Through the decades that have elapsed since the subsidence of the mid-twentieth-century American folk music revival, few folk musicians have produced a more convincing vision than Bill Staines of what it might mean to keep faith with that era. In an oft-quoted 1993 panegyric to his work, singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith encapsulates a sentiment that echoes through Staines's reception, observing that he “carries on where Woody left off.”Footnote 1 Which is to say, Staines's music is about as authentic as it gets.
Born in 1947 in Lexington, Massachusetts, Staines came of age in Boston's early sixties folk scene, at the height of the folk music revival. He has spent the years since then writing and playing music that seems impelled by the conviction that this vanished era's core stylistic premises, together with its clear-eyed optimism, remain as alive and available as they were at the revival's peak. Staines's songs are routinely celebrated as combinations of melodies so sturdy as to sound preordained with lyrics of seemingly timeless truthfulness in which beauty and psychological insight are spun from the simplest language and the most tried-and-true palette of imagery (nature, travel, working life, and so forth). Several of them—“River,” “A Place in the Choir,” “Roseville Fair,” and others—have found their way into the repertoire of folk classics that, many commentators attest, they sounded like from the start. At the same time, Staines's unpretentious, everyman baritone voice and unobtrusive (if highly competent) acoustic guitar work impart a powerful aura of clean-lined authenticity, if rooted less in fidelity to any particular historical or regional style than in a palpable lack of impurity.Footnote 2 Though he has released some two dozen albums since his 1966 debut (Bag of Rainbows) and continues to log around two hundred gigs a year across the United States, his music has never stopped sounding as though sprung directly from the midcentury folk revival's heyday, and still somehow possessed of that era's redemptive promise.
The creative resources through which this feeling is conjured, however, are not nearly as transparent as they might appear at first blush. In the discussion that follows, I seek to show that the mechanisms through which Staines accomplishes this fantasy of the revival's continued vitality go far beyond simply singing songs familiar from that era, or faithful knockoffs of them. Staines's work has the effect it has, I suggest, thanks in large part to a dimension of reflexivity which, though not unknown to former generations, takes on an unprecedented centrality and subtlety in his hands. In the “folk music” of no earlier generation do we find so persistent or self-conscious a musico-poetic foregrounding of the undergirding mythologies of the folk genre itself. And Staines's extraordinary impact can be traced, I shall argue, not to his ability to hold constant the artistic practices of an earlier era but to his penchant for reconfiguring those practices in what might be called postmodern terms. Staines can secure us a postlapsarian place in the Edenic garden of this genre, his work seems to say, but self-knowledge must henceforth be part of the package.
This study will trace the most conspicuous manifestations of this self-knowledge across a live album drawn from the middle of his career, Bridges, recorded on 15–17 July 1983, at the Coffeehouse Extempore in Minneapolis, Minnesota.Footnote 3 Through the album's eleven songs, Staines's voice is accompanied only by two acoustic guitars—his own (a right-handed Martin D-18 that he plays left-handed) and that of longtime collaborator Guy Van Duser—and by a generously miked audience. What I seek to show through this small sampling of his work is that Staines's art, however unmediated its ties to the canon and its investment in a spirit of authenticity might appear, in fact manufactures its meanings not according to the logic that governed the folk revival at its height, much less folk music itself (a concept whose torturous centuries-long reception history I have no interest in recapitulating here), but according to the logic of what I shall term “secondary nostalgia.”Footnote 4 It is true that Staines's work participates fully in that ideal of lyrical realism through which Scott Alarik, for instance, has sought to define some of contemporary folk's highest ambitions “to write about authentic life experiences in more honest, closely observed, and intimate ways than mainstream pop usually does.”Footnote 5 But I will argue that Staines's work operates also, perhaps chiefly, at a meta-narrative level captured neither in Alarik's formulation nor in Staines's critical reception in general. What Staines delivers are not so much messages of sociopolitical redemption as subtle, deeply nuanced affirmations of folk music culture's grounding faith in music's sociopolitical redemptive power. Whatever the immediate subjects of his musical “slices of Americana”Footnote 6 may be, the subject of most of these songs is actually music itself. And Staines takes calculated, subtle steps to accomplish a profound entangling of the experience of his own music with the tales he tells of music's significance-bearing potential. Carrying folk music through its own ultimately affirmative version of rock's inward collapse toward reflexivity, Staines's songs matter not in the sense that the songs of the folk revival mattered (or sought to), but in their self-conscious foregrounding of folk's habitual ascription of mattering to music, functioning as intentional catalysts, we might say, to what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has termed “collaborative hallucination.”Footnote 7
Secondary Nostalgia: Through the Conduit with Joan Baez
In the course of over twenty novels, James Lee Burke—critical darling and habitual New York Times best-selling author—has established himself as a master of grittily atmospheric, psychologically probing depictions of small-town America. His 2001 novel, Bitterroot, includes this snapshot of a roughly contemporary Joan Baez concert in western Montana: “Her humor and grace, her sustained youthfulness and lack of any bitterness, and the incredible range of her voice were a conduit back into an era thirty years gone. For two hours it was 1969 and the flower children still danced barefoot on the lawn at Golden Gate Park.”Footnote 8
The folk music revival whose crest Baez rode to stardom was, of course, nostalgic at root, centered on the promise it held out of a redemptive return to a music organically grown from the soil of the working-class experience, polluted by neither the technology nor the commercialism of the mid-twentieth century.Footnote 9 Over a quarter-century later, as Burke shows, this music had become doubly—or, rather, secondarily—nostalgic: nostalgic for itself. At the cusp of the new century, what Burke's fictional audience craves from Baez is a return not so much to the well of authenticity and truth represented by American folk music as to an age sufficiently naïve to believe that such a return was possible, to the heyday of the revival itself. As Kirschenblatt-Gimlett phrases it, “In the sixties in the United States, tradition was still a given. It was not yet invented.”Footnote 10
We verge in this assessment toward that configuration of pressures in recent rock to which Lawrence Grossberg, fitting squarely into a broad historiographic tradition, has applied the term “authentic inauthenticity,” improbable as the idea's application to the realm of folk might seem. If rock ‘n’ roll was founded on the promise of an “authenticity” that could somehow transcend the alienating, falsifying veneer of the capitalistic machinery it inhabited from the start, punk ushered in an era that has witnessed a new foregrounding of this strategy's inherent self-contradictions. “Authentic inauthenticity,” Grossberg writes, “says that authenticity is itself a construction, an image. . .. You have to construct particular images for yourself and adopt certain identities but, according to the logic of authentic inauthenticity, you must do so reflexively. . ..”Footnote 11 In the simplest terms, latter-day rock music can be trusted most at the moment that it acknowledges its own untrustworthiness, commercialism most nearly transcended in the acknowledgment that commercialism cannot be altogether transcended. Truth, simply put, henceforth contains a kernel of irony.Footnote 12
There is nothing ironic in the kind of fantasy Joan Baez is shown peddling in Burke's account. But there does linger over her performance an awareness of its status as fantasy, as a breed of naïveté no longer so much grounded in a social reality as fondly reminiscent of one. What matters in the performance Burke depicts is no longer the possibility of genuine social redemption but the thrill of passage through the “conduit” to a time when redemption might have seemed conceivable. Tamara Livingston, in her systematic exploration of music revivals, has pointed to those in which “the association of a tradition with a period of social well-being in that society's past is a factor. . .. The revived practice comes to represent that feeling of cultural and social well-being, and when performed, it evokes those sentiments in the participants.”Footnote 13 This impulse is just as fully in operation in Baez's music at the turn of the century as it had been in the sixties, but the past in which this sense of well-being is lodged has been displaced from the remote wellspring of American folk music to the popular peak of its revival.
