Lonesome Dan Kase
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about nostalgia.
Toward the end of my time at North Central University, which is located in downtown Minneapolis, MN, I began to frequent a nearby coffee shop/music venue/art space called E.P. Atelier (this wonderful place closed closed down awhile back). It was there, that I was introduced to a young blues musician named Lonesome Dan Kase. It was a Saturday evening, and business was slow for the coffee shop, I was the only customer. Lonesome Dan began to sing, and stomp, and play his 1938 Gibson guitar. It was the first time I had heard the country blues, and I was transfixed. Later, I wrote an article about Lonesome Dan for The Northern Light (the venerable student newspaper of North Central):
The music he plays hasn’t been heard (at least by most) in 70 years. It is captivating music, full of raw and throaty vocals, and intense finger-picking guitar work. It’s foot-stompin’, knee-slappin’ music of a bygone era; nostalgic music that takes you back even if you’ve never been there before. When you hear it, it makes you wish you had a name like Lonesome Dan, or Reverend Gary Davis, or Sleepy John Estes, riding from town to town on a freight train and playing the country blues on your old beat up guitar.
Back in the ’20s and ’30s the country blues was called “race music.” Back in those days it the popular genre of African America, and you can trace the development of modern rock, blues, R & B, and rap back to those gritty voiced black singers who got their start and their sound during the Great Depression: Mississippi John Hurt, Leadbelly, Robert Johnson (Eric Clapton’s muse), Son House (Jack White’s muse), Blind Lemon Jefferson, and the Reverend Gary Davis. The best word to describe the music of these men, and of Lonesome Dan is genuine. One man, a guitar, sitting on stool, in a bar or a road house, (back when such places were still filled with the smoke of cheap cigarettes) singing of love and religion, place and tradition, agriculture and crime and racism. These men lived the life they sang about, and it was not a glamorous life, either. They did not own mansions, or drive Escalades. They were many times homeless, and rode freight trains (Lonesome Dan ran away from home and hopped a freight train when he was eighteen…or so the legend goes). They didn’t lip sync their concerts or use computers to edit out their mistakes and correct their voices. The country blues is some of the most authentic music every made, and that’s why when you hear it, it makes your heart ache. It calls you to the open road, it makes you want to pack a knapsack and head for the train yard. It gives you nostalgia for a way of life you’ve never lived.
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Nostalgia is a yearning for authenticity, for a time when things were simpler, more real; but it is often a paradoxical yearning. These days, nostalgia has been commercialized, plasticized and outsourced. We’re flooded with cheap Elvis clocks, and Betty Boop commemorative plates that are supposed to remind us (well, actually our parents) of a better a time, back before suburban sprawl and big box stores, back when Americans actually manufactured things. So much for authenticity.
It is in this culture so filled with hype, with mind-controlling advertising, with disposable everythings, that the search for authenticity becomes urgent. My generation wants authenticity so badly–almost as badly as we want the new I-phone. And ultimately, that’s the problem, our search for authenticity always seems to get sidetracked, co-opted, packaged and sold back to us. But, good, raw, real music keeps on calling us back to the search, to the road…even if that music gets played through ear-buds.
Toward a Theology of Nostalgia: Advent, Anglicanism, and Angst
November 30, 2009
In the penetential spirit of Advent, I offer this confession…
I am Seething Lump of Paradox
I have long been fixated on a particular paradox that in many ways defines me, and explains many of the things that I do. One way of articulating this paradox is to say that I am at once a hippie and an wanna-be aristocrat. That is to say that I am simultaneously driven by a desire to see social and economic justice done on earth, and by the lure of ivory towers, fine living, and of all the “gentlemanly” things one would expect a landed, well-bred, roman-nosed, trust-funded English baron might be interested in and driven by: wine, falconry (don’t laugh you bastards), heraldry, the “classics,” architecture, fox-hunting, mahogany furniture, etc., etc., etc.
