from a distance

Singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith died last week. I didn’t notice the news, and I confess her name didn’t mean anything to me when KCRW’s Chris Douridas aired a tribute to her on his show on Sunday.

It should have, though. A million years ago, I was interning at radio station WCBE in Columbus when the music director and host of a show called “Radio Free Columbus” accidentally played Griffith’s recording of “From a Distance.” He had intended to play some other track from the album and punched in the wrong track number or miscounted the grooves or whatever technology they were using at the time. (I was interning in the news department, so I’m not sure what the Music folks did, but over in News I was literally cutting reel-to-reel tape to edit stories.)

The music director, a loud and likeable southerner named Jon Peterson, was appalled at what he’d done. As I recall, he literally ran out of the soundproofed studio, closed the door, and screamed. This was shortly after Bette Midler had released a big, gauzy version of the song that had become a major hit, and Jon’s shame at his mistake was probably equal parts that he had played that particular song, which stood out as especially maudlin thanks to Midler’s rendition, and that he had played what might be considered popular music, which wasn’t his or his radio station’s brand. The name “Radio Free Columbus,” after all, made an explicit claim to membership in the community of Athens, Georgia, and its indie radio scene.

In fairness, “From a Distance,” might be pretty maudlin. In that moment, though, I was listening for the first time to Nanci Griffith’s recording of it, which is quite a bit sparer than Midler’s reverb- and melisma-filled version. Griffith put the lyrics front and center. She said in an interview with Douridas that she never really considered herself a good singer, but damn, did she sing with clarity. So there I was, thinking for the first time about what this song was saying beyond “buy more soap.”

It’s a curious song. It lays out all these things that aren’t true, and that only seem true because we’re not looking closely enough:

From a distance we all have enough
And no one is in need
There are no guns, no bombs, no diseases
No hungry mouths to feed

And:

From a distance you look like my friend
Even though we are at war
From a distance I can't comprehend
What all this war is for

The sort of basic sentimentality you’ll find in a fair amount of 60s and 70s popular folk music; “Save the Country” and “One Tin Soldier” come to mind. Not that it’s wrong, just trite.

But stuck in the middle is this weird little bridge:

God is watching us, God is watching us
God is watching us from a distance

Which might, again, be sentimentality: God is watching us, it’s all good, he’s got the whole world in his hands, you know. Except, God is watching us from a distance. And from a distance no one is in need, the earth is blue and green, there is harmony and it echoes through the land. We’re sinners in the hands of a distracted, inattentive God. There’s an existential crisis at the center of this song. (Literally, right in the middle, which makes it weirder. The idea that God is watching, passively, at what he thinks are happy little humans is like a passing thought, and then we’re back to being at war.1)

I don’t know what songwriter Julie Gold was thinking when she wrote these lyrics. My cynical side says trite sentimentality is almost always the safer bet. And yet, as one of my literature professors used to tell us, “it’s on the page.” Just as Jefferson the slaveowner, whether intentionally or accidentally, put in writing the clearest possible argument for abolition, Gold the songwriter and Griffith the singer place us alone and left to take care of ourselves.

I tried to explain some of this to Jon Peterson in his despair as the wrong track went out over the airwaves, but he was inconsolable.

None of which matters from this remove, of course. But it is a moment in time when one might wish our so-called leaders (and others’ so-called leaders) had seen things through that more sentimental lens and asked what all this war is for.

Rest in power, Nanci Griffith; I wish I had known you better.