As I have observed, Bill Staines reached artistic maturity in the midst of this revival at its most optimistic, and has spent the years since attempting—successfully, by most accounts—to sustain that optimism. Around the time of his graduation from high school in 1964, he was hosting folk hootenannies in Cambridge's Club 47; his professional destiny was sealed, he told a Boston Globe reporter in 1998, at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival: “At age 18, when I left that concert, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.”Footnote 14 His first album came out the following year, and Staines has been recording and touring steadily ever since.
Critics tend to discern in Staines's songwriting a most unproblematic, unselfconscious maintenance of the folk revival's core emphases on unpretentious lyrical realism and manifest musical continuity with tradition. His most beloved songs seem to embody to the highest degree the sense of comfortable familiarity at the heart of the folk genre, while achieving an emotional impact—“genuinely moving music”Footnote 15—that seems, for many, to transcend its limited stylistic resources. “[H]is lyrics, homespun and naturalistic,” wrote one commentator in 1985, “roll off the tongue; and there's no better writer of instantly memorable singalong choruses in this genre of music.”Footnote 16 “When I think about the words ‘instant classic,’” wrote another, “one of the first names that comes to my mind is Bill Staines. . . . [A]fter listening to any of his albums twice it seems you have always lived with his songs and that you will live with them forever.”Footnote 17 Redhouse Records' promotional blurb for Staines drives such commentary home: “There's something about Bill Staines's songs that makes them instant classics and it's not surprising that so many of them slide so easily into the folk music canon. He writes lovely, infectious melodies, and his story-filled lyrics recall with compassion and depth the landscapes and characters he's known.”Footnote 18
Few familiar with Staines's work are likely to find much to argue with in these assessments. But just beneath the apparent “naturalism” of Staines's lyrics and the enchanting aura of almost preternatural musical oneness with the traditional canon—indeed, undergirding them—is a reconfiguration of priorities that I want to suggest set Staines's musical world well apart from that in which he grew up. For Staines's genius lies not in the realm of folk music, precisely, but in the realm of meta-folk, his art grounded not in the impulse toward the unmediated reclamation of the music of the past, but in the self-conscious affirmation of those patterns of cultural investment that made such a reclamation seem at once possible and potentially redemptive.
This discussion will unfold in four sections, describing a set of interlocking and mutually supportive processes through which Staines crafts his highly distinctive vision of that “secondary nostalgia” we have glimpsed in Burke's vision of Baez. The first section reflects on the album's opening number, a Woody Guthrie classic that provides—both in its very selection and in certain idiosyncrasies of Staines's performance—a cogent entrée into the issues of identity, memory, and musical self-mythology that undergird all that follows. The second section explores the persistence of music as a poetic topic across the remainder of the album, examining Staines's distinctive way of arguing for music's centrality in the formation of community and in the personal construction and negotiation of meaning. The third section examines a smaller body of songs that work their own choruses, as literal musical performances, into their lyrical diegeses, purposefully eliding the musical experiences of Staines's poetic subjects with the real-time experience of his own audience. The last section turns to the album's final number—or, rather, to this number's manifest musical commonalities with several that have come before—pointing to a particular melodic quirk through which Staines seems to accomplish a self-conscious running of his own musical language, river-like, toward the vast ocean of anonymous traditional song.
Mythology and Self-Mythology: Staines Plays Guthrie
Folk has long accommodated moments of reflexivity, of course, and the first words out of Staines's mouth on Bridges represent a lesson in folk's occasional effacement of the border between storytelling and self-mythologizing.
The album's first track is an up-tempo rendition of Woody Guthrie's 1939 “The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd.”Footnote 19 Through a few well-chosen—and largely fabricated—vignettes and quotations, Guthrie here mobilizes the Robin Hood archetype that had already proved so useful in popular reimaginings of the careers of Billy the Kid and Jesse James, rendering Floyd a subversive but kindhearted hero of the disenfranchised.Footnote 20 One typical episode:
His road to a life outside the law begins, in Guthrie's telling, in Floyd's salutary defense of his wife's virtue, as he picks a fight with a belligerent deputy who uses vulgar words within Mrs. Floyd's hearing.Footnote 22 By the last verse, it has become obvious that the real villains of this rural landscape are not the outlaws but the bankers they rob, and that gunslinging is not nearly so damaging to the social fabric as mortgage foreclosure: “But as through your life you ramble, yes, as through your life you roam, / You won't never see an outlaw drive a family from their home.”Footnote 23 It was around populist anthems of precisely this kind that folk's claims to genuine political relevance began to crystallize in the minds of many mid-century American enthusiasts for the genre.Footnote 24
To describe the song in this way, though, is to bring into view a second protagonist in the tale: the teller himself. And the fundamentally bifocal character of the song's celebration of subversive heroism is acknowledged reflexively in Guthrie's opening words, which lift the curtain tellingly on two spectacles at once: “Come'n gather 'round me, children, and a story I will tell / Of Pretty Boy Floyd, the outlaw, Oklahoma knew him well.” As formulaic as the “gather 'round” opening may be within the conventions of the genre, its resonances here are powerful and multivalent. For two parallel relationships are set forth here: one between the speaker (“I”) and the people he seeks to gather, the other between Floyd and Oklahoma.Footnote 25 Implicit in this juxtaposition is an analogy between the two, an analogy clearly central to the song's cultural value at the time of its creation. His supporters did not turn to Guthrie for journalistic transparency in the rendering of songs of this kind. Guthrie, like Floyd, was fast developing a patina of legend, and his, too, was a powerful symbolic presence in the community he addressed, a spokesperson for a generation of farm owners and laborers whose denunciation of the capitalist powers-that-be was rapidly gaining in clarity and volume. In this sense, “The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd” is finally about not one but two populist heroes: Floyd and Guthrie.
