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.

Ohio is being carved, our earth is being removed, peeled back, as if to excavate the darkest secrets of our souls.

We are singing the old hymns on Sundays, the hymns with the beautiful names: “Softly and Tenderly,” “Let The Lower Lights Be Burning,” “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder.” As a young boy, I notice a recurring theme in these old hymns: Someday the world will be reborn with the sound of a trumpet. The sound of a trumpet.

Now all these years later I listen to the great American horn players we’ve all heard: Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie to name a few. Even now I wonder about the sound of that trumpet. Is it real? Is it a metaphor? If, at the crack of dawn, we did wake one morning to someone blowing riffs in the sky, what would it sound like? What exactly is on God’s iPod?

The trumpet child will blow his horn
Will blast the sky till it’s reborn
With Gabriel’s power and Satchmo’s grace
He will surprise the human race
The trumpet he will use to blow
Is being fashioned out of fire
The mouthpiece is a glowing coal
The bell a burst of wild desire

The trumpet child will riff on love
Thelonius notes from up above...

But the sound of these horns feels far away, like they’re announcing something, an event, the start of a new chapter. We want to move in closer, lean in together, improvise a little slow dance. So let’s move from the horns to the sound of the piano. Let’s find an old piano with a broken heart, like the upright piano we had at church, a piano full of prayers spoken and unspoken, a piano that makes the old hymns sound like they’re being played next door to a saloon. Let’s tell the truth. There were two taverns located right across the road from that little white wooden Protestant church where my father was minister. And as Karin likes to say—after what we grew up seeing in church, having a stiff drink nearby is the sort of convenience that makes America great. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The very first time I heard a piano. I can still see it. My mother has taken me to visit one of her friends who has adopted a boy a few years older than me. We walk into the living room, and there he is seated like God himself on a bench in front of a small wooden house with elephant-ivory keys, and pedals like a car. And that sound, the sound of a piano, that loud, infinitely happy/sad sound, that universe being born as he touches the black and white—I can’t believe my ears. I haven’t been walking all that long, but I walk as quickly as I can with unpredictable knees over to the corner of the bench and steady myself, and get the palm of my right hand up on the keyboard to slap the miracle and help it come out. The adopted boy glares at me and gives me a push. I find my seat on the living room floor. I joke now that I learned at a very early age that music was a cutthroat business: He was up, and I was down—and he wanted to keep it that way.

My mother grew up on an Amish farm with no electricity. She dreamed of owning a piano. Her second-grade teacher helped her cut out a cardboard keyboard and carefully draw the black and white keys. My mother, as a girl, would sit in her bedroom, one of 12 children, and play her cardboard keyboard, and hear the music that was only inside of her.

We can't make The Trumpet Child without the sound of the piano.

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My father, who grew up in an Amish community that prohibited all instruments—except, for whatever reason, the harmonica—eventually moved away after deciding he wasn’t cut out to be a farmer. He brought home a stereo Sylvania record player and began buying records. He didn’t know quite where to begin, but he ended up choosing Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, Mahalia Jackson and some early Eddy Arnold. My father didn’t know that playing Beethoven, Mahalia and Eddy all in the same evening was against the rules. It was all just music to him, all part of a journey of discovery. And my father eventually found the sound of the clarinet and brought home Mozart’s woodwind concerti—anything he could get his hands on that featured the clarinet.

Years later, I thought of my father when I was on tour with Over the Rhine in New Orleans, watching a procession of musicians led by a clarinet player, dancing their slow funeral march down the street, celebrating the end of the funeral, giving an old friend a proper goodbye. I know my father would’ve had tears of joy in his eyes.

We need the sound of that New Orleans clarinet on this record. Let’s get caught up in something, some kind of celebration in spite of the darkness inside and out. Let’s join in, raise a glass to this story we’re writing. We lose the plot at times, but it’s our story, the only one we get to write our names on.

And so it always begins with family. The people that raise us up, haunted by their own childhoods. I try to connect the dots, sketch a few faces. I feel around like a blind piano player for bits of foreshadowing.

My father bought a piano when I was in the third grade, not a cardboard keyboard, a real piano of our very own. The old upright piano arrives, a wooden beast carried by, a real piano of our very own. The old upright piano arrives, a wooden beast carried by my father and three neighbors, and this is where I go as a child to begin tentatively saying what I don’t have words for. I place my left hand on what I later learn is an E flat, and I begin to let the music that is inside of me find its way out.

So we move from the horns to the sound of the piano. But something vital is missing that I can’t quite put my finger on.

My father grows skeptical of the public-school system in America and finds a boarding school in Western Canada that’s worthy of his children. We have an auction and sell almost everything we own including our Ohio piano, and head west to Montana in a Buick LeSabre pulling a trailer. Eventually we end up in the Bitterroot Valley, south of Missoula. We buy a Montana piano. We Detweiler boys learn to fish for trout in the Bitterroot River: the cold and slippery rainbows; the moody, determined cutthroat; the suspicious brownies, all bicep and brain; the lightning-fast brookies; the toothy Dolly Vardens.

