The Way It Was

Another Night, Another Concert

June, 2003

            Rabbit, Raven, and Coyote were touring along the lower Rio Grande. The flyers proclaimed them, The Kindred Spirits.

            Due to the inopportunistic electrical disasters in the past, the three were performing strictly acoustic this go-around. Rabbit generally played fiddle and mandolin; Raven was a virtuoso on any number of different guitars; and Coyote was the rhythm section, with bass violin, Jews harp, and whatever percussion tool he may find at hand. He was the purveyor of various sound effects, musical and not so musical, as well.

            Coyote stood upon the empty and lighted stage. He stared out at the blackness that was the audience, as if he could see each individual, and smiled.

            The audience smiled. It almost always worked.

            Pulling what looked like a violin from behind his back, Coyote raised it in his right hand and gestured. The instrument began to grow and grew until he rested a full size string bass upon the wooden floor.

            Coyote beat a low beat which drifted into a bluesy rhythm.

            From out of nowhere, raven appeared to the Coyote’s right, guitar across his chest. The rhythm became a song which flowed like water through streams, shiny and sweet.

            Rabbit, to Coyote’s left, began a tempestuous counter-rhythm with her mandolin. The water became wide, murky, as it wove its logy way across the high plains and endless prairies.

            The three joined with the epic of great rivers flowing and roaring, pulsating through time and distance to their various seas.

            Journey done, the audience sat in silence, breathless and worn. It then thundered into applause and whistling.

            When quiet had more or less returned, the trio began to sing: songs of the people, of struggle, love won and lost, of hewing sustenance out of  the physical and social environment, of the laborer spreading the structures of civilization, the farmer nurturing the gardens of the earth. They paid homage to the locals with songs of King Cotton and of the cowboy and his longhorns.

            Then individually they sang: Coyote of the violence and frustration of growth, of the Indian and the peon. Raven sang of glorious battles, of revolution, the currents of social thought and change running as eternal and proud as the water. Rabbit took her violin in hand and played of romance, of a wonderful land harmonized with a multitude of races, of faith and worship undying.

            Combining classical violin and earthly fiddling, when she was done, not a dry eye remained in the house.

            Exchanging her fiddle for the mandolin, she sang of flowers, those in the high mountains, in crystal meadows, and those in barren wastes, budding from inhospitable cacti, to those along the great rivers, shadowed in mesquite and Joshua, and those that carpeted the plains and valleys.

            Raven joined in with his lyrical tenor that was as open as the sky and as wide ranging as the birds.

            Then Coyote, who would gauge the audience, came in with comedy, laughter and a roaring good will that would crescendo the performance to a final note.

            Or, he would enter with a solemn bass, weaving the performance to a powerful and emotional end.

            The audience would be on its feet, laughing and crying, wild with applause, drained and excited at once. They would leave quickly, though. Time would have flown so fast and it would be a short night’s sleep before Sunday morning church.