Irish Things

From the long ago sixties, when folk music of all kinds was in vogue, an appropriate lyric from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem:

The Parting Glass
after the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem

Of all the money that e’er I spent
I’ve spent it in good company
And all the harm that ever I did
Alas it was to none but me
And all I’ve done for want of wit
To memory now I can’t recall
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be with you all

If I had money enough to spend
And leisure to sit awhile
There is a fair maid in the town
That sorely has my heart beguiled
Her rosy cheeks and ruby lips
I own she has my heart enthralled
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be with you all

Oh, all the comrades that e’er I had
They’re sorry for my going away
And all the sweethearts that e’er I had

They’d wish me one more day to stay
But since it falls unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not
I’ll gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be with you all

Sláinte!

Another October…

…without a good friend to everyone but himself, Billy; who appeared nightly on the boards of a thousand happy hours.

October 10, 1943 – August 26, 1983

…since it falls unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not
I’ll gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be with you all.

- “The Parting Glass”, after the Clancy Brothers

Avoirdupois, Billy, may some celestial bartender forever pour you Elysian liquor, never collecting the tab.

Dismembered Tennesseans at Nightfall

The Dismembered Tennesseans tonight: Fletcher Bright, Ed “Doc” Cullis, Bobby Martin, Laura Walker and Brian Blaylock. Most all of these folks play more than one instrument, and do vocals, but tonight their instruments were, respectively, fiddle, banjo, guitar, bass fiddle and mandolin. The band opened for the Gibson Brothers, and in typical self-deprecatory humor, Fletcher Bright remarked that opening at Nightfall was their favorite gig, since the audience was always larger when they finished than when they began.

I heard the Gibsons’ music on the local NPR station this afternoon, and would have liked to stayed to hear them live, but we had already put in a full day, so left toward the end of the DMT’s set. It was oh, so good. I have listened to the DMTs for many years, not quite as long as they have been playing – they are a few years older than I, but not much – and this year they sound better than ever. That may partly be true because of my paying closer attention to bluegrass this year, although they have been so good so long they may well be getting better. My attention to bluegrass has increased mostly because of a fellow I met last Spring at the Conference on Southern Literature, Dr. Tom Bibey, who I call “Doc Bluegrass,” because as he describes himself, he is a semi-retired country Doc and twenty-year bluegrass mandolin player.

Because of Doc Bibey, I have revisited bands and performers familiar to me in a casual way for years. Flatt and Scruggs, Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, Ricky Skaggs and many others. I have encountered so many new (to me) acts that my mind boggles. If you do not pay attention, getting most of your music information from broader media, you would not believe the depth, breadth and quality of bluegrass being played nowadays. Children, by my measure, not yet out of high school. Performers who have day jobs but  jam every chance they get and sell self-produced CDs. I will not live long enough most likely to hear all the talent in this field.

The Nightfall concert series is partly sponsored by Fletcher Bright, who has been playing bluegrass violin longer than he has been a real estate professional. He does well at his day job, but watching and listening to him you know where his heart is.

Next weekend another event, over two days, October 2 and October 3, also sponsored by Fletcher Bright, The Three Sisters Music Festival takes place at Ross’s Landing in Chattanooga – another free event. Among others, the Grascals, the Del McCoury Band, the Dismembered Tennesseans (both days) and eight other groups will play from noonish to night.

Jere

I heard today, twice, of a man I knew in my twenties well enough to ask him to be the godfather of my firstborn, a son, as he had asked me a year earlier to stand up for his newborn son. Just before noon, waiting to serve as chalice bearer at the 12:05 service at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Chattanooga, the Rector came in to arrange for the readings with me, and added a name to the prayer list for the sick. It was Jere. Donald said that Jere’s son, Jon, had just called to request that Jere be added to the prayer list, and that things were not going well with him, he was suffering from cancer and in rapidly declining condition.

I had last seen Jere to talk to at his mother’s funeral, sometime in the eighties. Long absent from Chattanooga, he described himself as a “gypsy,” working for a steel tube company, traversing the country. An hour ago, the secretary from St. Paul’s called me at Donald’s request to tell me that Jere had died. At my age, deaths of contemporaries are experienced more and more often. Even if it is someone who you have not seen for years, the sense of the world contracting weighs on you.

Through the 1960s, at the University of Chattanooga, various restaurants, beer joints and other places a floating group of young folk gathered and talked, laughed and shared their youth. I knew Jere in that place, and later Linda, his future wife. We talked of many things, as the women came and went, talking of other things. Jere went to Viet Nam. I did not. He joked about his time there, talked of fighting the war from a typewriter, although I think he saw combat during his tour. I think most men who spend time in war zones joke about their time, talking little of the grim realities they faced. My father did.

Jere and Linda married the year before I did, and their son was born close to my wedding day. After mutual godfather duties, life expanded and got more complicated. I moved out of town and a few years later Jere and Linda were divorced. Some years after that, I was as well. Years have gone by, as more and more I dwell on the years I was twenty and knew everything. Laughing with Jere and other friends over the follies of our parents’ generation. Now we are the generation which finally came to know how much we didn’t know.

My world contracted today, even though time and distance had combined to freeze memories twenty years past. Much more, the life of Jere’s family, his son and grandchildren, have grown a dimension smaller. I think of his son, and the grandchildren (when you have grandchildren yourself, that is an immediate thought.)

