Today there is none of that other stuff here– I won’t even utter the “P” word here this morning. As promised, today is about art and music.
This morning I want to link a song and a painting and the piece shown above immediately came to mind. It’s a 20″ by 10″ canvas titled Voyager Blue that is included in my current show, Contact, at the West End Gallery. It has a definite narrative to it, with the small almost indistinguishable figure at the horizon serving as The Seeker, which is often the character that figures portray when they appear in my work. The Seeker constantly searches for meaning, for purpose and for answers in this life.
The song I thought I would attach to this painting is the great folk classic The Midnight Special. This song, whose lyrics first appeared in 1905, is about a prisoner who longs for his freedom and symbolizes it in the form of The Midnight Special, a night train that would carry them away from the despair of their imprisonment. There was an actual Midnight Special train that ran between Chicago and St. Louis but the one depicted in this song is considered to be more likely a train on the Missouri Pacific line, the Houstonian, that ran between Houston and New Orleans, departing just before midnight.
But maybe it simply refers to the night train that is nearest to the prisoner singing for his freedom.
This song has been recorded many, many times over the past century by artists from Leadbelly to ABBA but today I chose a version from the Queen of American folk music, Odetta. It has a nice bluesy sway to it and seems like a good song to push off from on this Sunday morning.
Have a great day. I hope the Midnight Special shines her ever-loving light on you.
Just a short entry today for Father’s Day. It probably seems like a questionable choice to select Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone from the mighty Temptations as the song for this Sunday. It’s a song about an absent father and his son who is trying to discover who and what his father truly was. Not deeply sentimental and definitely not warm and fuzzy.
It’s hard to believe that Paul Simon has been a major part of the American songbook for over 50 years, since The Sound of Silence arrived back in 1964. If you want to get technical, Simon has been writing and recording since 1957. So it’s closer to 60 years. And through all that time, he has continued to move forward, never opting to cruise by on a well-built reputation and a deep body of stellar work.
I wanted to feature some music this morning that kind of jibed with the Henri Matisse Blue Nude cut-outs above that the artist produced in the early 1950’s. I wasn’t sure what I wanted but I settled on something from composer Burt Bacharach. 
Sunday morning quiet…
There’s been a huge resurgence as of late in interest in the music and life of the great Nina Simone, who died in 2003 at the age of 70. You hear her music on all sorts of movie and television soundtracks and commercials. There has been a couple of documentaries made of her life ( this includes the highly acclaimed What Happened, Miss Simone? on Netflix) and there are a number of big screen biopics in the works.
I have always been a big fan of the movies. I’ve written here in the past how I will often paint while an old movie plays in the studio, especially some of the older classics that were often based on great ideas and great dialogue. They are not distracting in most cases and it’s easy to pull thought and emotion from these films that finds its way into my work. It’s hard to not want to inject more feeling into whatever I am at work on when I listen to some of the lines from The Grapes of Wrath or so many other great films.
Redtree Times 