The Circus and Cueball's Pool Hall

Jeni Hankins Appalachian-Grown Country Folk Music 1500 Words on the Circus, Cueball's Pool Hall, and Hearing Yourself Sing. On Friday, the Englishman and I were waiting on the roofer to give forth on the water trickling down our upstairs bedroom wall. While we waited, we played three games of pool – I lost all the games – and listened to the soundtrack for “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” on vinyl. It turned out the roofer liked that soundtrack too, and this gave us confidence in him despite the shocking revelations about our chimney pots and cowls. After he left, I continued to loose at pool and we switched to Bruce Springsteen. I said, “Do we have that record with that circus song?” And the Englishman rustled around in our vinyl collection and put the record on our hi-fi which is not only a hi-fi system, but “a nice piece of furniture,” according to the late sixties brochure which came with it at the auction.  “That circus song.” Do you remember Bruce Springsteen’s circus song? Though I’d been listening to Bruce via my parents since I was a toddler, I’d never heard his circus song until last year. It was then that a long-time fan made a disparaging remark about “The Oxygen Girl” and the “novelty song” – meaning my circus song. I personally don’t have a problem with novelty songs and I know all of the words to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Punky’s Dilemma.”What’s wrong with “Wish I was an English muffin, ‘bout to make the most out of a toaster. I’d ease myself down, coming up brown.” I never would have wondered so much about boysenberries without that song in my childhood and boysenberries seem a tame obsession for a thirteen year old girl given the other options . . . In fact, I may just make buttons that say, "Citizens for Boysenberry Jam" which perfectly defines the political chaos . . . . back to circuses. But there I was, last year, confronted with a fan who regarded “The Oxygen Girl” as a frivolous and annoying novelty song. What did circuses have to do with Jewell Ridge anyway? So, I was feeling a bit raw when the Englishman said, “All the great songwriters have circus songs. Do you know this one?” And then he queued up Bruce Springsteen singing “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” which begins, “The machinist climbs his ferris wheel like a brave.” Since that night, this has become my favorite Bruce Springsteen song. This is not only because this song was played for me in a gesture of romantic heroism, but also because there’s a tuba and an accordion in the arrangement – two of my favorite instruments. And it’s about the circus. When I was a kid I loved the circus. Even though Mom and Dad were broke, they somehow got tickets through their offices or cereal box tops or radio contests, I don’t know. And there we were, eating cotton candy, watching women in sequined dresses spin from ropes of silk between their teeth. All of the animal stuff has changed at circuses now and that’s how the world spins, but that’s where we saw elephants and tigers and bears. The trapeze. The trapeze. The trapeze. Women with feathers in their hair, balancing on the backs of horses. The knife-thrower. The fire-eaters.  My great-great grandmother’s sister ran away with the circus. I’ve been trying to write a song about her for years. I woke up at 4:30 last night with some new version of that song about her in my head again.  Maybe it’s a thing with us performing songwriters – that yen for the big-top moment. Isn’t that what we want our audiences to feel – the way that I did at the circus when I was ten – transfixed, transformed, jubilant, and defiantly hopeful? When I started performing professionally, I had been singing all of my life, but suddenly I worried that I was meant to have some kind of distinctive voice – some kind of tone. This resulted in some odd unreleased recordings of me sounding like Ralph Stanley. But little by little, I let go of this worry and just sang – sang like I was sitting next to Mawmaw at the Friendly Chapel Church or next to my Dad when he got out his harmonica and guitar at Christmas. But even after making eight records, I couldn’t say what my personal distinctive Jeni “sound” was. You all have kindly described my voice to me in terrific comments and questions after concerts, but I couldn’t quite hear “the Jeni voice” in my own head. That changed the other night when I sang “Wild Billy’s Circus Story.” The Englishman, being a longtime Bruce Springsteen fanatic knew the melody far better than I did, so he began teaching it to me. After singing along with him, and the both of us singing along with Bruce, I said, “Let me see if I can do this first verse on my own.” So, I started singing and maybe because Bruce’s voice is so different than mine, maybe because it’s normally a rock song, maybe because I’ve been doing more sewing than singing over the last few weeks, my voice announced itself distinctively as my own – a little folk, a little mountain country, certain words that slide here and there, notes between notes, and a wrapping of words around lines. The Englishman laughed with astonishment to hear one of his longtime favorite songs sung in an entirely un-Springsteen voice. He loved it. I surprised myself. We sang it again and again until our stomachs reminded us that some supper would be nice. Dad always heard my voice. He made a study of it which wasn’t difficult for him since my voice is part his voice. The last time he saw me perform – at Merlefestin North Carolina – which was the first place I felt being a singer-songwriter was the life for me, he mouthed all of the words to the songs AND the stories in exactly my rhythm. He knew what I was going to say before I did.  I think a lot of you heard my voice before I did and so many of you have encouraged and galvanized me over the last ten years of my professional touring career. You’ve done this through coming to shows, buying CDs, hosting shows, sending me cards, letters, emails, Facebook messages, calling on the telephone, and being a group of a few thousand people who together make an audience, a fan club, a family, and a congregation of sorts. I used to talk with my Dad nearly every day. When I called him, our conversation would go like this: Hello? Hi Dad. Hi Kid. How are you? I’m so good I can hardly stand myself. That was Dad. Other times he would pretend that he was a guy named Cueball who ran a pool hall and then he would pretend that he would have to go look for my father. My point is that it’s been a really crazy year in the world. Things seem very hard and confusing and downright mean sometimes. I rarely comment on any of this in these newsletters or on social media because what can I say but that the world seems to be falling apart a lot of the time. On the other hand, I have felt tremendously loved this year. I’ve made some extremely talented and some truly good friends. I’ve traveled and returned home safely. I can still hear the voice of my grandmother in Jewell Ridge on the other end of the phone. My sister is making theater. My Mom sent me a photo of our family cat talking on FaceTime with me. Sometimes, I just feel like making politicians learn the banjo to distract them from messing up the world, and other times, at the end of the day, I feel so good I can hardly stand myself. I hope that you will give yourself a chance to hear your own voice, to sing a new song, to laugh in the face of chaos, to show kindness, to dare to write a circus song, and to pretend you are in Cueball’s pool hall with Dad, eating peanuts and drinking Rolling Rock Beer. I’m going to head over there now, order a tonic water and some salt & vinegar crisps, and put “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” on the jukebox. I hope in 2019 you will feel transfixed, transformed, jubilant, and defiantly hopeful – like I felt at the circus when I was ten. Thank you for ten years of touring! Here’s to the next ten!  See you in 2019! Happy Christmas and a Bright New Year! Jeni www.jenihankins.com Next year, 2019, will mark my second decade as a touring artist! If you’d like to see me in concert next year, please write to me with your house concert or local venue or festival ideas!   First Concert of 2019 I'll be in the states for the first part of 2019 and I'm tickled that the folks from the Huntsville Assistance Program (HAP) in Huntsville, Alabama, have asked me along to play a benefit concert. Saturday, January 26, at 3pm in the afternoon at United Church of Huntsville. Tickets are $20 at the venue on the day of the show. HAP is supported by 60 churches and provides vital assistance to family through food banks and utilities. Second Show of the Year I'll play my second show of the year at the Hope and Anchor Pub  on Upper Street, Islington, London. This promises to be a terrific evening of variety for the performers and audiences alike with poets Kevin Reinhardt and Cathy Flower, strummy folkie Adrian R Shaw, electro pop band Parenthesis Dot Dot, and yours truly. It's all put together by master of ceremonies, comedian and songwriter, Hank Osasuna! I'll be playing somewhere in the middle of the evening. Tuesday, February 26, Doors at 7:30 pm. Copyright © 2018 Jeni Hankins, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: Jeni Hankins 500 Westover Dr #13373 Sanford, North Carolina  27330 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