One look inside my closet provides an example of the near schizophrenic behavior this paradox has pushed me to. Over the past 5 years my wardrobe buying patterns have oscillated between garb befitting an English country gentleman (replete with bow ties, hunting and smoking jackets [God forbid you wear your hunting jacket in the smoking parlor, or your smoking jacket whilst hunting harts in Her Majesties' Forests]), and all fair-trade, eco-friendly, anti-sweatshop attire (No Sweat Shoes, shirts made of organic cotton by a women-run co-op in Nepal).
By confessing my confusion, I hope to put my turning to Anglicanism/Episcopalianism into perspective. In Anglicanism have found an entire Communion of Christians who are living the very same paradox that is me. Torn between justice and tradition; landed and monied, serving fair trade coffee and running day centers for the homeless; mixing gothic architecture with radical hospitality; this is what being Anglican is about. Two rows behind me at church, a retired international investment banker sits next to a homeless woman whose grocery cart full of tin cans is parked next to the big red doors which proclaim to the city “this is a sanctuary for all.” Anglicanism is a way for me to live in tension with myself and not be consumed by guilt on the one hand (that hand which is elegantly gloved in black calf-skin), or self-righteousness on the other (that hand which offers a warm meal to a stranger in the park).
Nostalgia and Advent
Nostalgia is the best word for what drives my wanna-be aristocratic side. And–since I grew up in a trailer park and have no land, nor title, nor bank accounts brimming with neither old or new money–it is really a nostalgic longing for a time and place that I have never experienced first hand. I am nostalgic for some idealized version Edwardian British Imperial domesticity that neither I nor my family had any part in whatsoever. Simultaneously, I am revolted by the oppression, and the economic, environmental, and cultural destruction that such imperialism has wreaked on our planet and on my fellow human beings in places like Africa and the Indian sub-continent. Interestingly, in this huge colonial morass I come again to Anglicanism, which was, at different points in history and sometimes simultaneously, an endorser, a restraint, and a healer of this imperial carnage.
Where does this nostalgia come from? Obviously, the answer is the books I’ve read, the TV shows and movies I’ve watched. As a boy, Tolkien and Lewis colonized my imagination (they might as well have raised a British flag over it), and turned me into an insufferable Anglophile.
Whereas my nostalgia (which extends far beyond my Anglophilism) can and does get me in trouble, it is also one of the reasons Advent is my favorite season of the Church calendar. Advent is about having a nostalgia for the Kingdom Reality that one has not yet fully experienced. It is an intense longing for a time and place both in the past and the future, which drives one to work for that Reality in the present.
A form of nostalgia is also at work in the active colonization of a sacred Christian feast by the demonic forces of materialism and consumption (and so my hippie side once again raises its dreadlocked head). A highly manipulated nostalgia for the idealized Platonic Form of Christmas Past is at the very heart of the advertising frenzy which causes shoppers to literally kill each other in the race to buy things that they have been convinced will allow them to relive those glory days of Christmases gone by: when everything was perfect, everyone was happy, and the big fuzzy horses trotted by pulling a sleigh down the gas-lamplit street as snow began to fall on the head of Tiny Tim as he uttered the immortal words, “Walt Disney bless us, bless us every one.”
I don’t know anyone who has ever lived this Hallmark Channel Christmas, and yet we are all willing to sell our souls to corporate America on the promise that if we just put up the decorations early enough, and open a few more credit cards this Christmas will be the Christmas. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing.
That is why Advent is so important to me. Through Advent Christ offers me the chance to have my nostalgic imagination colonized by the Kingdom of God, rather than by the Kingdom of the World. Advent is a tool to keep my out-of-control selfishness at bay and to paradoxically allow me to live in the moment that God has given me, while lifting my head in nostalgic anticipation for the Future that brings about our collective redemption.
Tony Hunt
jstambaugh
Shawn Wamsley