Precisely this dynamic in the experience of the folk ballad—the division of the genre's cultural value between the tales it transmits and the musical custodians themselves—is captured in Thomas Hart Benton's 1934 painting, Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley (Figure 1), in which our attention is divided between the story of the song itself (upper left) and the story of the song's performance (lower right).Footnote 26
Figure 1. Thomas Hart Benton, Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley. Reprinted with permission of the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. Museum Purchase: Elizabeth M. Watkins Fund.
If we were to capture visually what occurs in Bill Staines's 1983 rendition of Guthrie's song, however, the picture would be even more crowded, the eye even less sure where to turn first. For Staines's performance raises the curtain on a third spectacle, and takes the act of mythmaking up one further level of remove. If what matters most in the 1939 original is Guthrie's appropriation of the semimythical Pretty Boy Floyd, what matters most to Staines's 1983 audience is Staines's appropriation, not of Floyd's image, but of Woody Guthrie's.
We may discern a symptom of this shift in priorities in the gentle reworking of the song's verse structure in Staines's performance.Footnote 27 To begin with, two couplets of Guthrie's twelve (the seventh and eighth, shown below) are gone:
If this deletion hastens the unfolding of Guthrie's picaresque, episodic tale, the rendition Staines offers also presses toward a more shapely, goal-directed whole by offering a recapitulation of the opening couplet (the “gather 'round” verse quoted above) at the end of the song.
Though these alterations thus have important structural effects, they also have the effect of deflecting the song's meaning away from sociopolitical realities: no mention of farmers or mortgages remains in Staines's version, which encapsulates Floyd's putative social benevolence in the single episode quoted above about the Christmas dinner. The deletion of the two central couplets turns this from a tale about the urgent, real-life problem of farmers' debt (the crux of the story for Guthrie) into a more generalized fable of the kindhearted outlaw—though it is Guthrie's verse about the mortgage that houses what might be seen as the kernel of his moral exculpation of Floyd: through the circuitous logic of the quick-change artist, the farmers get their mortgages paid off, the bankers get their money back, and we struggle to recall who the real victim is. At the same time, Staines's reprise of the opening verse at the end obviously redoubles the effect—indeed, makes an overarching trope—of the song's most reflexive gesture, the moment that deflected attention from the song's subject toward the song's performer.
Although the album that follows taps deeply into the mythologies of the truth-peddling wanderer for which Guthrie served as archetype, Bridges forgoes almost entirely any hint of investment in Guthrie's (much less Floyd's) politics, or, indeed, in any politics whatever. By comparison to this opening number, the ten songs that follow are resolutely issueless; Bridges does not set out to cast suspicion on anyone, to resist authority in any form, or to galvanize support for any cause, apart from the broadest sorts of appeals to general harmony.
Staines's refusal of political investment has in fact proven one of the most fetching aspects of his work for many critics. As Bill Craig put it in a 1999 article:
While some of his colleagues use the coffeehouse stage as a forum for self-absorbed political and personal statements, Staines's brand of folk poetically but humbly celebrates the heroes of small-town America, the virtues of true love and the rewards of simple living. . ..
Like other folk singers, Staines works meaning-of-life messages into his act. But unlike almost all others, Staines' philosophy is marked by non-ideological common sense.Footnote 28
Craig's final formulation constitutes an infelicity of comforting naïveté; like much of what passes for “common sense,” the breeds of heroism, love, and simplicity Staines celebrates are steeped in ideologies of their own. At the same time, Staines is scarcely as unique as Craig seems to suggest in seeking to uncouple folk music from the agendas of overt political progressivism (we are doing little more, of course, than revisiting the chasm Bob Dylan famously threw open at the folk revival's peak). Many of the more die-hard folkies at the performances captured on Bridges almost certainly had at home the April/May/June issue of Sing Out!: The Folk Song Magazine, the publication that, since its 1954 inception, has been feeding folk supporters around the country a steady diet of interviews, articles, “teach-in” columns, and, most important, songs. In that issue, folksinger Bruce “Utah” Phillips articulates succinctly the notion that it is through his own apolitical approach that the best interests of the ordinary working folk, to whom he retains his ties, are best served: “I know there are those political people, many of them good friends, who say ‘Why don't you do more of our politics!’ Well, look. People don't set aside money from their wages to go to a club or concert so that they can get beaten over the head with ideology.”Footnote 29 As Staines himself told the Washington Post's Brenda Caggiano in 1988, “I always try to keep my music positive. Rather than singing a protest song, I sing a positive song about the alternative.”Footnote 30
What is Staines's “alternative,” and what, if not politics, are his songs about? A list of nominal topics, surveying the contents of this album, would include a range of folk's most deep-rooted tropes: working folks, trains, rivers, valleys, and the bittersweet pleasures of life on the road. But lurking throughout—at center stage only fleetingly, but rarely offstage altogether—is music. The numbers speak for themselves: though music is not a topic in the “standards” that open and close the album (Guthrie's “Pretty Boy Floyd” and the traditional “I Bid You Goodnight,” respectively), seven of the nine songs that intervene make explicit reference to music-making in some form. It is to these that we now turn.