The Girl I Once Knew

This week, I stepped into my house in Nashville for the first time in over a year. It was like stepping into an art installation made by someone I used to know – me, two or three years ago.

I came here to check on the house, to get a few sewing supplies and clothes to take back to England, and to do a little business in Nashville. But, instead, I am staring into a mirror at a person I might not have seen in a while. This person began collecting little treasures from the time she was a girl for “one day” when she would set up house. She has a set of pink tin children’s kitchen furniture, an array of china tea cups on her mantel, vintage cameras lined up like soldiers ready to shoot, and vintage soda pop bottles pulled out of old houses and flea markets keeping watch over the kitchen. She has a Hoosier cabinet, an Arts and Crafts desk, a pink ceramic water pitcher for her hairbrushes, and a pink melamine sugar bowl for her dental floss. She has a tiny green TV from Hershey Park and, when she looks in the peephole on the back and pushes the button on the bottom of it, she is transported to when she was ten years old, holding the hand of her grandmother and smelling chocolate.

I like this girl. I think we could be best friends. 

This house was built in 1912 and has had only three owners, including me. The single sisters whose father built the house lived here until they died and hardly changed a thing as far as a can tell. The wood work has never been painted. The mantlepieces are in tact. The floors have never been stripped and “re-done.” The kitchen looks to have had an update in 1960. The almond appliances date from circa 1985. No dishwasher, just an electric range and boxy fridge. This house is the perfect setting for my teal plastic sugar and flour bins, for my tasseled lamp shades, for my super 8 film projectors. The house and my things are merry together.

