see his humanity--his love, fear, sadness and truth.
As I sit in Memphis, thinking about how nice it will be to eat NYC bagels and how my mood is so often affected by how well I do or don't sing on a given day, I should remind myself of a person like Martin Luther King. Of the slaves who used their songs to communicate escape routs, or just to express their sincere longing, joy and despair. There was a reason my 15 year old self was drawn to Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, even B.B. King and the like. Because they sang from the soul. The songs are rooted in a deep history of truth and expression.
Having turned singing into my career, my identity, it is difficult sometimes to remember why it I chose to do this work. I know I am not alone as a classical singer who is worried about what other people think of my voice, how I do in an audition as apposed to how truthful I felt about the song I just sang. The essence of the music can be buried beneath florid lines, complicated harmonies and a heavy blanket of ego. But, if somehow, a lifeline can be held on to... connecting the heart to the vocal chords... the blues can peek through even when I'm singing in French.
Perhaps the best way to keep that lifeline is to sing a spiritual every once in awhile. And I believe Dr. King would have approved.