Words about Music
Guthrie's song—to take a final backward glance at the album's opening number—invoked Floyd to affirm his audience's own capacity to wield power over the systems that oppress them; Staines invokes Guthrie to affirm his audience's belief that music is capable of mattering in this way, of filling this need. The album that follows touches on a range of human situations, but its most persistent lesson is that music must be understood to matter, to fill needs, whether as a site of salvific epiphany, for instance, or as an anchoring point in the demarcation of life's passages, or as a framework within which to conceptualize social harmony writ large. It is in this sense that Staines's breed of folk is finally a meta-discourse, its ultimate value lodged not in the work it stands to do in the world, but the work it stands to do in ratifying a particular understanding of music's role in the human experience. The question is not “Is it authentic and meaningful?” We must ask, rather, “How does Staines's art work to affirm his listeners' faith in the possibility of musical authenticity and meaning?”
The project I seek to locate at this album's heart finds perhaps its most robust adumbration in the album's title song (track 7). Its entire lyrics run thus:
For all their open-handed obviousness, the signifiers are deployed here with considerable care. Having set forth, in the first two verses, the images of the “bridge” and the “canyon” in turn, and freighting them heavily with highly generalized symbolic value, the first line of the final verse mobilizes two terms yet unmentioned—“us” and “music”—while at the same time turning from an account of the present to a plan for the future. As emotionally alluring as the sense of community engendered in this final verse may be (who wouldn't want to be out spanning canyons and righting wrongs?), membership in that community is apparently defined through a single parameter: one's investment in music. Music itself, meanwhile, enjoys an even more dazzling aura of suprarational incandescence—lumen de lumine—than those “bridges” enumerated in the first verse, counterposed as it is against the symbolism of darkness touched on in some form in every line of the second verse.
Such foregrounding of music-making is far from unprecedented in the folk canon. Indeed, “Bridges” is so structurally evocative of Pete Seeger and Lee Hays's “If I Had a Hammer” that the spirit of the earlier tune lingers powerfully here even in the absence of the faintest actual quotation. (In Seeger and Hays's song, the first verse's “hammer” turns, in the second, to “bell,” in the third to “song”: “I'd sing out love between my brothers and my sisters / All over this land.”).Footnote 31 It is in the near ubiquity of the theme of music, however, and the subtlety with which it is handled, that a difference in degree in Staines's work becomes a distinct difference in kind.Footnote 32
Music's power to define community—or, in this case, to inspire a sense of universal communality—comprises the governing trope of “A Place in the Choir” (track 4), a song that had already attained the status of a standard by this point (a cheer goes up at his introduction: “This is my animal song. . . .”).Footnote 33 The verses present a zoological inventory, encompassing the sounds that each animal in turn—bullfrog, hippopotamus, cow, dog, cat, hummingbird, cricket, donkey, pony, coyote, owl, jay, duck, opossum, porcupine, ox, fox, grizzly bear, alligator, hawk, raccoon, and dove—can contribute to one global act of music-making. Its chorus unites them:
Characteristic of Staines's gift for accomplishing much with the most limited musical and poetic means is the conclusion of this refrain. In the last poetic line, Staines has run out of musical abilities before he has run out of animals, forced to find a role for those who lack not only the ability to sing but even the anatomy to clap properly. The poetry bends to include them; the line far exceeds its metrical allotment of syllables, and after three singsong rhymes, this final line is obliged to rhyme with nothing. The music's hypermetric logic proves just as willing to give way as the strong expectation of an eight-bar chorus (the first three lines each get two) is abandoned at the end; the melody is exhausted, and logically concluded, by the end of the eighth measure (with the word “hands”), but a ninth is tossed in to be sure everyone is accounted for (Example 1).Footnote 34
Example 1. Chorus (conclusion), “A Place in the Choir,” from Bridges written by Bill Staines. © 1978, renewed MINERAL RIVER MUSIC (BMI) ADMINISTERED BY BUG. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
“River” (track 11), another tune popular enough to get a rousing rendition of the chorus the first time through from the audience, traces the arc of a lifetime, from the first-person protagonist's birth “in the path of the winter wind” in the first verse to an anticipation of his death in the last: “My rolling waters will round the bend / And flow into the open sea.”Footnote 35 Music, as we might expect in this idealized autobiography, figures into the picture at every turn, its role developing along with the subject himself.Footnote 36 Its single appearance in the first verse is fleeting: “The whistling ways of my younger days / Too quickly have faded on by.” With the onset of adulthood in the second verse, however, the protagonist's growth toward musical self-actualization is enfolded with the narrator's own mounting capacity for capturing the narrative's key elements—in this instance, the exilic view of childhood, sexual awakening, the metonymic demarcation of time's passage in autumn leaves—in musical terms:
And it is music that Staines toasts last in the final verse's turn toward the chorus:
In its iconic enfolding of journey, community, and song, “River” feels like nothing so much as a versification of the affirmations at the center of the folk revival of twenty years earlier as we find them articulated, for instance, in Eric von Schmidt and Jim Rooney's 1994 retrospective of the Cambridge scene in which Staines reached maturity:
As a result of our lives together, we each found ourselves charting our own course and abandoning the one that had been set for us by our parents or by society at large. . .. The quest became as important as what it was we were questing after. We redefined ourselves as people through the music we chose to sing and play and listen to. . ..
For most of us, music has been the way we got to where we wanted to go, and music, we discovered, is a very important thing in many people's lives, whether they play it or not.Footnote 37
Bill Staines did not write Bridge's tenth track, “Secret Garden”—it was penned by California folksinger Carol McComb—but the number fits no less securely into the album's overarching concern with music and its potential to channel meaning. McComb's first verse reflects on the songwriter's pursuit of inspiration; searching too hard, she suggests, is as futile as “looking for shooting stars in the sky.” The second verse teaches us that making demands of love is just as sure a path to frustration, “like clutching at fistfuls of sand.” In the third and final verse, music and love are conceptually united in the lesson that both must simply be taken as they come: “Believing in love is like letting the song sing itself, / The more it comes out, the more you become your own self.”
