The Whole Blessed Thing

What can we learn from songs?

‘Lessons of life can’t be learned in a day’
— Bob Dylan, ‘Cross the Green Mountain’

‘If you’ve ever heard Hank Williams sing / then you know the whole blessed thing’
—Robbie Fulks, ‘That’s Where I’m From’

Lines from two songs I love. One passes on timeless wisdom: the need for patience, for letting experience and knowledge accrue, for not rushing into the belief that you know it all. The other places knowledge in the moment, the flash of understanding, the possibility that everything can be communicated in a honky tonk song.

I’m taking my cue from both songs for this post about how songs teach us lessons and convey sensuous knowledge, but this isn’t really about either song. I’ve written a bit about the Dylan song before, and I hope to say more about the Fulks song in a future post because I think it’s a brilliant piece of songwriting.

I first encountered ‘That’s Where I’m From’ on Robbie Fulks’ 2013 album Gone Away Backward. That’s still the version I listen to most, though I’m also partial to live versions such as this one. I often use it when I’m teaching, as an example of a ‘where I’m from’ song. There are many such songs, in several genres. I like to use examples from US country and US/UK hip hop to explore with students how musicians authenticate themselves or their protagonists through attachment to places and spaces.

Some of the examples I’ve used most often are Alan Jackson’s ‘Where I Come From’, Diggable Planets’ ‘Where I’m From’, Jay-Z’s ‘Where I’m From’ and Fulks’ song. Those are all good for lyrics; I complement them with other songs whose sounds or videos also convey strong connections to places and spaces.

While I’m taking my cue from Fulks’ line abut Hank Williams, it’s important to know what the whole song sounds like and what the context is. Rather than explain that in words, I’ll link to the song itself. The point I want to make is that the protagonist of this song offers two ways of trying to understand where he’s from: one is through the vivid imagery of his own lyrics and how they are vocalised in this specific song; the other is by referring his audience to any Hank Williams song. That’s where they’ll find ‘the whole blessed thing’.

Sounded Experience

There’s another lyric I was tempted to add to the two at the top of this page. It’s in Bruce Springsteen’s ‘No Surrender’, from 1984: ‘We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school’. Rock and roll as education or a calling: those are lessons musicians have been teaching us for years. They’re there at the birth of rock, with Chuck Berry’s odes to getting out of school and into life.

I heard another variation on the lesson back in May 1992, when Andy Kershaw played John Trudell’s ‘Baby Boom Ché’ on his BBC radio show. I’d tuned in for a live Richard Thompson session and was taping the show. Kershaw had played Trudell’s ‘Rockin the Res’ the previous month, but it was ‘Baby Boom Ché’ that really grabbed me. So much so that, having replayed the cassette a few times, I headed to my local Our Price the following Monday to buy Trudell’s album AKA Graffiti Man.

‘Baby Boom Ché’ is about the promise of rock n roll in the 1950s and its effect on the boomer generation. Trudell posits Elvis Presley as a freedom fighter surrounded by commandants—Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Bo Diddley, Gene Vincent—in what he calls ‘another Civil War all over again’.

The other side is represented in Trudell’s verses by several ‘feel good’ family shows and by the music of Pat Boone. The battle lines are drawn and lessons are there to be learned:

I mean, you take ‘Don’t Be Cruel’, ‘I Want You I Need You I Love You’
And ‘Jailhouse Rock’,
Or you take Pat and his white bucks singing love letters in the sand,
Hell, man, what’s real here?
I mean, Pat at the beach in his white bucks,
His ears getting sunburned,
Told us something about old wave delusion.

That ‘something’ is echoed later as a vagueness around how exactly lessons get communicated in song. The important thing is that they do: ‘Elvis, even though he didn’t know he said it, / He showed it to us anyway / And even though we didn’t know we heard it, / We heard it anyway’.

Trudell’s poem, first set to evocative, Elvis-referencing music by Jesse Ed Davis in 1986 (and with additional guitar by Mark Shark on the 1992 version), is an example of something I’d later come to call sounded experience. I started using that term after reading Sylviane Agacinski’s book Time Passing. Agacinski considers the way that we come to know our surroundings not only from our direct experience of passing through them, but also from the act of having previously encountered them in texts.

The walker reads many texts at once, while each of them resonates with the others. Such bookish knowledge penetrates his present perceptions … Thus the walker’s lived experience is traversed by a “second existence,” the result of books, in such a way that the different types of experience merge and fade into one another.

To find another name for this ‘bookish knowledge’, Agacinski borrows a term from Francis Bacon: lettered experience. Then, noting the predominance in our own era of photography, film and screen media, she proposes an additional term: imaged experience.

Those terms made instinctive sense to me when I read them, because that’s what I’d noticed sound, especially song, had been for me: a way of understanding the world both in terms of what I already knew or had experienced and in terms of what other lessons I sensed were out there waiting to be learned.