I head to the Canadian boarding school when I’m 13, and on a clear day we can look across an ocean of wind-blown wheat and see the mountains a hundred miles away. I finally have my first real piano teacher, a serious, lean man who lifts my arm and lets it fall toward the keyboard. I catch it before it hits, but he tells me to let it fall into the keys. I do, and the piano booms. Use the weight of the arm, he says, Relax. Listen to the tone. Connect the notes. If I use the weight of my arm, I can play loud. He wants a full, rich tone, and he smiles when I get it right.

My piano books are from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, a Canadian city far away. After my first year of lessons, the Royal Conservatory sends a grand lady to Three Hills, Alberta, to listen to each of us play privately, and the grand lady will make comments and give us a score. I play my first piece.

“Could you please play that again, Linford?” she asks.

I play it again. She looks at me for a while and then asks me to continue. I play the next two pieces. Eventually she leans forward, and writes something on the sheet of paper in front of her and says I’m free to go.

A few weeks later my piano teacher shows me the paper. She has written: “Thank God for musical children.”

My piano teacher tells me that I got the highest score of any piano student in Alberta. It turns out that my father doesn’t have to pay for piano lessons anymore. Someone else is going to be paying for my lessons. They are free from now on. I’m at sea in Alberta, on an ocean of wind-blown wheat, sailing on a piano scholarship. (I have no idea yet that it’s both a blessing and a curse when something you love comes so easily when you’re young.)

As I walk back to my dorm room from the skating rink one night, I see the Northern Lights, the aurora borealis, and they’re like dancing girls in flimsy luminescent gowns. I grin at the free show and hum to myself. Something occurs to me for the very first time: I wonder if I might ever write a song, a real song with words and a melody. Late at night, I often slip into an empty, dark auditorium on campus and play the piano to 600 empty seats. Will there ever come a day when the seats are full?

My father reminds me that I’ll soon be graduating from the Canadian private school, and wants to know what my plans are after high school. We decide that studying music is the obvious choice. But at what college?

“How about that little Quaker College back in Ohio in the town where you were born,” he suggests, “where we would sometimes go and see the Audubon nature films?”

“Sounds good to me.”

And that’s how we picked a college, where I would go to study music. And that’s how I met Karin.

Karin grew up near the little white wooden Protestant church where my father was minister. We’d never met as children, but she had seen the same Ohio hills torn apart for coal. Karin grew up singing because she liked the way it felt in her body. Singing made her feel good. Her father had left home when Karin was very young, never to return.

When a girl sings because her heart is broken, because she’s calling someone back home, the voice doesn’t come from the vocal chords, it comes from some place deeper down that we cannot name.

The thing about music is, you either feel it or you don’t. And for whatever reason, when I sat down at the piano and Karin opened her mouth, the room changed. It was just a little room in Ohio, mind you, but it changed. We didn’t plan it that way. It’s just that the first time we performed together, people felt something on their skin and wanted to know what had happened, because it felt different somehow. All of a sudden we were feeling a bit shy. We didn’t know what had happened, and Karin and I went our separate ways not long after we graduated. But I think that chemical reaction was lurking in the back of our minds.

And I knew right then and there what I had been missing from my music: I had the sound of the trumpet, that unforgettable egg-tooth blast that woke me up to the world. I had the sound of the piano. What I needed was her voice. I needed to feel that voice on my skin again.

I ran into Karin a year or so later, after I had discovered that being a songwriter was an undertow that was sweeping me somewhere I couldn’t resist. Neither of us had ultimately been that interested in classical music, even though we tried to study it seriously.

In college, we both started tentatively writing songs of our own. Karin had been slipping me R.E.M. albums, and we started discovering other songwriters and bands, and it felt like something alive was happening, something more communal and dangerous, with more room for laughter and mystery and stories, something more akin to the feeling of playing hockey after dark with friends in Alberta under the aurora borealis, trying to cuss the puck into the net, dreaming of untouchable girls, rock 'n' roll, jazz, gospel, soul, American music!

I told Karin I was thinking of starting a band, and would she be interested in...

"Yes."

And she likes to say she’s been finishing my sentences ever since.

You smell like sweet magnolias
And Pentecostal residue
I wanna get to know you
Shake the holy fire right out of you

So Karin packed her bags, and we started Over the Rhine in the neighborhood of the same name in Cincinnati, Ohio. We began making records and, believe me, we realized there were a lot of records being made. Again, the last thing we want to do is waste anybody’s time. But this is simply what we do. This is who we are. This is the only only-in-America tale we know how to write. So we’ve made a record called The Trumpet Child.