A Song for Father’s Day

James Agee is back, with a revived version of the work he did with Walker Evans in the American South during the Depression. His ear supplied the words and Evans’ eye supplied the photographs of stoic people trying to survive.

Here is another great collaboration I seek out at Father’s Day: Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Samuel Barber’s adaptation of Agee, sung by Eleanor Steber at a concert in Carnegie Hall on Oct. 10, 1958.

The song works for Mother’s Day but even more for Father’s Day, because the lyricism and discordance suggest what is coming soon. Agee’s father died in 1916, which was commemorated in Agee’s A Death in the Family, published in 1957, two years after Agee’s death.

The song describes Agee’s family sitting outdoors, in a time before air conditioning and television. It begins:

It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds' hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy….

I heard it first on WQXR-FM years ago, and bought the CD, Eleanor Steber in Concert, 1956-58.  I later read that Steber was from Wheeling, West Virginia, and wondered if she would have felt any affinity for Knoxville, further down the Appalachian range.

The song reminds me of summer evenings in the 1940’s, when my family stayed outdoors, in our own back yard in the borough of Queens, to catch some slight breeze. I remember fireflies and the Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio and my brothers and sisters and my parents.

This is where I usually lose it:

All my people are larger bodies than mine...with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth…

When I play this song, I think of our parents, talking about books and politics and the old days, suggesting what is possible for us in our lives.

For those of us who know that our parents were good to us, this is a memory. For others, it may be an ideal, a hope. 

 

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The concert above is from 1948, when the work made its debut. The pianist is Edwin Biltcliffe. 

Jane Redmont’s web site has a wise  tribute to the song, and includes the lyrics:

http://actsofhope.blogspot.com/2008/02/knoxville-summer-1915-james-agee-samuel.html

My childhood friend Alan Spiegel wrote a lovely  biography and critique of Agee in 1998:

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&&url=/journals/american_literature/v071/71.4maine.html

Another type of concert: Altenir and Celia Silva attended Caetano Veloso and Vanessa de Mata at Ipanema the other night. Eu sou ciumento.