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Exploring the intersection of sacred and secular.
I discovered something kind of wonderful, my daughter likes some of my music — at least the songs she doesn’t call “old and tired” — she’s seven, y’all.
Country Road
During this end-of-summer lull between camp and school, our membership to Davis Farmland has been pretty handy. (Note to Davis Farmland and others, I accept sponsorships, and will sell ad space in my articles…we just won’t tell the publisher!) On the way the other morning, she asked for one of our favorites, Take Me Home, Country Roads — “play West Virginia again!”
It was the third time.
Then I saw another song that I knew she’d enjoy, Somewhere Over the Rainbow / Wonderful World by the Hawaiian heavyweight crooner Israel Kamakawiwoʻole. His voice surprised me the first time I heard it, because it conveyed a joyful melancholy with an honesty few achieve.
Take Me Home to the Place I Belong
Like a lot of people, I heard the song much later than its release, since it’s been revived a few times in movie scores. Given its warmth, the ukulele seemed oddly timeless. It seemed an odd instrumental choice to go platinum in almost any era, but moreso given its 1993 release. Nirvana’s anfechtung-laden flannel flinging rhythms took glam rock from stadiums to state fairs. But when we think about the time, it may not be as surprising as all that.
The mid-nineties was a moment of cultural shift, as we were not in a Cold War but not quite an aspiring end-stage capitalist dystopia. Cobain’s coarse vocal authenticity and GenX apathetic disdain for The Man paired well with our anger at being at the early stages of ransacking the social safety net enjoyed by our parents, already suspicious that the cards were stacked against us.
West Makaha
Since every generation grows up with adults groaning about how awful the world and kids nowadays have gotten while seeming determined to do their part in its downfall, I think every generation is drawn to voices with Cobain’s gritty edge and Kamakawiwoʻole’s heart.
And the third time she asked for Country Roads, I saw Kamakawiwoʻole’s rendition of the John Denver classic. Music of any genre becomes folk music when it’s passed down from generation to generation, with Hallelujah being a classic example. We see songs of all sorts done and redone, written and rewritten, and the song doesn’t even have to be that old for this to happen. Case in point, Doechii’s Anxiety in 2024 uses the beat from Gotye’s Somebody that I Used to Know from way back in 2020.
And so when I heard Iz sing the familiar intro, “Almost heaven” felt homey, and then he sang “West Mahaka” as the next words. I had a moment of complicated existential angst when I didn’t hear “West Virginia,” and realized he’d taken this classic and remade it into an ode to his country roads, carrying him to his home where he belonged. Not the mountain ranges or whatever they have down there in West Virginia, but he called back to island roads that I realized evoke something similar, albeit different, in my heart — take me home, or someplace like it.
Mount Ka’ala
Now I’m not old, but I’m old enough that I have a calendar app and an email app that I like, and even though there are newer apps that may actually be better, I’m sticking with them. That’s a lot of words to say that it’s weird to hear the next generation adapt something you grew up with.
Then it occurred to me that Denver may have heard this version of his song, despite that both died in 1997, Denver at 53 in an October plane crash, and Kamakawiwoʻole at 38 in June from respiratory failure. It made me wonder what Denver might have thought, and I think it probably would have made him smile if he did. First, there’s something cool about hearing a song you wrote being sung by someone else. A friend in college used to sing a song I wrote, and it was really cool. It’s like someone’s carrying a little piece of you with them wherever they are.
Take Me Home, oh Country Road
Something in music brings us closer to home than almost anything else. No matter how many times I experience it, there’s something sacred in singing an old hymn like Amazing Grace with someone in memory care and they start singing along. It’s a way of sharing ourselves — a shortcut to intimacy. And sharing this common ground of human experience opens us to something sacred that resides deep within. If we’re incredibly fortunate, it can become a way of giving something of ourselves away, as happened for Trent Reznor when he heard Johnny Cash’s rendering of his song, Hurt, saying, “That’s his song now.”
In an age of DMCA takedowns and covetous corporate copyrights, we’re in need of a little more folk music in our lives because there’s something deeply human about putting our own words to tunes that belong to the generations.
Eric Wolf is a local Lutheran pastor, and he’d love to buy you a coffee, tea, or beverage of your choice to tell him about your faith, your ideas about meaning, or whatever “sacred stuff” means to you. Reach him at [email protected]! To learn more about Eric and his writing, visit his blog at Love Sees Color.