All these years later I have to laugh at the incongruity of our 7th grade science teacher playing Donovan’s Jennifer, Juniper in class. At the time it seemed perfectly appropriate. Now I strain to see the connection between folk music and science. But then I’m far less creative now alas.
It's interesting how my perceptions of the past are colored by unrealities. I thought Mr. V's music was, for all intents and purposes, aborigine music. So ancient that it could be seen as a science project. Yet my own historical study proves this was not the case. I have found out that Donovan sang this hit song in 1968, a mere seven years before I heard it in class. This would be like me playing a 2001 song to my class, had I a class. Mr. V was not even indulging in nostalgia as it was almost new to him!
Had I known, as John Updike attests, that all our writing comes from our first twenty years I might’ve tried to live more during them. I wasn’t conscious then of drawing upon it as a source, though things done for an ulterior motive are likely disqualifying anyway.
What I’ve found is that there is much to draw in those first twenty in terms of self-knowledge even though we typically react in the years afterwards as if to disprove the narrative formed in the initial years. In high school, Nixon was the person least likely to become president. And so JFK; his brother was supposed to be president - he was like the third in line of the royal family so he could relax.
The bullfighters in Spain find much more self-knowledge in the manly art of courting death. But JPII tells us in his encyclicals that God tells us the most about ourselves so when we read the bible we learn the most about ourselves!
I wasn’t old enough to remember Johnny Cash in his prime nor was I with Pope John Paul II. Both became familiar only in their extreme agedness, both betrayed by a body that had served them well in their youth and late middle age. When at their best both had a charisma that touches only the very few, although it's likely that they, like Christ, taught us more when they were with cross. When I was a kid the only words of Christ that really moved me were the ones that were said on the Cross.
I saw the movie “Walk the Line” about June and Johnny Cash but watching videos on YouTube gave off an entirely different feel. I wonder if it is even possible to ever really portray a person given our uniqueness. But I also wonder if "Walk the Line" was truthful without being accurate in the externals. How much importance should we put on historicity given that June Carter Cash was a moving target visually while Reese Witherspoon was not? And yet to say that only the words and story matter is to ignore the undeniable part that body language plays. I can write words on a page and say them in person and there is much more meaning when the words are married to body language and inflection than when stripped to mere skeletal words: "The letter killeth..."
Entertainers, more than most, have to stay current with the culture in order to stay popular. They donate themselves like canaries in the coal mine and we see the effects of cultural movements in them before we see them in us. Every age has its drugs, be it cocaine or alcohol or caffeine or materialism or pride or whatever. Entertainers, if successful, are on the front lines of the age's drug of choice.
In “Walk the Line” there was little sense of the chameleon-like quality of June, how in ’67 she was demure, with a touch of Emily Dickinson, and how by ’69 she'd become electric with an underground sexuality. By ’70 there was stasis, a comfortable confidence, with her hair grown long as if doubling for Cher. Hers was a physical transformation almost as dramatic as that of the Beatles. In some ways her story is more interesting than Johnny's, whose familiar fall and rise was penile in its simplicity. Up, down, like a pump. Hers was a more complex, ovarian journey simply because she was not under the direct control of hard drugs. He was all need while she had freedom, making her wrestlings with conscience interesting since the capacity for freedom makes us interesting.
Johnny & June seemed like different people in ’67 such that it was apparent something had happened not to just to them personally but within the culture. In the ’67 June there was a stiffness and awkward pauses (that appear so only in retrospect; they were neither stiff nor awkward in their time). And the ’69 video could’ve been made today. Whatever happened in speech and body language between ’67 and ’69 is still with us. That desire for a border and thus to be able to identify a cause, is still with me although I recognize the '50s and early '60s were not the golden, saintly time I'd thought they were.
Judging by appearances, let alone by tiny snippets of YouTube, is folly. But what is interesting is how we can hear CBS newsman Edward Murrow today and think how different and odd he sounds. While we can hear a newscaster from the '70s and feel it not too out of sort. Is that mere accident? Are the differences in cadence and mien indicative of less superficial differences?
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