Well, we can safely say yesterday wasn’t a great day to wake up and check the news. The weekend was a hellish multi-pack of tragedies, the kind that can leave you speechless, throwing your hands in the air and wondering what on earth is even happening.
Well, sometimes music can express what we can’t put into words, especially when it’s sung by one of the all time greats. Roberta Flack could get, as writer Julius Lester noted in her New York Times’ obituary, noted that she could “get further inside a song than one thought humanly possible and to bring responses from places inside you that you never knew existed.” Two of the songs she got inside won Record of the Year awards, and in two consecutive years, too. Her musical toolbox was full: not only did she have formal musical training, she had a huge amount of knowledge about a wide range of music – pop, soul, gospel, classical, jazz, folk, and so on. And she’d honed her skills as a performer both as a nightclub act in Washington DC and as a school music teacher. So yes, she knew how to get inside a song, but she also knew how to share what was inside the song with the person who heard it.
In 1997, Flack put out The Christmas Album (later re-released as Holiday), on which she reinterprets some famous Christmas songs in her signature style, and brings some attention to some newer and/or lesser-known holiday songs. One of the songs in that second category is “There’s Still My Joy,” which is a slightly folky and slightly adult-contemporary ballad that also appeared around that same time on a Melissa Manchester Christmas album. Manchester is one of the song’s writers; there’s also producer/musician Matt Rollings and singer/songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman. I obviously don’t have any inside info on which of the three came up with which parts of the song, but “There’s Still My Joy” came out around the same time as Chapman’s album “Sand and Water,” which is centered on the love and grief she felt after losing her husband to cancer. (Chapman has written very beautifully about how music, especially the hymns she grew up singing in church, helped her through these difficult times.)
I mention all this because in the song, it’s Christmastime and the protagonist is hurting; she’s looking “to find my peace and grieve no more/to heal this place inside my heart.” She essentially lays her pain down at the feet of the Almighty and says, in the words of George Bailey’s prayer in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” show me the way. And in the season of miracles, her prayer is answered. It doesn’t take away her grief, but she sees that grief comes from love, and that love is still all around her, and her broken heart has room for joy, and once she feels it she marvels at it. “My soul was lost but here I am,” she sings. “So this must be amazing grace.”
The original Melissa Manchester recording is very sweet, and the Indigo Girls also did a fine version. But of course it’s Roberta Flack who really gets inside this one. Given everything happening all around us at the moment, when a lot of people are hurting, maybe what we need is a song, and this one seems about right. Thanks, Roberta.
