Kind & Generous: 5 Songs of Generosity and Gratitude

This week's songs are from Charlie Parr, Pops Staples, Homer Banks, Jeff Tweedy and Natalie Merchant.

It’s Thanksgiving week. There is no better time for sentimentality and I intend to deliver.

Roger Ebert described Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru as “one of the few movies that might actually be able to inspire someone to lead their life a little differently.” It’s a high compliment for any piece of art. And there is likely more music than movies out there with that kind of power.

There was a period of time (let’s call it the 6 year stretch from when the Beatles went on Ed Sullivan through the Manson Murders & Altamont) where the idea that rock & roll could and would change the world was a significant cultural force. LSD may have been a factor. But even after the drugs went bad, the music resonates. Instead of peace and love, now it’s selling you a car.

Even if music is less of a revolutionary force than it was thought to be, it still has the ability to shape, influence, or motivate the individual. Hopefully for the better.

My daughter’s Kindergarten teacher has a system where if she sees students doing nice things for one another, she adds a ticket into a bucket. When the class bucket is full, there is a celebration. So acts of kindness are called “bucket fillers.”

This week’s songs are bucket fillers.

It’s not just what the songs are saying, but how they’re saying it and how they invite the listener to share in the spirit of the song and carry that forward. It’s also how the performers not only sang about it, but lived their lives accordingly.

Take it in. Spread it around. Like gravy.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Charlie Parr - “817 Oakland Avenue”

Charlie Parr is a “modern folk” singer out of Minnesota. By “modern folk,” I mean a solo singer-songwriter who uses acoustic instruments. He mainly tours around the upper Midwest. He’s the type of musician that posts pictures of his homemade veggie burrito warming on the engine of his van on Instagram to promote his tour. If that alone doesn’t intrigue you, he’s also the type of musician that can make his one guitar sound like three with some incredible finger-picking. Before becoming a full-time musician, Parr was an outreach worker to the homeless community in Duluth Minnesota. Here is one of his many delightful and warm-hearted songs, reminding us that to be generous is a privilege. In Ebert’s Ikiru review, he says “Kurosawa achieves his final effect [by making] us not witnesses to Watanabe's decision, but evangelists for it.” In “817 Oakland Avenue,” Parr sees the goodness and joy in people as a given; his song shines a light on it so that we see it in ourselves, recognize it in others, and share it. That’s a kind of evangelism.

“If you sing from your heart — what comes from the heart, reaches the heart.” —Pops Staples

Pops Staples - Friendship

Roebuck “Pops” Staples was born on a plantation in Mississippi. His love of music was born out of watching Charlie Patton and Howlin’ Wolf perform in a local hardware store. Eventually moving his family to Chicago, he got them performing as a gospel band. This was the Staples Singers. In 1963, seeing Martin Luther King speak inspired him to write songs inspired by—and to inspire—the civil rights movement. It carried them out of churches, into the streets, and on the radio. Like Dr. King, the Staples Singers brought the lessons of the gospel and committed positivity with them into the mainstream. Don’t Lose This was made from tapes Pops recorded while his health declined (hence the title). Following his death, his daughter Mavis enlisted a range of producers to finish the album. Those producers piled on overdubs and production techniques that the family felt was diminishing. After working with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy on her own live and studio albums, Mavis knew Tweedy was the person to revisit the material. She was right: Tweedy stripped everything out and that wasn’t Pops, placing his voice and that shimmering tremolo guitar front and center. Some light-touch instrumentation and back up singing from his daughters shaped the final record. Staples’ voice has the gravitas and world-weary wisdom of all his 85 years, and yet it is pristine and youthful. In a shocking and fun coincidence: it wasn’t until I was putting the finishing touches on this week’s entry that I noticed this song was written by Homer Banks and Lester Snell.

Homer Banks - “I’ll Be Your Shelter (In Time of Storm)”

This selection is from a recently released (and incredible) compilation of demos from songwriters working at Stax Records in its heyday. Music producer Cheryl Pawelski was putting together a 50th anniversary box set for the label when she uncovered more than 2,000 hours of unreleased material, nearly all of it demos by songwriters working for Stax. All of it “fucking awesome,” she whittled it down to the 140 tracks in this collection. This is something you can turn on in the morning and spend the whole day with. No skips. It’s music to have on while you make dinner, while you eat dinner, do the dishes, and leave on while you read on the couch. I’m not paid to say this. It’s just that good.

"Most people just can't craft a song like he could. There's a difference between writing a song and crafting a song, and he was a master at it - where every word had so much weight." - Lester Snell, Stax pianist on Homer Banks

Homer Banks’ “I’ll Be Your Shelter” is a perfect example. This is a demo; the song itself would be recorded and released by Luther Ingram and later by Taylor Dayne (I’m doing you a favor by not linking to that one). Ingram’s version is good. It’s got all the charm of Al Green’s peak period: organ, bass, and horns. But on this recording, Banks’ voice is electric and the sparse instrumentation in the back of the mix let’s it shine. It’s the sound of someone with nothing promising someone else everything, and you believe it. Banks was a one-time musical partner of Isaac Hayes. He would go on to co-write a number of hits for the Staples Singers, including “If You're Ready (Come Go With Me),” but never made it as a recording artist in the US. He broke through in the UK enough to help spark the Northern Soul movement. That killer riff in Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin” is a direct lift from Banks’ “A Lot of Love.”

Jeff Tweedy - “Love & Mercy” (Brian Wilson Cover)

Here is our man Tweedy again, this time with Golden Smog, covering Brian Wilson’s “Love & Mercy.” Where some songs might adopt the perspective of the lonely, victims of violence, or those in pain to make a point about how “it’s just not fair,” Wilson’s song is from a true empath. So troubled by all of that suffering, he wants to offer them what he can: love, mercy, and a song. Tweedy has described his own “bone-crushing earnestness” as something of a superpower, and it’s on full display in this performance. This is a case of the cover version being better than the original. Wilson’s version has a Casio-like production that makes it sound both cheap and grandiose. His singing is a little lumpy and the vocal overdubs are plain goofy. But the spirit of the song is undeniable. That warmth is captured in this intimate recording. I’ve had this version in pretty much every iteration of a music library I’ve had over the last 20 years or so, along with bootlegs from living room performances by Tweedy, which he auctions off as a fundraiser for the Letters to Santa program started by the late, great Steve Albini and his wife Heather Whinna. Reading Albini’s description of how the program came to be, it’s pretty much the story within this song.

“I grew up in a house where no one watched the news on television and no one read the paper. I've been discovering these things as I get older, and the news has affected me more than it ever has before." - Natalie Merchant

Natalie Merchant - “Kind & Generous”

Don’t skip this! Pretend this wasn’t always on the radio in your mom’s car. Forget everything you learned all those times you watched it on Pop Up Video. Put all of that baggage in the back of your mind. You with me? Ok, now press play…Absolutely lovely right?

Natalie Merchant isn’t someone who faded into obscurity after a brief career in the mediocre music boom of the mid-to-late 90s. She deliberately stepped back from music to raise a family and teach art to underprivileged kids. A wonderful example of someone taking music to heart and living life accordingly.

Thanks for reading. Enjoy the listening.