Billy Bragg and Me

BILLY BRAGG AND ME

Who would have believed that there could be an affinity between Billy Bragg and me, although he knows nothing of me and I have never listened to his songs.  I have only known that he was a singer.  Do you know him?  Do you know his songs?

Now I have learned that he and I were discovering Simon and Garfunkel at the same time, around 1970.  We both shed tears over “Scarborough Fair,” and we both were profoundly moved by, and  identified with, “I Am a Rock.”

Yet Billy Bragg and I couldn’t have been further apart.  He in England, I in USA.   He a lonely, yearning adolescent boy of 12, and I a wife and mother of nine children, in my late 30’s, struggling with a faltering marriage.  How could there be such a bond, and the two of us unaware of it, between two such disparate persons?

I have become aware of this bond through reading Billy Bragg’s “The Progressive Patriot: A Search for Belonging.”  I only recently purchased this book—I think it showed up as a suggestion when I was ordering the dvd “The Internationale,” the latter having been recommended in some political item I was reading, and featuring Pete Seeger and Billy Bragg,   Billy is, of course, English, and his book came to me all the way from England.  You should read it.  He begins with a stirring philosophy of patriotism, goes on to write of the history of his home, Barking/Essex, and about dissent in the area and in his family.  Then he gets to the music that appeared during his adolescence, and its profound influence on him.    Oh, and that’s not even half way through; I have not yet finished the book myself.

 Every Spring  when I start digging in the earth I find myself singing “Scarborough Fair,” as I prepare a large clay pot, set with ‘parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,’ and give it a special place of honor in my herb garden.   But how had I missed the canticle all those years, or perhaps I had not missed it at all, perhaps it had reached me subliminally.  But it took Billy just now to call the Canticle to my attention.   Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEhAXQ5QQzs and listen to it for yourself.

For years I thought of “I Am a Rock” as my song, and shed tears as I sang it throughout the day.   Was it a just a song of despair, of aloneness, or did it somehow bring me strength; as Billy says, it gave him ‘great comfort and cause for hope,’ probed his ‘sense of injustice’ and the feeling that he ‘deserved better.’  He speaks of how he ‘drew succor from this song, finding strength and clarity in its breathtakingly absolutist sentiments.’  And so now, after all these years, it is for Billy to help me see how this song, for me, was not just a song of despair to sink into but a song of hope to rise to.  Yet he was 12, and I was 39.  Listen to it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVLFlkehGuU&NR=1

And Billy and I have both gone, on, each in our own way, living lives we never dreamed of in those days.

Thank you, Billy.