This album's celebration of music takes one of its subtlest forms in its second track, “Movin' It Down the Line.” Though the song's title-cum-tagline is drawn from the lingo of the truck driver who is the song's second-person protagonist, Staines's own long history of transcontinental travel clearly lurks just beneath the surface.Footnote 38 In the second verse, breaking into the atmosphere of pointlessness Staines has thus far woven around the eternal nowhere of the road, the imagery takes a somewhat surprising turn, as music is put forth as a surrogate for the eternally deferred gratification of arrival:
In the bridge, music returns in a more substantial role. The first three lines set forth the slot machine that never pays out as a metaphor for life on the road, a life of travel toward a destination that will never be reached. The three lines that follow propose an alternative form of fulfillment in the spontaneous act of making music:
In this image of the trucker, surprised, it appears, at his own capacity for music-making, spontaneous song comes to stand for the promise fulfilled, for the happy outcome that is forever accessible even in the face of the grinding sameness of daily life. The discovery of his own voice seems to take place in some numinal region between the sound of the morning traffic—a metonymic signifier for the life of travel—and a village bell, with its overtones (as it were) of spatial fixity and the stability of community. And the actual early morning through which the driver is living is transmuted, through the closing simile, into a poetic abstraction, a “break of day” in which we cannot help but discern a familiar image of hope and renewal.
The musical results are immediate and, as often with Staines, moving to a degree belied by their simplicity. The bridge gives way to a guitar solo over the verse's chord changes, as the protagonist appears to give himself over completely to the musical world he has discovered. The solo's opening gesture (a version of which had already entered as a countermelody to the second vocal verse) consists of a scalar ascent whose ultimate arrival at A4 seems calculated to accomplish the precise counteracting of the vocal fall from A3 that initiated the bridge (Examples 2a and 2b).Footnote 39 Against a backdrop of prosaic sameness, redemption through music is thus hinted at, discovered, and accomplished in the most economical strokes.
Example 2a. Bridge (opening), “Movin' It Down the Line,” from Bridges written by Bill Staines, © Copyright Secured MINERAL RIVER MUSIC (BMI). ADMINISTERED BY BUG. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
Example 2b. Solo (opening), “Movin' It Down the Line,” from Bridges written by Bill Staines, © Copyright Secured MINERAL RIVER MUSIC (BMI). ADMINISTERED BY BUG. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
In 1979, Steven Mailloux, a leading figure in the then promising young field of literary criticism broadly known as “reader theory,” sought to confront the curious problem of Ishmael's disappearance as narrator from the later stretches of Melville's Moby Dick. Reader theory is, in general, concerned with bringing the reader's experience of a literary or poetic work to bear on interpretation, directing critical attention away from a conception of the work as a static, objectified whole in which meanings are embedded wholesale by the author, toward the time-bound unfolding of the reader's encounter with the text, whose meanings—now constantly negotiable—come into existence only at the moment of this encounter. In these terms, Mailloux suggests that Ishmael, in effect, outlives his usefulness to Melville, rooting Ishmael's disappearance in an understanding of the purpose the character serves early in the book:
Early chapters of the novel prepare the way for later ones, not simply by revealing new information but by arming the reader with interpretive habits, specific ways of reading. In the early chapters, Ishmael (a schoolmaster on land) teaches his reader to see the rich significances of the later chapters. Indeed, reading Moby-Dick is a process of learning to read it.Footnote 40
Though Staines never withdraws, Ishmael-like, from the scene of his own music, and his goal is not to inculcate a way of reading (or listening) so much as to sustain one, the service he provides in the foregoing songs seems closely parallel to that provided by Ishmael—or rather Melville through Ishmael—in Mailloux's vision. As firmly as Staines lays hold of folk's capacity for what Simon Frith has described as “lyrical realism” (“asserting a direct relationship between a lyric and the social or emotional condition it describes and represents”Footnote 41), and as richly as these songs may embody Donald Clarke's rough-and-ready description of folk song (they are “easy to remember, easy to sing, and seem to be about things that matter”Footnote 42), the senses of reality and mattering in these songs are ultimately inseparable from the promises they make on music's behalf, that is, from the prescriptions they set forth concerning music's uses and meanings. Whether or not Staines's lyrics are “about things that matter,” they are about music's mattering, affirming music's capacity to assume a role in memory and identity formation, in forging community in the face of diversity, in affording life a sense of fulfillment. As closely as the depths of allegory and resonances of meaning are bound up, in the case of Moby Dick, with Ishmael's instructions to the reader in the pursuit of interpretive depth, so, too, does the emotional impact of Staines's music seem inseparable from his systematic lessons in music's capacity for emotional impact.
Diegetic Choruses, Sing-along and Otherwise
If the experience of Staines's music is strongly conditioned by his deployment of music and music-related imagery in his songs' poetic diegeses, crucial, too, is his frequent deployment of a more specific effect through which this linkage emerges in its most focused form: moments at which these two musical realms—the songs' real-time performance and the songs' lyrical fixation on song—become one. It is to such moments of diegetic music that we now turn.
In my earlier discussion of “River,” I passed over one key detail in the passage of the final verse into the chorus. After Staines delivers the closing salute to his own music at the end of the last verse—“Here's to the song that's within me now, / I will sing it where e'er I go”—he speaks two words to the audience on his way into the closing chorus: “Help me.”
Such injunctions are a familiar part of Staines's pre-song patter (he preludes this album's performance of “A Place in the Choir,” for example, with the words, “There's a chorus to this, help me out on it”).Footnote 43 Though there is indeed a strong sense that the sing-along chorus of “A Place in the Choir” functions, at each particular live performance, as a case in point—a potent instantiation of just the sort of universal music-making the lyrics celebrate—the lead-in to the final chorus of “River” seems calculated to accomplish something even more specific than this (the audience has been singing along lustily for two choruses already, after all). For the strong implication here is that the task to which Staines summons the audience's aid is the performance of that song he has just named, the one that is within him now. The music being depicted and the music being performed at that very moment thus collapse into each other; Staines is found not only singing about the discovery of his song but literally singing it, there and then, with the audience invited to take part in its performance. He thus scripts into this tale of the transcendent power of music a role for the auditors before him, and the idealized, semi-mythological narrative of the music-centered life bleeds directly into the real world of the performance.
The protagonist of Bridges's sixth track, “The Happy Yodel,” seems a close cousin to that of “River,” a wandering musician who, in this case, is making his way home to a girl he hopes is still waiting for him. Here, too, the principle of diegetic song (that is, the actual performance of the song being depicted lyrically) becomes critical, but it is deployed to a markedly different end—in some respects, an opposite one.