Grokking the Yup Moment

Here’s what I wrote about sounded experience in a post about Townes Van Zandt last year:

I’m guided more by what kind of experience I felt I was hearing in Townes’ music when it arrived in my life. How clear or explicit was the experience being communicated? Was it more like accumulation or accretion, something that’s hard to pin down but still tangible, something you wake up one day to find you’ve got, though you can’t tell quite where it came from?

And here’s what I had to say in my very first Substack post about those moments in listening when a correspondence occurs. Here I use another term: the yup moment.

My understanding of what songs were communicating to me has not fundamentally changed, but I’ve encountered different ways of trying to explain it. When I was listening to a lot of country music and watching a lot of westerns, I might think of that revelation of experience (whether lived or still to come) as the ‘yup moment’, referring to the kind of minimal utterance-cum-gesture that you’d typically find in those genres (‘yup, that about sums it up’). When I was a regular reader of The Wire magazine, I might think of it in terms of epiphanies, like those fragments of life writing that appeared at the end of each issue and reported each writer’s experience of ‘music’s transformative powers’. More recently, having discovered the work of the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, I might think in terms of ‘the unthought known’. This is a concept that Bollas uses to explain how ‘evocative’ and ‘transformational’ objects help us to realise and work through ideas which we have already anticipated in some manner but not yet articulated, or had articulated for us. The epiphanies we find in art often allow us to find ways to represent the things we have already sensed.

Although I sometimes use sounded experience, epiphany and the yup moment interchangeably, there are differences between having something affirmed in song that you felt you’d already sensed (yup), realising that you’ve come to know the world partly through sound (sounded experience) and having a lightbulb turned on inside your head (epiphany).

There’s also that wonderful word ‘grok’, used to refer to intuitively getting something and feeling that you’ve ingested it and it is already working effectively within you, or that you have become one with it. It’s a concept that became popular in the late 1960s following its appearance in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, where it was introduced as a Martian concept for explaining how, for example, a drinker of water becomes one with the water, and the water becomes one with the drinker.

Because the concept saturates Heinlein’s novel, it is sometimes left to readers’ intuition to figure out what grokking means and how it works. In other words, readers are required to grok ‘grok’. The word does evocative work: I remember grokking it when I read the book in my teens.

Robbie Fulks’ ‘That’s Where I’m From’ suggests there is much to grok in Hank Williams’s voice; it’s country, it’s where I’m from, a way of life, a feeling that’s otherwise inexpressible (Americana’s saudade, perhaps?), a ‘yup’, and perhaps also a gesture of defeat: I’ve done my best to put into words a certain feeling about the traces left in a person by place and history, but I’ve reached my limit and am just going to defer to a sound that you’ll either get or not. And that’s that.

But that’s also not quite that. The words are so carefully fashioned that we know we’re in the presence of a fine songwriter, one who has grokked a whole lot more from Williams than just what it’s like to grow up country. Fulks’ voice attains the high lonesome sound that means all you really need to hear and know—the whole blessed thing—is there in its register, that timbre that breaks through the song’s studium to bury its punctum in the listener’s skull. Fulks’ writing and singing combine to channel Williams’ songs into a new century.

Learning from Song

In June 2021, I received a link to an online class to be given by the songwriter Joe Henry as part of a series called ‘Five Things I’ve Learned’. Henry’s contribution was ‘Five Things I’ve Learned By Song’ and, while I didn’t register for the class, I did find the trailer intriguing. In it, Henry adopts a learned tone to describe the life lessons that can be taken from songs and how songs, like lives, are unfinished processes.

Henry talks about song as a way to respond to the mystical, to what is mysterious in life. Some of what he says is also included in text on the website as well as some additional information:

My friend, the poet Jane Hirshfield, once acknowledged a fundamental truth I’d never before heard properly acknowledged, saying:

“The poem has an intelligence that the poet does not possess.”

Blessed be.

When she spoke this, I felt struck as an old tower bell is struck; felt both enlightened and liberated as an artist and as a man; for it has never not been my witness that I am led into thought—understand who I am and what I believe—by the songs that I have been writing since I was fifteen years old. And since those earliest year[s] of having my ear to the street and my shoulder to the wheel, I know that more than anything, I have been cultivating, creatively-speaking, a surrender into process.

By this, I do not mean “surrender” in terms of resignation, but of radical acceptance.

By this, I do not mean that the “creative process” is limited to the making of songs or any other so-called Art; but rather it is as a habit of being; for as I work, so do I live.

And the longer that I live and the longer I have worked, I see that the line I first thought must separate the two has become blurred and ever-changing. Most everything of significance I have learned in my lifetime has either been ushered in on the arm of Song, or affirmed and made clear by it.

