In the search for relaxing music for the Sabbath, tonight I went to Pandora and played my Corrs station. Though I would like to talk at another time about the three different components of my pandora stations and how they triangulate my taste in music and a good deal of my personality, I would like to dwell at least briefly on the particular ironies that come from that particular Pandora station, given the strange course of my own life and the influence that music tends to have on my own life.

For those who are not fans of the group, the Corrs were a family and of three sisters and a brother that combined pop sensibilities and traditional Celtic triad music. Their music ran the gamut from love ballads to sunny and peppy pop music to Irish folk music, and most of the ground in between. They were hugely popular everywhere except for the United States, and it would figure that I would have become a fan given my own interest in Adult Alternative and Adult Contemporary music, which they were considered from their debut in 1995, a time of particular drama within my own personal life for a variety of reasons.

When my Pandora station plays the Corrs, as it tends to do, it branches out from there to other genres and artists that have a related sound. One branch takes the Corrs’ female vocalists and plays a variety of other singers and bands of women adult contemporary singers. Another branch takes the world music pop rock and looks at other artists with the same sort of mix. Another branch looks at singer/songwriter music as a whole. However, a particularly strong branch takes the folk instrumental songs (which the Corrs included on every single one of their albums) and plays a variety of folk music from European, Cape Breton, and Appalachian sources. I happen to find this particular strand of music both enjoyable and a bit melancholy.

Despite the fact that I have spent most of my life outside of the place I was born, I am a child of the melancholy Appalachian mountains, and the history and culture of that area are deeply embedded in my own family history, which in turn has greatly influenced me as a person. Whether one is looking at the effects of the exploitation of a land and its people and resources for the wealth of outsiders and the mixture of sullen rebelliousness and dependency that one tends to find in much of Appalachia, or one is looking at an extreme level of mistrust for authority and government (quite understandable given the history), along with a difficulty in cohesion and complicated family relationships, struggles with alcoholism and a culture of moonshining and fast cars. All of these elements have shaped my own family history and my own life, often in strange ways.

Those who know me well are probably not too surprised to see that music (especially of a melancholy and reflective sort) tends to often fill my mind, and when I am not too busy talking to someone or doing something that requires a great deal of attention, I often am humming a tune in my head when I am not creating a tune myself. A deep strain of my own love of music, and my enjoyment of string instruments, comes from my own particular divide between “high” and “low” culture, the point where folk music meets the arbiters of high culture who saw in rising democracy the need to harness that folk culture for nationalist causes, which I have talked about before with regards to fairy tales and the nationalistic era of music.

One of the first songs I remember falling in love with as a child was the haunting melody of Appalachian Spring, a piece composed by the American nationalistic composer Aaron Copeland, taken from the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” a title that has great ironic personal meaning given the meaning of my own name and my own deep longing for simple and soothing and uncomplicated parts of life. The melancholy of Appalachian songs, the longing for paradise restored, the sad reflection on innocence lost and on the tension between a longing for love and intimacy along with a great mistrust of being controlled or hemmed in, as well as a tension between a broad and universal expression of passion through music and the deeply provincial mindset of people whose attention and knowledge is often limited to isolated valleys, is written in my own veins despite my exile from my native land. It is a legacy that I carry with me wherever I go, and one that has shaped my life in powerful ways.

As I child I grew up in the country, a bookish and talkative and intellectually curious child who nonetheless also possessed a deeply sensitive heart and an intensely reflective nature. The isolation of the places where I spent my childhood deeply frustrated me, especially because for a variety of reasons (both life experience and temperament) I struggled with the anti-intellectual feelings that were rampant around me, since from early ages I was nothing if not a very self-aware intellectual, even if one with a deeply poetic soul. Even as I was alienated and estranged from the culture of my childhood, the same melancholy poetry and song of the folk culture of my homeland already had wormed its way inside my heart and soul, and shaped my worldview, even if it has often been expressed in a vastly more scholarly and less straightforward way than in the folk traditions of the green hills and valleys of Appalachia.

Wherever I have traveled in this world, I have most enjoyed those areas which, in some odd way, reminded me of “home,” with hillsides full of trees, and valleys full of rivers and creeks, filling me with music full of longing. I suppose in many ways I long to be a tree planted in rich and well-watered soil–with roots that tie me to the earth, and with branches sagging underneath the heavy load of good fruits still reaching for the heavens. I suppose that if we are honest with ourselves, we will all recognize the tension between our hopes and visions for the future, the place in our lives where we find ourselves in the present, and the course of our personal and familial and cultural histories. There is much we must all rise above and see beyond, but also much strength and richness we can also draw from connecting ourselves with both our history and our visions for a better future.