“The Happy Yodel” first appeared on Staines's album Miles, released in 1975, the year in which Staines won the National Yodeling Championship at Texas's Kerrville Folk Festival.Footnote 44 Staines's craft—which remains in dazzling form at the time of the 1983 recording—is showcased in the yodeling that makes up the second half of this song's chorus (no singing along with this one). What is ultimately accomplished in “The Happy Yodel,” though, is strongly conditioned by its turn toward explicitly diegetic song at the outset of the chorus:
As yodeling made its way into the twentieth-century American pop-cultural landscape, songwriters not infrequently dealt with its flagrant spectacularity—beneath which lurked the constant threat of absurdity—through the activation of diegetic pretexts. One thinks, for example, of the persistent self-referentiality of the yodeling song that the Seven Dwarfs perform for the title character in Walt Disney's 1937 movie Snow White: “Ho hum, the tune is dumb, The words don't mean a thing. / Isn't this a silly song for anyone to sing! / [yodeling].” “The Lonely Goatherd,” in Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1959 The Sound of Music, makes continual reference to the yodel as performance while ringing playful changes on potential rhymes with “Goatherd” (e.g., “Folks in a town that was quite remote heard [yodeling]/Lusty and clear from the goatherd's throat heard [yodeling].”)
But the convention of the diegetic yodeling refrain provides Staines with the opportunity to achieve rather more than Hammerstein's goatherd. For the poetic pretext of the yodel lays bare the purely fantastic nature of the narrative unfolding here, situated as we find ourselves in a world in which the traveler announces his eminent arrival not by cell phone, say, but by casting a happy yodel across the valley. Though Staines speaks in the first person throughout, and tells a familiar autobiographical tale of life on the road, the trope is mapped onto a pre-mechanistic pastoral landscape patently remote from Staines's own, his “I” lodged, in this case, in the persona of one of this landscape's fantastic inhabitants. This use of first person has the effect of placing the entire song into quotation marks, as it were: this ceases to be a Bill Staines song about a wandering singer so much as a Bill Staines performance of a song spilling spontaneously forth from an imagined wandering singer.
It is precisely the establishment of this critical distance that allows us to make sense of the rather tricky relationship between the poetry of this entire song and Staines's own characteristic poetic voice. Staines's lyrics, concerned as they persistently are with spinning universal truths around familiar experiences through everyday language, frequently dance near the border of cliché, laudable largely in so rarely crossing it. In this song, it is hard to escape the sense that this border is not so much approached as freely crossed and recrossed, as if to probe in a most self-conscious way the stylistic conventions by which Staines's own art is so studiously regulated. The demands of the metrically tight-knit rhyme scheme Staines sets for himself are met time and again with improbably convenient, even worn out word choices: “I've walked down the highways and come down the byways”; “There's a girl in the valley and her name is Sally”; “The birds'll be singing, the bells'll be ringing.”
Needless to say, this laying bare of the constructed character of his own poetic discourse need not be read as criticism in the negative sense, nor is there any internal justification for reading it thus. We know this language for what it is, Staines seems to say, and we'll take it. The conventions of Staines's own poetic language may indeed come under clear-eyed scrutiny here, but to an end that feels like nothing so much as celebratory embrace, a happy foregrounding of the stylistic premises underpinning this music's community-affirming power to feel familiar.
The power of the diegetic chorus to strike at otherwise inaccessible kernels of truth is explored in a very different way in Bridges' third track, “Walker Behind the Wheel.” In yet another scene from a musical life on the road, this song's first-person protagonist is a fiddle player whose band enjoys a successful gig, then repairs to the bar, where most of the action takes place. In the second verse, an old man “full of whisky” approaches the fiddler to pass on some of the hard lessons of his own life as a traveling musician, and asking the young fiddler to offer some news on their shared home state of Texas. Upon its final iteration, the old man clarifies that the “picture of home” he craves is one only the fiddle can provide, that music alone is capable of revivifying the Texas he remembers (the full lyrics appear in Figure 2).
Figure 2. Formal structure, “Walker Behind the Wheel” written by Bill Staines, © Copyright Secured MINERAL RIVER MUSIC (BMI). ADMINISTERED BY BUG. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
Though there is a powerful emotional impact in the very thought that this musician trusts most what only music can provide, the question of what precisely is provided at the song's close is complex, one that requires turning first to ambiguities raised near its opening.
The song begins, after a 16-measure introduction, with sixteen measures of talk over a repeated guitar riff (accompanied by what I term, in Figure 2, “Chord Changes A”). With a move to the subdominant (for “Chord Changes B,” at 0:35), the voice breaks into actual melody, the lyrics turning toward a bird's-eye view of the situation that we are likely to identify at once as the chorus: “It was Jack on the guitar, and Bill on the bass. . . .”
A second spoken verse follows (0:54), after which Staines returns to the same four lines of melody, but this time with a new set of words (1:11), introducing us to the older musician. When the four-line melody is repeated at once (1:29) with a third set of words—“Do the bluebonnets carpet the fields in the spring,” etc.—we are forced to revise our earlier grasp of the song's structure: this must be the real chorus.Footnote 45 The verses, we now realize, are composed of Chord Changes A and B in turn, with speaking over A and singing over B, followed by a chorus composed of the “bluebonnet” words set to a repetition of B (with the same melody). This is precisely the structure played out in the following twelve lines.
Things again become uncertain, however, in the final verse. We return to spoken monologue, as anticipated, over Chord Changes A (3:03), but when Chord Changes B roll around (3:22), the man continues to talk through their first three lines, almost as if even this song is in danger of eluding him—this is the first time in the song (outside of the guitar solo) that this progression has occurred without its characteristic vocal melody. As a result, when the man at last launches into melody for the “bluebonnets” material (3:40), it comes with a sense of structural dislocation; the first sounding of this melody ordinarily comprises the second half of a verse, not the chorus itself, and we cannot be altogether sure which one this counts as.
Though the sense of a chorus returns more forcibly when the “bluebonnets” material—words and music alike—is repeated (3:59), what follows muddies the waters considerably. For the song closes with a final sounding not of this chorus but of the “Jack on the guitar” quatrain we first took to be the chorus, as if to reassert its viability as the song's central idea (4:18). We walk away with the curious sense that the song has, in effect, two competing choruses, one belonging to (and delivered in the first person by) each of the two musicians in the story.
