The Hard Love Video
Labels: "Hard Love", canoe, pond, video
Miscellaneous news and writing by Bob Franke, mostly about songs as a portable art form, and the process of creating them and enabling them to do their work in the world.
from www.bobfranke.com: Bob Franke began his career as a singer-songwriter in 1965 while a student at the University of Michigan. Upon graduation in 1969 with an A.B. in English Literature, he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has since made New England his home. Bob has appeared in concert at coffeehouses, colleges, festivals, bars, streets, homes and churches in 33 states, four Canadian provinces and England.
Labels: "Hard Love", canoe, pond, video
Blind Willie Johnson (1897-1945) was a street evangelist in Beaumont, TX who made 30 commercial studio recordings from 1927 to 1930. His remarkable slide guitar technique and his songs have had a significant impact on American music; his musical meditation on the Crucifixion, “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was The Ground” was included on the gold record carried by the Voyager spacecraft beyond the bonds of the solar system.
What strikes me about “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning” is the intensity of Willie Johnson's encouraging witness. As much as I love our beautiful Anglican musical heritage, I love even more the Anglican view of the Church's catholic nature, which asserts that Willie Johnson and all of us here at St. Andrew's are members of the same Church, though we may be in different branches of it. My offering this morning is a faint echo of one of my musical heroes, and our brother in Christ.
According to Wikipedia, Johnson remained poor until the end of his life. In 1945, his home burned to the ground. With nowhere else to go, he lived in the burned ruins of his home, sleeping on a wet bed. He lived like this until he contracted pneumonia two weeks later, and died.
Labels: "Blind Willie Johnson", church, gospel