Hi Folks,
The 24th song in the Plant Songs project is called Johnny Joe Mockingbird.
I was away for the long weekend, spending time with my parents down in the Rio Grande Valley. It was a great time. But it meant that I got a late start in beginning this piece. Happily, I was able to catch the idea and get it worked out entirely on Tuesday. It’s got an AABA form plus a coda, nothing too unusual, and in my ear it’s got a pretty positive sound.
The title of this one has some fun stuff about it. I am currently reading Evan T. Pritchard’s book Bird Medicine. Pritchard is a Native American scholar and a descendant of the Mi’kmaq people. The book is full of stories about birds, many of them involving death; often a bird will appear to someone at the moment of a loved one’s death, or sometimes before or after. After reading many of these encounters in the book, I remembered one instance that happened to me:
We moved to Beacon in late July 2015. The first 6 weeks or so were an intense, but fun, period of renovating the house and unpacking. After finally settling in and getting into our routine, I noticed some strange behavior from a Northern Mockingbird. This bird was around for something like three weeks, sitting in the neighbor’s hedge across the street, staring at me through our kitchen window. Possibly aside from the piano, the kitchen is where I spend most of my waking hours. In addition to home cooking I do a lot of homesteader activities like fermentation, bread baking, and food processing. I like having a hand in my food as much as I reasonably can. My wife Akiko probably thinks I tip into the unreasonable in this area, and I can’t blame her for thinking that. These activities get me in front of the kitchen window doing dishes often. Over this three-week period I observed this Mockingbird staring at me as I did the dishes. When a car approached the bird would duck down into the hedge, then pop up after the car had passed and resume staring at me. After a day or two if this, I had the notion that this bird was Mr. Joseph, the previous owner of the house checking in to see what we were up to in his old house .
Our house was built in the sometime in the late 1870s or early 1880s. My curiosity led me to research our property on the internet and at the Beacon Historical Society. I learned that we were just the third owners of the house; pretty remarkable for a house this old. I took it as a very good sign; that we had moved into a place that had good energy. I’m happy to say that we’ve put down some hard roots here in the last ten years, figuratively and literally! The Tallmadge’s had built the house, then the Joseph’s moved in the 1950s if my memory serves me correctly. One of the Joseph’s told me that our house was originally a chicken coop. The beams of our house go different directions in different rooms, which supports such a claim. It’s a gnarly hodgepodge construction that has been added onto at least three times, possibly more.
John Joseph worked for the US Postal Service (so did I, back in college), had an excavating business, which continues to be operated today by his kids. His wife Jeanne was an avid gardener (as am I). I heard one of my neighbors refer to Mr. Joseph as “John Joe”. With all this on my mind from reading Evan Pritchard’s book, I thought Johnny Joe Mockingbird was a fun, albeit a little corny, title.
After I came up with this title, I realized that the rhythm of the melody was similar to the 20th song in this project, Dark-Eyed Junco, another song about birds. I thought maybe there was something inherently “bird” about this rhythm. For a moment I even considered scrapping the song or changing it radically as to avoid repeating myself, but then I thought that no, it’s okay for me to borrow from myself. I was explaining this small predicament to Vincent, a student of my mine at SUNY New Paltz, and he said, “Well it’s a mockingbird, right? So that’s not a problem. It’s imitating the other song.” Perfect! I hadn’t made that connection. Thanks, Vincent!