A SIP OF BLUE MERLOT

Although the Sewanee Writers Conference is in full swing right now, and we’re getting our annual fix of readings from noted authors and poets, yesterday we took time out for a visit with Joshua (Bubba) Murrell and Brenda Lowry. This duet, sometimes billed as B&B On the Rock and sometimes as Blue Merlot, are creative artists in the music field and perform in two music realms – Gospel and Blues/Jazz. They make an annual pilgrimage to Nashville to attend a show of music equipment and, on the way, veer off route to visit with us at Sewanee.

Bubba and Brenda live in New Iberia, Louisiana and have been performing together for at least ten years. Bubba composes on the piano and performs on guitar, slide guitar, bass, and what he calls “funky/skanky” organ. He was awarded a Grammy for engineering and producing music, and Brenda is the vocalist with Blue Merlot who can belt out a mean “Memphis Blues,” and “Rock My Baby Jesus” (the latter for which she wrote music and lyrics). They’ve won an award as “The Best Blues Band in Acadiana” (2008) and achieved top honors in the Louisiana Blues Challenge in 2002.

Although I love to hear this talented duet perform, I particularly enjoy watching them give rein to the play impulse when they’re talking non-stop. Often, when they’re sitting, talking in our living room here at Sewanee or in New Iberia, one of them will suddenly say a phrase that could lend itself to musical lyrics and toss it to the other who responds in a split second to the word play. Usually, they discard the word play as just that – word play – but sometimes the phrase becomes part of a song that they later perform. Their latest CD with a Blue Merlot label centers on Hurricane Katrina and the devastating effects of that storm. Blue Merlot performs what Brenda and Bubba have labeled “Gumbo Funk” – a combination of music styles in songs like “Blue Tarp City,” “Wall of Water,” and “Floating Around New Orleans.”

Brenda represents Luna Guitars (an all-female guitar company), writes the lyrics for many of the duet’s songs, plays 12-string guitar, and is the main vocalist for Women at the Well and Blue Merlot. Bubba received his Grammy in 2008 for his work on Terrance Semien’s Live! Worldwide CD in the Best Zydeco or Cajun Album category. Both Brenda and Bubba perform with the Sweet Tones, B&B on the Rock, and the South Louisiana Blues Revue.

For several years, Bubba and Brenda had a studio in the apartment attached to my carport in New Iberia, Louisiana and did a lot of composing/recording there before they began to garner awards for their bayou blues and Gospel renditions. Oddly enough, their studio was so well-insulated, I never experienced music “booms” in my home next door to them. On several occasions, I brought them along as the performing musicians at retreats I directed in Pineville, Louisiana and Memphis, Tennessee, and in addition to their “noodling” in the background while I delivered meditations, their renditions of Gospel songs were especially inspiring.

Bubba and Brenda label their music “distinctly Louisiana” and bring forth in me nostalgia for the Teche country each time they visit with us on The Mountain. As I said earlier, the best part of a visit with this duet is the fun of watching them throw out lines that may later form the lyrics for a new song. They inspire creativity in any artist – musician, poet, and painter – and show us how to delight in creative play.

LAKE ARTHUR

During summers on The Mountain here in TN, I long for water -- the world of rivers, lakes, and bayous that course through my life when I’m in Louisiana. Louisiana is a land of big water. The Mississippi River, “Father of Waters,” becomes a half mile wide as it flows through the state, and early settlers made homes along its banks, as well as on rivers, bayous and streams that provided them with food, transportation and livelihood.

My father’s paternal Grandfather Samuel came down from Iowa and settled on the banks of Lake Arthur, Louisiana, actually buying the entire town through a land company he and my Great Uncle owned. The Mermentau River widens at Lake Arthur, flows into Grand Lake, and then through marshes to the Gulf of Mexico. The many lakes and bayous in Cameron and Calcasieu parishes provide a great habitat for ducks and geese. It's a hunters’ paradise, but as a child, the sport that Lake Arthur offered me and my siblings was fishing.

While pining for water the other day, I came across a photo (above) of me and my brother Paul after we had spent a day on the water and caught a small string of catfish. We had been pole fishing and were standing on the wharf leading from my grandfather’s house to Lake Arthur. Two scruffier kids you haven’t seen, but we appear to be happy fishermen. My brother grins broadly, and I seem to be fascinated with the large can of worms I’m holding. The catch looks like blue catfish, but I can remember catching a few yellow ones in the lake, along with gaspergou, choupique, even a gar that my grandmother cut up and rolled into garfish balls and fried (boulettes de poisson arme’). In later years, I whined enough to be noticed and was taken out in a Joe boat one night when the men in the family ran trotlines, string lines with live bait attached to the hook (minnows, smaller fish) to lure huge catfish.

My grandmother’s kitchen always smelled of seafood – fish, shrimp, crabs – and I remember this short fat woman, weighing perhaps 250 pounds, seated on a wooden stool at a single sink, cleaning seafood most of the morning. During the 40’s and 50’s, Grandmother offered lodging to boarders in the German style house my Great Grandfather built, and when we visited, the long oak table in the dining room sometimes held three kinds of seafood (including garfish balls), a pork roast, fresh pole beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, biscuits, cornbread, German potato salad, slaw, iced tea and beer (no dessert). At least six boarders who worked on oil rigs nearby joined us at a dinner topped off with French roast coffee made by my grandfather in a white enamel French coffee pot and poured into small white cups, then diluted with heavy cream and sugar for the children.

