Posted By BillHeise on September 27, 2010

Patty Griffin is one of my favorite musicians ever, and she has written one of my favorite songs (perhaps my favorite song) ever. It is called Up To the Mountain. I heard it in a movie theater a couple months ago and, as I always do since I had my stroke (I’m very emotional since I had my stroke), I began to cry. My wife told me she loved me and then began to mock me, (as was appropriate).

Anyway, you’ve been warned. Here it it is:

This song, which appears on her Children Running Through album, draws from the bluegrass/gospel/Biblical tradition that I for one find extremely attractive, as it solves the Enlightenment problem that continues to plague the secular world (and which I have dealt with in all sorts of posts on my blog).

The tradition divides the universe into two parts, a rational (and incomplete) component and a Biblical vision of a perfect paradise where difference disappears. She hopes to achieve that vision, not by power of her individual will, but through the aspiration of Martin Luther King, a leader who has seen farther than she herself ever could.

Follow along with the lyrics:

I went up to the mountain
Because you asked me to
Up over the clouds
To where the sky was blue
I could see all around me
Everywhere
I could see all around me
Everywhere

Sometimes I feel like
I’ve never been nothing but tired
And I’ll be working
Till the day I expire
Sometimes I lay down
No more can I do
But then I go on again
Because you ask me to

Some days I look down
Afraid I will fall
And though the sun shines
I see nothing at all
Then I hear your sweet voice, oh
Oh, come and then go, come and then go
Telling me softly
You love me so

The peaceful valley
Just over the mountain
The peaceful valley
Few come to know
I may never get there
Ever in this lifetime
But sooner or later
It’s there I will go
Sooner or later
It’s there I will go

Here she is singing ‘No Bad News’ in support of her album Children Running Through on the Ellen show.

Patty says she wrote the song about President Bush, and it’s an interesting take on the artist’s vision, but this song is broader than a topical reference alone would indicate. It reminds me of Anne Bradstreet’s poem ‘On the Burning of Our House’ of so many years ago in which she writes of the purifying power of fire to kill the temptations of the world, in this case to ‘kill your own disease,’ and in Bradstreet’s case she harbors a secret desire (‘That fearful sound of “Fire!” and “Fire!” / Let no man know is my desire.’) that cannot be met through her own will. Patty doesn’t share Anne’s vision of her secret longing, but she does configure her universe along the same lines. Fire is bad and worldly, and there is more for those who are willing to burn their worldly goods for the more secure goods of the next.

Why don’t you burn it all down, burn your own house down, burn your own house down
Try to kill your own disease
And leave the rest of us, there’s a lot of us, leave the rest of us
Who wanna live in peace to live in peace

She, too, places her emphasis on a companion with whom she can travel the world. This will break her free of her insulated (and individual) life in a ‘fortress,’ and will open her up to new, as-yet-unheard-of opportunities for growth. This construction of a tower that hovered over the world had a long life in the Middle Ages, particularly in The Romance of the Rose‘s Tower of Reason, but extending back at least as far as the tower of St. Barbara. It is only by breaking out of the rational constraints of positive (and limiting and individual) science that she will be able to find the true answers that will bring people together rather than shutting them up in individual (and defensive) towers of confinement.

I’m gonna find me a man, love him so well, love him so strong, love him so slow
We’re gonna go way beyond the walls of this fortress
And we won’t be afraid, we won’t be afraid, and though the darkness may come our way
We won’t be afraid to be alive anymore
And we’ll grow kindness in our hearts for all the strangers among us
Till there are no strangers anymore

Here another song in this venerable American tradition. It’s a hymn called ‘We Shall All Be Reunited.’ It was written in the 20s and appears on her most recent album, Downtown Church:

Here she sing of her own aspirations beyond this limited life in terms derived from the same Biblical sources (particularly Revelation 22) that the first American poet used to distinguish this limited life from the perfect next:

We shall meet beyond the river
In that land of pure delight
Where no sickness or no sorrow
Will our joys there ever blight

We shall all be reunited
In that land beyond the skies
Where there’ll be no separation
No more marching, no more sighs
No more marching, no more sighs

I hope you find these songs as inspirational as I do. And please buy her albums.

Categories: What I'm Listening to This Week
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