By the Sweet By and By, We’ll Get There (Soon)
By Win Frederick
There is a YouTube video of the late great folk and blues guitarist Elizabeth Cotten that I’ve found constant joy in revisiting lately. In it, the left-handed guitarist plays a version of the gospel hymn The Sweet By and By, in her signature two-finger picking style now known as “Cotten picking.” The COVID-19 lockdown has led me to a few new hobbies. One of them has been picking up music, myself. It will take me years of practice to be half as good as Cotten, but the phrase “by the sweet by and by” has become a mantra for me. Those six words and their hymnal melody remind me that with steadfast dedication, all things that are meant to be will, indeed, be.
While my appreciation for Elizabeth Cotten is recent, my relationship with folk music began in high school in my bedroom. Like a lot of people in southern Nevada, I wasn’t born here. My parents had a complicated relationship with the place from which they came. Discovering folk music on the internet was a way of creating my own roots in a time when I felt untethered. In times of upheaval, I always return to folk songs for comfort and inspiration. There are many reasons folk, blues, and gospel are often categorized under the umbrella of “Roots Music,” one of them being that they are tied deeply to the lands where they emerged.
As much as I love those old songs rooted in the American south by way of the West African diaspora, I didn’t grow up in the south. I grew up in central Las Vegas by way of the West Indies, by way of the West African diaspora. Folk music helped me find my rooting, but I knew I needed to dig deeper. The writer and soul activist Francis Weller writes in The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief about folk tradition and indigenous ritual:
While we have much to learn from indigenous cultures about forms of ritual and how ritual works, we cannot simply adopt their rituals and settle them neatly onto our psyches. It is important that we listen deeply, once again, to the dreaming earth and craft rituals that are indigenous to us, that reflect our own unique patterns of wounding and disconnection from the land. These rituals will have the potency to mend what has been torn, heal what has been neglected. This is one way that we may return to the land and offer our deepest amends to those we have harmed. (p. 77)
To get through the upheaval of current times, I’ve begun generating my own songs and chants. They’ve brought me a lot of peace and joy, and they keep me pushing forward. I’m sharing one of them, called We’ll Get There (Soon), with the hope that it inspires you to generate your own.
Double Down Blogger image/Win Frederick.
Win Frederick is a writer and poet from Las Vegas, Nevada. They do lots of other things, but they mostly get paid to write. You can find their occasional posts on Instagram as @yeswincan.
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