My grandmother, a Vincent, insisted that she was not of Acadian descent, but her ancestors were among those exiled from Port Royale, Nova Scotia during the Grand Derangement, and she was clearly Cajun French. My grandfather Marquart’s German ancestors came to the U.S. from Alsace-Lorraine, and he was every inch the German patriarch, sitting down at the table with all plates in front of him so that he could fill them with the portions he thought were hearty enough, then passing them around to adults first. If a child reached across the table for the butter instead of asking that it be passed, he rapped the offender sharply on the knuckles with a table knife. Both grandparents believed in setting a good table and eating heartily, but my grandmother descended from a long line of stout people and was severely overweight, while my short, slim grandfather was always hitching up his khakis. Sometimes, my grandmother would coax me to sleep with her, and I was afraid she’d roll over in her sleep, particularly after a heavy meal, and suffocate me.

Anyway, my early fishing interludes in Lake Arthur led to more advanced fishing with a fly rod on the Bogue Chitto River near Franklinton, Louisiana and, later, to white perch fishing while week-ending on a Louisiana lake near Toledo Bend where we had acquired a camp during the 70’s. While living in Iran in the mid 70’s, I wasn’t allowed to fish, and I was appalled when I saw fishermen catching catfish, similar to the beautiful blue catfish we caught in Lake Arthur, in the River Karun near Ahwaz and throwing them back into the water because Iranians don’t eat fish with skin.

My fishing ceased during the late 80’s because I never seemed to have leisure time to get out on the water, but in recent years I’ve enjoyed a few days of pier fishing on Silver Lake in central Florida. Now, while I sojourn here on The Mountain at Sewanee for the summer, I long to see lakes and fresh water rivers, even murky bayous – long stretches of peaceful water with fish occasionally breaking the surface and daring me to take up an old and satisfying hobby.

CROWING AGAIN

The raucous sound of crows cawing in the backyard reminds me of how many poems I’ve written about these dark birds, most of the poems not-so-dark in content. Crows have always fascinated and comforted me, and I’m among a minority of crow lovers since these creatures are regarded as nuisances in many places throughout the world. Next month, crow hunting season in the U.S. begins and doesn’t close until the end of March. There isn’t even a bag limit on these birds if they’re found “about to commit depredations upon ornamental trees, agricultural crops, livestock, etc.” However, hunters who kill these creatures can’t sell their kill! The laws don’t say anything about the four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie, and I guess those who kill crows could eat them if they were so disposed – my father once shot one in the backyard of his home in Franklinton, Louisiana, and my mother, at his bizarre request, baked it in a pie… of which I didn’t partake, I hasten to add.

Crows are canny and score high on their I.Q. tests, rating at the top of the bird scale in intelligence; e.g., they’re said to have the skill to drop nuts with hard shells on streets through which heavy traffic runs, waiting for cars to crush the nuts open. The birds stand alongside pedestrians and when the stoplight halts traffic, they strut out to pick up their cracked nuts.

I’ve never seen a murder of crows (the name given to a group of congregating crows), but I have seen them gathered in cemeteries and near carrion and have identified them as ravens, rather than crows. Like Robert Frost, crows symbolize hopefulness to me. In his “Dust of Snow,” he wrote: “The way a crow/Shook down on me/The dust of snow/From a hemlock tree/Has given my heart/ a change of mood/And saved some part/Of a day I had rued.”

When I lived in Iran, the sight of huge ravens parading through the gardens of the Shah Abbas Hotel in Isfahan made me feel less homesick and diminished the waves of cultural shock I felt during my first year in Iran. They were large, bold creatures that almost sat down at the outdoor tables with us, hovering nearby as we enjoyed an afternoon drink of Tuborg beer in the gardens. They were waiting, perhaps, for the snack that accompanied the Tuborg – the meat of pistachios we accidentally dropped while cracking them open.

A recent poem I wrote about crows:

THERE ARE NO PLACES TO HIDE FROM CROWS

every place I’ve lived
they’ve taunted me,

“my territory,” they caw,
zooming back and forth

from front yard to back,
landing in the hemlock,

screaming like jealous women
finding their lovers in new nests.

Hunching shoulders and spreading wing,
they inflate their size,

dare me to take over
the landlocked wood of oak and poplar,

indignant trees I really don’t wish to claim,
my deepest longings for river, lake

ocean, any rushing stream.

Every time I step outdoors
they start up,

thinking they’ve frightened me,
caused me to depart The Mountain,

not knowing how much
they comfort me with their harsh cries,

their sheen of confidence
bringing me messages

about life in the other world,
death in this world,

consoling or terrifying news,
their disclaimer: they’re only messengers.

How many poems I’ve written for crows
and yet they never stop to read them,

so careless of my admiration
for the way they speak back to the world,

all of which is their base territory,
a global field of play.

Sometimes I see them attacking raptors
like that one, the black marauder diving now

into outstretched branches of the hemlock,
a suspect creature, ruthlessly gurgling

to its prey, an owl lost in daylight.

And yet I love their dissonance,
throaty sounds echoing

remorselessly through treetops.

I know they aren’t wholly unkind or dishonorable
as they bring food to their feeble, aged parents,

opening blood-soaked beaks to proclaim
a Gospel of love and filial piety.



Note: The picture above is taken from the cover of one of my chapbooks, a painting done by my brother Paul.