Stand By Me
There's an old saying about blues to the effect that, no matter how bad things get, singin' the blues makes it that little bit better, just enough that you can keep going one more day. It's music born straight from pain, hardship, poverty, and grief. And conversely, even when it isn't spelled out in the lyrics, music made to carry hope of a better tomorrow. With that in mind, here's a new video for you, found via matociqualafrom my LJ friendslist. It made the internet rounds a few months ago, and it's sweeping over blogs and LJs again this week, and deservedly so. It's part of a video project put together by redwire.com, check them out. They send you new music every week. Half of the $5/month subscription price goes to buying medicine for people with HIV in Africa. You can do a trial subscription first, for free, to see if it's for you.
Go. Watch. I'll wait. Watch it twice, if you want. I did. Especially, look for the old-fashioned New Orleans street-corner slide-guitar bit, starting at about 3:00 on the track. I've watched this about thirty times this morning, and it still makes me grin every time.
There's something more than a little special about this old Ben E. King classic. Everyone knows "Stand By Me", and hardly anyone can help but grin and hum along, when you play it, and I've played it for concerts in parks, club gigs, and friends' living rooms. But I learned that this song was magic of a particularly true and pure kind over twenty years ago, walking home in the wee hours from a blues club just outside the French Quarter in New Orleans, in the early morning fog, in those long-ago days before Katrina. I was with a good friend, we'd both had a bit too much beer, and I don't even remember who started singing first.
But one of us started singing "Stand By Me." And because it was New Orleans, we stopped to jitterbug on the deserted street corner while we sang. Now, in almost any other city in the world, someone would have shouted out a window at the drunken fools singing and dancing on the sidewalk to shut the hell up, because people were trying to sleep. But not that night. Not that song. Not that city. Instead, from a balcony maybe a block over, a man started singing the base-line along with us. Then a gorgeous woman's voice came from somewhere else—the fog made it hard to tell exactly where the other voices were—picking up a harmony line, weaving the lyrics in and out of the other voices. Before the end, four or five strangers were singing with and to each other, in the wee hours of a New Orleans morning.
This is very nearly the perfect embodiment of what music is about, what music is for, and shared music at its best. So happening onto this video both made me happy and gave me goosebumps, all out of proportion to hearing an oldie-but-goodie. There aren't that many songs that total strangers can sing together, you know?