It would be a mistake to speak with too much confidence about what this moment means.Footnote 46 But it would be a mistake, too, to ignore the interpretive possibilities that seem to linger closest to the surface. Setting side by side two of the most striking features of this song's closing stretch—the touching call of the older man for a musical picture of home and the surprising return of the younger musician's voice at the end—we might well be inclined to understand the latter's closing “chorus” as a direct, literal response to the older man's plea. The old musician asks for a picture of home in song, and song is what the young man provides through the return—a diegetic one this time—of the first sung music he offered. The ironic twist of the tail, of course, is that the home depicted is not the desired one, Texas, but the one both of them ultimately opted for: the road. The absence at the center of the older man's bleak world remains unfilled, and even his effort to center the song structurally around his nostalgia for Texas, through his vision of its rightful chorus, is compromised in the end. A different chorus, and a different home, insist on preeminence. And it is the self-conscious engagement with the conventions of the chorus itself, the perennial heart of the folk song, that provides the stage upon which this drama unfolds.
“Into the open sea”: Composing Traditional Music
As we have seen, Staines is fond of imagining rivers emptying to oceans; the Brazos does it in “Walker Behind the Wheel,” and the rolling old namesake of “River” does it at the end of life's journey. One reason the image works so potently in Staines's hands, I suggest, is that it provides a lucid metaphoric framework for the aspirations of his own artistry. It is from the language of traditional music that his songs are perceived to flow—he “write[s] songs that seem like traditional folk songs”Footnote 47—and no greater artistic victory is possible than watching his own creations “slide . . . easily into the folk music canon.”Footnote 48 I will explore shortly the possibility that the closing number accomplishes for the album as a whole just such a musical flowing into the open sea of traditional song, if through means so subtle that they almost certainly linger shy of the threshold of intentional design.
The issues in play are almost as old as the audio recording of “folk music” itself. No sooner had OKeh Records talent scout Ralph Peer—and his counterparts at Columbia, Paramount, and Victor who soon followed—demonstrated that there was money to be made in the harvesting of the nominally authorless songs rural Americans had been singing, unrecorded, since time immemorial than it became clear that even more money stood to be made by owning copyrights to newly composed songs that retained a plausible aura of folk authenticity. As rapidly as songwriters swept into the breach, and as fertile a creative field as folk-style music has proven from then till now, an uneasy détente persists in the question of the precise relationship between the old and the new in this arena, between the twin goals of originality and stylistic continuity with what has come before.
The crackdown in 1996 by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) on campfire singing at children's camps, including nonprofit camps that charge for attendance, came as a grim (and to many, bafflingly counterintuitive) lesson in the fact that however deeply a song taps into the stylistic behaviors of folk music, its enjoyment of folk music's cultural behaviors are much more restricted. Nowhere in the media blitz surrounding Metallica's copyright infringement suit against Napster.com do we find heartstrings tugged quite as effectively as in the Wall Street Journal,'s coverage of the Oakland, California, Girl Scouts who find themselves unable to sing “Edelweiss,” “God Bless America,” or “Happy Birthday.”Footnote 49 Yet, clear as it may be that songs issuing from the pens of contemporary songwriters working in the folk idiom can be legally regulated as intellectual property, the more interesting question that remains is to what extent many of these songs can properly be said to be the product of their copyright holders' intellect in the first place. “[T]he musical practices that support traditional music transmission,” as Anthony McCann has put it, “abide by models of creativity, collaboration, and participation that together add up to the antithesis of the text-based, individualist, and essentially capitalist nature of intellectual property regimes.”Footnote 50 Woody Guthrie's account of the generative process behind his own melodies strongly suggests that McCann's caveats are fully in play; Guthrie's creative debt to existing music, as he describes it, far exceeds the notion of “style” as it is normally understood, pressing toward something more like centonization:Footnote 51 “I mix up old tunes, I wheel them and I deal them, and I shuffle them out across my barking board, I use half of two tunes, one-third of three tunes and one-tenth of ten tunes.”Footnote 52 Though few would accept this formulation outright as an accurate description of Guthrie's work (it is difficult to see, in any case, how the math could be made to tally), it obviously speaks importantly to the issue of just how fine a line the folk songwriter is called on to walk between the old and the new.Footnote 53 I suggest that Bill Staines's delivery of “I Bid You Goodnight,” the last song on Bridges, brings precisely this line into view.
There is an obvious comfort in the simple fact of returning to the open sea of traditional song at the album's conclusion; it was with time-honored tradition that Staines began, and with time-honored tradition that he ends. “I Bid You Goodnight” has its origins in the hymn “Sleep On, Beloved”—with words (1871) by Sarah Doudney and music (1884) by Ira Sankey—which enjoyed broad popularity by the end of the nineteenth century as a funeral hymn.Footnote 54 Redacted through generations of oral transmission in the Bahamas, it entered the American popular music scene through a 1965 recording by Bahaman singer-guitarist Joseph Spence and the Pindar Family.Footnote 55 By the decade's end, the Grateful Dead were regularly closing shows with a version of the song based on Spence's, which also inspired recordings by artists as diverse as Aaron Neville, The Incredible String Band, and the Dixie Hummingbirds. Thus, by Staines's 1983 performance, it carries the force of an old standard.
If much of the power of “The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd” inhered, as I have suggested, in the fantasy it offers Staines's audience of participation in a moment in music's history when the folk ballad carried genuine political force (back through Burke's “conduit”), so, too, does “I Bid You Goodnight.” This frankly religious song offers not an invitation to actual religious communion but the comfort of imaginary re-situation into a past in which Christianity's power to configure community in a realm beyond the everyday could be unproblematically accepted (the question of the historical reality of this past is immaterial). But there is more at work here than this. For through the most economical of gestures, Staines succeeds in sweeping great swaths of the whole preceding album to the open sea with him. As widely as his tunes are praised for their feeling of preordination, that they spring straight from the canon and are instantly fit for a return to it, Staines opens this song by allowing us the briefest peek behind the curtain, as it were, at one compositional mechanism through which just this effect is accomplished.
The poetic structure of “I Bid You Goodnight” is simple, its five verses identical except for the change of a single word in the first line (“brother” becomes “sister” in the second verse, then “mother,” then “father,” then “brother” again).
Musically, however, the verses are not performed identically. The opening line of verse 1 falls from E through C-sharp and B for the syllables “your rest”; the following four verses resolve via F-sharp to E at the same place (Examples 3a and 3b).
Example 3a. Verse 1 (opening), “I Bid You Goodnight,” from Bridges by Bill Staines (Red House Records RHR25), © Red House Records, Inc. 1984.