Ah, Jere. Selah.

Last Call – Again

The heat of summer is beginning to lose a little of its punch, as August has given way to September, leaves are beginning to turn, and in this long-running drought, to fall a bit earlier than normal. As I do in these weeks every year, I remember my friend the late Billy Phillips, actor, comedian, raconteur. Sometime in the small hours of August 26, in 1983, Billy died in his sleep. The following October 10th would have been his fortieth birthday.

He was four days out of the hospital, after a three-week stay following a cluster of heart attacks which required two rounds with a defibrillator. Billy had arrived at the hospital emergency room a month earlier, feeling the onset of something very wrong, barely had time to tell the admissions clerk that he thought he was having a heart attack, and at that moment collapsed. The emergency staff hustled him into the nearest treatment room and began the intensive care that prolonged Billy’s life for three weeks and four days.

Friends and family gathered, and once Billy was moved to a room, that room became “Club Billy” for the rest of his stay. Billy entertained his callers, in his element, able to forget his looming mortality doing what he did best, telling stories, making jokes, putting on a few of his many characters. He was a performer. He may have suspected that this was the last play, and when this particular performance closed, his personal theatre would go permanently dark.

Since the patient was without family in town, or funds, friends volunteered to house him and watch over him in his convalescence, which officially commenced on a Monday. His father went home to Pennsylvania, and the first watch went on duty. Calder, the husband of the host couple, had been practically a brother to Billy when they were young. Calder’s family had given the young Billy a home, so that he could finish high school in Chattanooga, following his father’s transfer out of town. Billy was home, again.

Friday came, and the second shift of friends were on deck to take Billy in. The night before, his first shift had stayed up late with Billy, who had other old friends visiting that night, telling old stories, remembering good times and laughing much. Billy mentioned that he had a toothache starting, and was pretty tired. The friends wished each other good night, and so to bed.

The next morning, Calder and Betsy, his wife, went to work, careful not to wake the sleeping Billy. Betsy prepared Billy’s lunch, covering the plate and leaving it in the refrigerator, with a note reminding Billy of a follow-up doctor’s appointment that afternoon.

Betsy called to check on Billy at mid-day, and there was no answer. She called again. still no answer. Uneasy, she called her son who worked close to the house, and could get there quickly. A short wait which seemed long to her, and her son called back to say that Billy was in bed, blue and cold. Sometime after taking his toothache to bed, Billy had died.

Twenty-five years ago, and I remember hearing of his death as clearly as if it were yesterday. The news rippled out through the extended network of Billy’s friends, and funeral plans were made and carried out. A memorial service in Chattanooga at the funeral home, and burial the next day in Augusta, Georgia, the home of Billy’s mother’s family, where the family plot in an old cemetery had room for another member.

This upcoming October 10th, Billy would have turned 65. He would have had witty things to say, jokes at his own expense mostly, and mordantly funny references to mortality. But on that August early morning long ago, his own last call stopped age and decay and all the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Billy usually finished his many evenings on the town at David’s, a bar now defunct, a few blocks away from his apartment. As the bartender called “last call” Billy would down his final beer, and with a lopsided, confiding sort of smile wend his way into the darkness. I have always thought it was probably around that same time, two-thirty a.m. on August 26th, 1983, that he made his final exit.

Selah.

Another Birthday without Its Honoree

William Joseph Phillips, III

October 10, 1943 to August 26, 1983

On August 26, 1983, I, and all the rest of a goodly company, learned that our friend Billy Phillips had died. Inheritor of a genetic predisposition for early heart disease, Billy only fitfully took care of his health. In the words of an old epitaph I once saw in a Massachusetts cemetery, “He ate and drank, and sinned and suffered, and squeezed his orange very dry.” Billy would have been forty the following October 10th. He had extracted the most he could from his short life.

On a Sunday of fierce heat, a packed funeral home chapel heard a eulogy for Billy, celebrating his paradoxical nature, as thunder grumbled and then crashed overhead, followed by torrents of rainfall. Billy did not go gently into that good night. Reluctantly, he loosed his grip on the world, and left much grief behind. For those of us of a like age, the departure of a friend by natural causes was a sobering experience. Mostly, though, we grieved for the departure of a unique friend, compact of wit, sorrow, joy, vigorous appetites and an imperfect sense of his own value to hundreds of friends.

Ah, Billy, you hardly knew yourself.

Now it is twenty-three years since Billy, an accomplished comedic actor and raconteur, trod the boards of his natural theatre, the scattered bars of a thousand happy hours, where he raised a host of characters from his prodigious imagination. He gave, and gave, and gave again, and his admirers were not sated, they laughed and shouted, “More, Billy, more.” Finally, there was no more to give. The candle had guttered out at both ends, and Billy slipped away in his sleep (found by the son of his friends, in whose house he was recuperating from a massive heart attack, the next morning. Blue of face and cold of body.)

As the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem sang back in the sixties, when Billy and his friends were young,

Oh, all the comrades that e’er I had
They’re sorry for my going away
And all the sweethearts that e’er I had
They’d wish me one more day to stay
But since it falls unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not
I’ll gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be with you all.

Tonight Babs and I will lift a parting glass to you, Charming Billy.