A friend pointed me to this remarkable performance by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings of a now-old song. I pass it along here not only for its inherent worth, but also because it seems to chime with many of the thoughts and intimations behind this blog.
Here we can see, through the conjurations of two guitars and two human voices, how the bloody murk of history is turned into a powerful myth — a myth of yearning, a yearning for liberation: from the bonds of convention, from the sentence of mortality, from the soul-draining exigencies of history itself.
And if you want a purely political message for our times, it’s there in the final lines: “They don’t like you to be so free.”