Only in America

I was standing backstage at a recent festival in The Netherlands when a fellow from the former East Germany approached me with a couple of his Dutch friends. He booked a music festival in Germany and was wondering if my band, Over the Rhine, might be interested in making an appearance in 2008. But what he really wanted to talk about was my last name, Detweiler.

“With a name like that,” he said, pronouncing it Det-Viler, “certainly you must have German roots.”

“We Americans are mostly mongrels, stray dogs,” I said, “and, like so many, I am a blend of various bloodlines.”

“You’re bastard children of Imperialism is what you are,” he responded playfully.

The conversation could’ve gone a number of ways at that point, but I chuckled and said, “Now hold on, wait a minute. America is a land of great contradiction. We’re greedy, and we’re generous. We’re optimistic and superstitious. We’re materialistic, yet have deep religious roots. And we’re the only country on earth that could have given the world Johnny Cash.”

There was a pregnant pause, and then he broke into a warm laugh. “You’re absolutely right,” he said.

In the months prior to this conversation, as we in Over the Rhine worked on writing and recording our latest project, The Trumpet Child, we’d been thinking a lot about the music that could only have been made in the country we call home. It takes a messy experiment like America to give the world Louis Armstrong, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Coltrane and Patsy Cline.

While recording the album, we slipped away one evening to see Tom Waits perform at the Palace Theater in Louisville. You might’ve heard Mr. Waits’ justification for this sudden off-the-beaten-path string of performances. In his signature rasp: Well, we’re gonna pick up some fireworks in Tennessee, and someone owes me some money in Kentucky.

Sure enough, Mr. Waits—this modern giant of American song—walked out on stage and kicked up his own brand of dust, evoking and embodying so many aspects of vanishing America: the itinerant preacher, the railroad bum, the carnival barker, the saloon pianist. He sang and swore like the lost musician Flannery O’Connor would’ve written about had she not died so young.

The next morning I sat down (basking in the afterglow I suppose), picked up a pen and began scribbling words that came before I could talk myself out of them:

He’s got the hands of a blind piano player
He’s got a feel for the dark like a soothsayer
He takes a little bow and tips his fedora
Shouts like he’s gonna save Sodom and Gomorrah

He wears a tuxedo made of sackcloth and ashes
Has a tattoo of a girl who can bat her eyelashes
Down on the river he was fishin’ with a sword
He knocked off John the Baptist for a word from the Lord

And so on. It was a private aside, a little memento of a great night, but when I read the words to my wife and bandmate Karin later, she said, “We have to do something with these.” When we got back to the recording studio, I sat down at Brad Jones’ tack piano and started playing a little ragtime riff. Karin grabbed her pocket recorder, and it wasn’t long before we’d accidentally recorded a song about Tom Waits.

It was a turning point in The Trumpet Child for us. One thing we had always loved about Van Morrison—in addition to the fact that he remains the world’s most unabashedly earnest songwriter—was that he was always speaking the names of his musical (or literary) heroes in the context of a song, giving them shout outs (Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll, Jimmy Rodgers, Muddy Waters, Jack Kerouac). How would it feel if we actually spoke the names of some of our musical heroes in the context of our own songs?

But an even larger question remained: Since there is all this music that could only have happened in America, are we foolhardy enough to believe that the music of Over the Rhine—our music—is, at its heart, an only-in-America tale of some kind as well? And if our music isn’t deeply connected to who we are and where we’ve come from, if we don’t believe our songs have the potential to be an authentic footnote of some kind in this larger unique story of American music, aren’t we just wasting everyone’s time, including our own?

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this music we are about to make will be our life’s work. Let’s pan way back (even farther back than backstage). What if we were brave enough to actually tell the story of how we got here, our very own only-in-America tale? Where would we start?

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How about some horns, some old saxophones, maybe a valve trombone? Why not? Considering that my first memory is the sound of a trumpet at a tent-meeting revival, it seems obvious enough. I see myself now from a distance sitting on my mother’s lap. I’m staring at that bright brass bell, trying to steady my unwieldy head. I cock my ear toward that sound, the sound of a trumpet, toward the small wooden stage at the front of a tethered tent, past rows of people sitting on wooden folding chairs, past strings of bare lightbulbs and my sister Grace’s braids to my right. The sound of the trumpet is piercing something right in front of my eyes, waking me to my first real remembered night on earth. Prior to that egg-tooth blast, I’d been living in a blurry world, only vaguely aware of distant muffled things. But now I am awake and alive. I form my first real thought: I’m way back here, and that sound is coming from way up there. I'm not OK with this. I want to be where the sound is coming from.

My father is a minister in a tiny coal-mining town in southeastern Ohio. There are train tracks not more than 30 feet from the front steps of the sanctuary. The train whistle blows during my father’s sermon, and he pauses. My mother laughs nervously. The crossing bell clangs, the hymn books tremble in their racks on the backs of the pews, and the engines rumble toward us, all iron-clad and steel-hearted, to shake our Sunday faith. The train cars roll by heavy with coal, off to stoke the fires of the world.