“Tradition’s whatever you grew up with.”
That was some truth passed on to me by a wise Mennonite lady who was doing the best she could to keep up, to keep the bills paid and the family intact while the landscape shifted once again beneath her her feet. It’s stuck with me, given me perspective, and reminds me to check my assumptions when debates start and arguments arise. We all grew up with a different take on what it means to be us, what it means to be you, and what it means to be me.
As far as I can tell, it never goes much past your grandparents. That’s about as far back as the collective memory goes. Anything older’s just a blur, a notion based on a few black ‘n white photographs, in dusty frames that once graced grandma’s mantle, now basement-boxed and soon to be abandoned.
Sure there are some wonderful exceptions out there. Some ancestor-honoring peoples seem to have millennia encoded in their bones.
But we’re Americans, raised up in a land of itinerants and vagabonds. And if you know where momma and daddy came from, if you have a few aunties and cousins that still keep “back home” alive, you’ve got more history than most of us, wandering around, westward-leading, still proceeding. You’re blessed to be pretty well-grounded in this restless land.
John Prine’s “Paradise” always sums it up for me. No, I’m not of Appalachian stock, but as a mongrel white boy — wrought of dutiful Pennsylvania Dutch and hard-hustling Irishmen — I’m not too far off. My family scattered, were absorbed by suburbia, but my roots are wrapped tight around the coal-seamed soil that stretches down from Pittsburgh to the southern hills.
Despite the mythology, John Prine didn’t grow up in Kentucky. Like many of his generation, he was from a family that headed north to factory towns and post-war rust-belt possibilities. But Kentucky was in his blood. And they never let him forget it.
His three-minute memorial might be the best anyplace will ever get. It’s a three-chord elegy for the tradition on which he was raised, and it sounds at once ancient and forever, even though it’s both soon come and long gone.
Rest In Peace, John. And thanks for letting me cover your song:
