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. 

Holding fast to what she taught me – in memory of Virginia Lowe

Special Report from Los Angeles, California, in honor of my mentor, Virginia Lowe: I talk a lot about heaven in our shows and listening to the obituaries on the radio with my great-grandmother, and funeral home tote bags. I know that part of the reason I do is because I grew up with a bunch of women – my grandmother and her sisters – who talked a lot about heaven in the course of just any ole thing like lunch or curling their hair. We once played a concert in Northern California to a mostly Chinese audience and I was never so conscious of how many times I say the word "Heaven" in the course of a show. Afterward, nearly every person in our audience came up and said hello, had a picture made with us, and one woman echoed several others when she said, "I like how you talk about heaven. It's very beautiful. I feel happy."

Virginia Lowe was buried on Friday morning. Some of you who have read my posts or our bio, will know that she was my musical mentor. I grew up listening to her sing and preach at the Friendly Chapel Church on Smith Ridge just across the road from Mawmaw's house.

Mawmaw's church is Pentecostal. When I was a child, people spoke in languages I didn’t understand, they believed in a fire that did not burn, they fell down in the floor with the spirit, and they sang. They sang loudly and passionately. Their singing got under my skin because it wasn’t for prettiness or show – they were hollering their story up to God with every ounce of their being. To me this is singing and this is songwriting – to shout the story of life as an urgent message to the beyond.

The person who embodied this entirely was Virginia Lowe. Her body literally shook and quavered as she sang. She was a short lady with narrow shoulders, but her voice sounded like it came straight from Moses' burning bush. Whether she was preaching or singing, and she went from one to the other constantly, she was like an instrument made of bone, flesh, and hair on which God strummed a mighty chord.

She had no artifice about her. She loved cakes. She was cagey about being recorded because she was suspicious of people making money from her singing, not because she thought her singing was wonderful, but because her singing was a record of the spirit being cut into the grooves of every heart in the congregation.

She was blind since childhood and so was her husband, Jim, who died two years ago. They went to school with Ronnie Milsap and you could hear those same country roots when she played the piano. She was very troubled after Jim's death and never seemed comfortable in the world without him.

Her death was not a shock to me. She had been sick more than she had been well since Jim passed over, but I feel a sadness nevertheless. I did switch on my voice recorder in the service once or twice and I can go back and hear her. But I will miss being in her physical presence because to be so was like being in front of the great riddle of life itself.

The songs she sang at the Friendly Chapel were the ones I distilled into the lyric for our song Made As New. When I sing, it is my aim to honor the fiercely honest way of singing that Virginia taught me. I don't sing to be admired, but to relay a message that I think must be delivered. Our songs are not created to glorify us, but to bring joy, warning, empathy, kindness, and respite to fellow travelers. If I fail at this, then I've no business doing this work and I best just stick to sewing. Life is short and it seems best do what matters and bring love to table.

When I was in school and read about the oracles in Greece or Yeats' mediums, I always thought of Virginia Lowe – a woman sitting with a braille Bible at her side, eating a second piece of cake, about to sing out an urgent message brought out of the mouth of God into a little mountain church to the few that would hear. Those that did hear will not soon forget the message or woman that spoke it.

If you would like to hear Virginia's powerful singing, I invite you to click this link.

https://soundcloud.com/jeniandbilly/virginia-lowe-sings-hold-fast-to-the-right