I walked into this house with an aim to figure out which things I was going to take over to England at some point. But, honestly, the idea of dismantling this walk-in sculpture fills me with dread. My traveling companion once told me about an artist who took over an empty store front in London and made an art of dismantling and destroying all of his possessions. This is the image that buzzes through my mind as I look at my Elvis-whisky-decanter-music-box. I feel faintly sick.

My traveling companion says I should open my house to the public and charge admission. This idea, I like. Because, actually, not many people have been to the house or seen the installation. I remember when some friends visited from England a few years ago. They said they felt they’d walked into a home magazine, but a very quirky one that didn’t exist, and they started taking pictures.

Maybe, I’ll enter the Christmas home tour in 2018. Maybe, I will turn my house into a very quirky Air B&B or furnished rental. Maybe, I will wait and think about it all another time. I have learned in this last year of tumult, that the picture becomes clearer in time, and the path forward sometimes opens like a ten cent child’s fan with a picture of the thing that means the most in the world to you.

The house is rented until sometime next year. The ceramic elephants and bakelite napkin rings will stand sentinel until I return. And the girl I once knew? She’s still around, and, I must admit, she has a little collection of thirty pence, tiny ceramic ladies on my mantlepiece in London. 

Nashville, it's been a while

Back home in Nashville for just a day or two before our Jonesborough and Johnson City, TN, concerts this weekend. The first time I've set foot in the house in four months and two days. First time coming home and seeing Dad in everything. Taking refuge in laundry and unpacking. Wrote a new song this morning. And I'm remembering that Dad being in everything means that he's right here wherever I am, always. 

Home is a returning

Report from Loving, New Mexico: Today, we are traveling north on 285 from Fort Stockton, Texas, to Westcliffe, Colorado, where we'll play a concert tomorrow night. We've never taken this road before and I can tell you that the part through Pecos County, Texas, was "flat as a pancake" as Mawmaw Ann would say, and covered in scrub. There is truly nothing but oilfields out here and the men who tend them. There are more white pickups trucks than I ever saw in my whole life, and all manner of temporary worker's housing from cinderblock shacks to trailers to purpose-built tiny houses, dozens of them all the same out in the middle of the sand. 

We've seen Cowboy Churches, pipelines, falling stars, towns with nothing but a few rusted out burnt out buildings, power lines, yuccas, and reservoirs and rivers with no water in them at all. 

Last night we played for our friends in West Texas – librarians, oilfield workers, children, a piano teacher, and a beauty queen who taught at the Agricultural (Ag) school. We talked quilting, grandmothers, armadillos, and brothers. We saw our friend Buddy who gave Billy a Mr Bill doll, we slept soundly at our friend Jody's house, and then we were on our way. 

And through all of this, a single thread keeps winding through my mind about the nature of home. What is home? A place you remember, a place you create, or simply a place to sleep at the end of the workday. When I see the temporary houses of the oilfield workers I think about how they probably live there alone and their families live somewhere else. This is their bunkhouse. Home is another place where their kids play softball. In this way, work and home can be at odds with each other. Where the oilfield workers sleep is a place that they stay because of work, but it's not where they live. 

Because we live mainly on the road, I think of home as a returning - returning to a familiar place, seeing familiar faces, and even remembering small things like how nice and cold the water from the water cooler is at the Fort Stockton Library. My ancestral home in the Appalachian mountains will always be my true north. But as a person who moved many times as a child and is constantly on the move as an adult, I find home in friends, in familiar landscapes, in listening to a favorite film score, and re-reading a beloved book. And home sits right beside me in the car on this 12 hour drive explaining to me what's happening musically in my favorite film score and listening to these tour reports.

Sending love out to all those searching for home.

Homeward Bound

On my way home to Nashville after two weeks at Mom & Dad's. It's nice how they are the best parents and didn't mind having me take over the house with cartoon drawings, little folded up versions of CD packaging, cups of tea, and scraps of fabric. And it was lovely of Billy to come pick me up -- a lot of driving for my Baltimore Boy, but he didn't mind a bit. Ten days to get packed up for Britain ... then the Paradise Festivus in Baltimore on the 25th, Dulles to London on the 27th! So thankful for this troubadour life!

Placemat Hijinks

Report from JeniandBillyLand in Nashville, Tennesse: Even our placemats are feeling creative today. This one bloomed two eyes and a smile -- a happy accident.