Also:

courtesy of Song, I came to see the connective tissue between every-thing and all of us. I can point back and often do to the moment when, at about age ten, I first heard Bob Dylan. Suffice for this moment to say that Bob didn’t change everything as much as he unified everything. By peeling back the onion on his journey and process, I could hear the connection in all I was encountering: understood the taut thread (tension again) that stitched Hank Williams and Jimmy Reed to the so-called beat poets; Miles Davis, Picasso and Cassius Clay (as he was known in that moment of revelation) to Richard Pryor; Walt Whitman to Duke Ellington, and on to Orson Welles.

Several of the key words and ideas in these extracts—liberation, understanding, recognition, connection, surrender—fit with my own thoughts about what I’ve learned from song. What gets added here is the idea that we can learn by listening to someone tell us what they have learned. Links in the chain. And, while this isn’t branded as a songwriting masterclass, the fact that it’s being delivered by a revered songwriter is kind of the whole point.

Sensuous Knowledge

I have another concept to flag here. It comes from Minna Salami in her book Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone. Salami notes the emphasis placed on rationality and logic in education from an early age, how this feeds into the privileging of STEM subjects and how what she calls ‘Europatriarchal knowledge’ assumes that such approaches are the answer to everything. She contrasts this with the way that the arts are often thought about:

We do not view knowledge as something that can be accessed, and assessed, through the arts and their connection to the emotions, senses, and embodied experience. We associate talent with the arts but not knowledge. Yet art is suited to explaining reality because art captures reality from the inside out. Art explains who we are because our existence is artful. We are not simply rational and mental beings, we are also emotional and physical beings.

Salami emphasises that ‘sensous’ should not be confused with ‘sensual’. This is not about sensuality:

When something is sensuous, it affects not only your senses but your entire being—your mind, body, and soul. Books are sensuous, for example. You can see, touch, and smell them. You can hear them in audio format and taste their words on your tongue. Books are tangible objects of myriad textures—aged, hardback, hand stitched and so on. They are mentally stimulating, therapeutic, and they potentially transform your deepest thought patterns. They affect you entirely.

This is the kind of knowledge common to the people I have been quoting from in this post. It’s the claim to learning and experience which I intuitively—sensuously—felt when I read Salami’s book.

And the Moral of That Is …

What kinds of lessons can be learned from song, then?

Some might be from what the words in a song say, the way a lyric articulates something we were on the verge of grokking but needed a well-crafted song object to help us get to.

I wouldn’t want to put all the emphasis on song lyrics as literal communication, though. For example, I’ve never been keen on songs that tell me what to think in too forceful a manner; this is the issue I have with some protest songs.

In many ways, I felt I learned as much from Bob Dylan telling me that the sun wasn’t yellow it was chicken, as I did from him telling me that the answers to the big questions were blowin’ in the wind.

A song that tells you what to do rather than what to think: now that’s a different thing. ‘Wiggle to the front, wiggle to the rear’: as practical as a Pilates video.

Songs teach us about experience, what I call ‘sounded experience’. If nothing else, they tell us that the person singing to us has experienced life and has something they wish to pass on about that experience.

Songs also teach us about what makes good songs, which might be one of Joe Henry’s points. That is useful whether one is training to be a listener, a songwriter, a creative practitioner of another sort, or just a human being.

Songs teach us lessons in aesthetics, and those are things we can take beyond our listening lives.

Songs teach us the value of moments, whether those are the moments songs find us in or the moments we find within songs. I’ve offered my ‘yup’ reaction not only to words crafted so well that they seem to tell me the whole blessed thing, but also to blink-and-you’ll-miss-them moments where an interjection, transition, modulation or a brief shudder in the song text snaps my head around. I’ve written about some of these moments before; I’ll be writing about more of them soon.

Can songs teach us about morality? The philosopher Jerrold Levinson suggests they can. In an essay called ‘Popular Song as Moral Microcosm: Life Lessons from Jazz Standards’, Levinson posits some reasons why music of any kind—instrumental or vocal—might have a moral dimension, then proceeds to mention some lessons that jazz standards contain. He notes that songs share the qualities of condensation, compression and concision with poetry but benefit from the combination of ‘articulate words’ and ‘inarticulate sounds’.

A great song, one that is not only beguiling in its music and worldly wise in its words, but compelling in its precise marriage of the two, has ethical quality, one might say, partly in virtue of serving as an emblem of harmonious and mutually enriching cooperation, a prime goal of interpersonal relations and of social life more generally. And when one responds positively to such a song—acknowledging on an emotional level its utter rightness and fineness of tone—one participates imaginatively in the ideal of sublime interaction that the song represents.

There’s much here I’d be keen to unpack, not least how much agreement any group of listeners might find regarding what constitutes ‘a great song’. But that will have to wait for another piece, or, better, a live conversation or two. For now, I just want to add Levinson’s take on the issue of what can be learned from song.

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In closing, I return to the Dylan lyric I opened with. Here’s the whole verse:

The world is old, the world is gray
Lessons of life can’t be learned in a day
I watch and I wait and I listen while I stand
To the music that comes from a far better land

What and where, I find myself wondering, is that far better world of which the song speaks? And what might we learn from its music?