I’m a big fan of Transatlantic Sessions, a series of music sessions recorded for DVD and TV broadcast to which the BBC must have bought the rights because they kindly keep showing them on the excellent BBC4. I love Celtic music, and I love much of what has come out of America in the last twenty years or so under the heading of roots music or “Americana” – in other words, european folk music (in the broadest sense) filtered through American poular culture and sent back to Europe. This is the kind of music I love to play, as a drummer and percussionist.
The relationship between Britain and America is fascinating, I think, and this musical exchange is one aspect that illustrates and points to the ways in which the peoples of the two nations relate culturally, theologically, and philospophically. But that’s something to write about elsewhere. Joan Osborne turned up in one of these programmes singing a song called Holy Waters, and I was captivated by her voice, the song, and the band’s performance. It helps that she has Iris DeMent singing harmony, of course! You can see and hear the performance here on YouTube.
There’s not much to the lyrics, in one sense; the song is almost an impressionistic poem shot through with what sound like fragments of a love story.
“On a pitch black highway lookin’ for a road
Sleepin’ on a stormy bed, honey, who will be your coat
Came to be my drivin’ wheel, you came to be my man
Now you’re rollin’ like a baby boy in the backseat of a van”
It’s the way she sings the chorus, which is just the words “Holy waters, holy way; Holy waters, sweetest way.” Her voice captures all the sorrow and regret that is hinted at in this song, and takes it all to the well of holy water, the sweetest way. I think many of us who drink at the well of living water know what a deep and complex mixture of joy and sadness is found there. I know this about my relationship with God, and it is the Eucharist that reminds me of this all the time…having tried the ways of the world, and having found that they always deliver less than they promise, I have learnt that only in God is a safe stronghold to be found. It was a relief to learn that after many years of struggle-some living, and that knowledge remains a joy and a refuge. But I will always carry a mixture of sadness, nostalgia, regret and compassion for my old self and the delusions of human perfection that I used to live by. Joan Osborne captures all that, and more, and sings it in eight words.
Postscript: When I found the video clip on YouTube to include in this journal entry, I noticed that a number of other people had picked up a similar theme from this song. Among the comments that people have made about this performance are: “This kind of music lifts even a cynic out of his heels and restores a drunkards faith in the ruined scheme of things,” “make you take back stuff you didn’t borrow,” and “she is a chosen vessel.” Lovely.