Example 3b. Verses 2–5 (opening), “I Bid You Goodnight,” from Bridges by Bill Staines (Red House Records RHR25), © Red House Records, Inc. 1984.
Though the first verse thus departs from what appears to be Staines's sense of how the tune really goes, it does have one crucial effect: it renders the first line of this song a close structural relative of the opening line of the song that came before, “River” (Example 4).
Example 4. Verse 1 (opening), “River” written by Bill Staines, © 1978, renewed MINERAL RIVER MUSIC (BMI). ADMINISTERED BY BUG. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
Here, too, we find an opening line that reached scale degree 
on the first beat of its first measure, recalls 
as the high note of its second measure, descends stepwise to 
for the opening of the third measure, then moves through 
to . Such harmonic events as take place in this line are identical to those of its counterpart in “I Bid You Goodnight”: two measures of I, one of IV, then back to I.
Nor do the similarities end there. Taking this melodic recollection as our cue, we may well be moved to take note that the entire verse of “River” is nearly identical in its harmonic course with the verse of “I Bid You Goodnight.” Though they arrive at V through slightly different means in their second lines, the points of similarity far outnumber points of dissimilarity. The progressions, with each chord representing a measure, might be represented as in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Chord changes, “River” and “I Bid You Goodnight,” from Bridges by Bill Staines (Red House Records RHR25), © Red House Records, Inc. 1984.
This is, needless to say, one of folk music's most time-honored progressions; the “chord change family” to which these two tunes belong is vast, its members including “Amazing Grace,” “Boil 'em Cabbage Down,” and hosts of others. But the proximity of these two songs, and the apparent invitation to associate them offered by the melodic similarities of their first lines, may well prompt reflection on just how fully “River” participates in some of folk's most familiar conventions.
And “River” is not the only song touched by this possibility. The opening gesture of “River,” together with its harmonic underpinnings, is essentially identical to the opening of the final phrase of the verses (and choruses, wherever we locate them) to “Walker Behind the Wheel.”Footnote 56Example 5 shows its first appearance.
Example 5. Verse 1 (excerpt), “Walker Behind the Wheel” written by Bill Staines, © Copyright Secured MINERAL RIVER MUSIC (BMI). ADMINISTERED BY BUG. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
A version of the same melody appears, too, in the opening of “Louisiana Storm” (track 9, Example 6), though at a faster tempo, and without the characteristic harmonic move to IV. It also underpins the opening of “Railroad Blues” (track 8, Example 7), allowing for the more loose-limbed elaboration. This gesture's essential features even haunt the more animated contours of the opening of “Bridges” (Example 8), despite the higher reach of the first measure, the obvious rhythmic differences, and the phrase's ultimate goal (in this case, the tonic).
Example 6. Verse 1 (opening), “Louisiana Storm,” from Bridges by Bill Staines (Red House Records RHR25), © Red House Records, Inc. 1984.
Example 7. Verse 1 (opening), “Railroad Blues,” from Bridges by Bill Staines (Red House Records RHR25), © Red House Records, Inc. 1984.
Example 8. Verse 1 (opening), “Bridges” written by Bill Staines, © Copyright Secured MINERAL RIVER MUSIC (BMI). ADMINISTERED BY BUG. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
That such points of congruity exist is hardly surprising in itself. We are obviously dealing with one of the basic melodic building blocks of a musical idiom that does not have all that many blocks to begin with (similar melodic incipits can be found in tunes ranging from “Who Will Shoe Your Pretty Little Foot?” to “The Water Is Wide” to “Jesse James” to “Jesus Loves the Little Children”). But Staines's idiosyncratic rendering of the first verse of “I Bid You Goodnight,” briefly casting upon this gesture the spotlight of structural anomaly, has the effect of bringing into view the participation of his own work in the age-old mobilization of melodic archetypes of just this kind. The process of melodic recurrence shown in the foregoing handful of examples cannot be understood, of course, as a failure of imagination; better, perhaps, as something more like the mapping of the verse-chorus dynamic onto the album as a whole. Just as the discursive journey through the material of the verses (most apt to be the provenance of the soloist) gives way to the homecoming of each chorus (most apt to belong to the audience), so melodic originality per se—though far from absent—gives way time and again in the album's course to the return of the familiar voice of the community.
Staines's return to the folk music canon in “I Bid You Goodnight” forms, with “The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd,” a fitting bookend. But the details of this particular return to tradition work to show that, musically, we never really left.
Staines may indeed be ambling farther down the same artistic road Woody Guthrie trod—to return to that observation of Nanci Griffith's cited early in this discussion—but his leg of the journey is passing through markedly different historical and cultural terrain than Guthrie's did. If Guthrie was called on to create a repertoire that would (among other things) sustain and abet a broad, polyvalent populist upheaval in its ambitions to configure an American future, Staines's chief obligations are not to the future but to the past. Staines does not offer his audience a real program for cultural or political change, the moment having passed for folk music to enjoy such aspirations. He offers, instead, the opportunity to reinhabit imaginatively a world in which such aspirations existed, crafting a generalized but finely wrought image of music as a thing of significance, together with subtly crafted assurances that audience members are—at the moment they listen and occasionally sing along—assuming their place in an age-old community of folk music's faithful. To recapitulate the essential course this argument has taken: Bridges' first song links Staines's persona to Guthrie's iconic model, gently redoubling the Guthrie ballad's emphasis on the singer himself as hero. The subsequent album weaves music repeatedly into narratives of social redemption and personal self-actualization, and the diegetic choruses that pepper the album effectively collapse the worlds of Staines's poetic subjects into that of his immediate audience. Finally, a melodic tweak to the traditional song that closes the album has the effect of bringing many of the songs that have come before directly into the fold of traditional music, eliding the musical experiences of the past with the musical experience of the present.
A few sentences after her invocation of Guthrie, Griffith makes another observation just as thought-provoking, if less flamboyantly quotable: “It seems to me that the art of folk music is passing it on with clarity.”Footnote 57 This “clarity” would seem to be conceptualized in Staines's work not as a form of transparency, as the maintenance of a passive window onto musical tradition, but as something more like a cinematic projection, a conjuring of illuminated images focused carefully enough to take on the impression of life and vitality. What is vivified is not an illusion, of course, so much as a structure of faith. And it is a faith that Staines understands as well as anyone how to keep.
