For about ten years, I’ve been involved with the musicians at our local Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, playing keyboards or harmonica and sometimes offering one of my own songs during our weekly services. We’re a small group – maybe about sixty – and we’re lay-led, so things are pretty informal. We take the summer off, so August finds us preparing for the first few meetings of our year.
And that’s what I was doing yesterday morning with my fellow musicians, working on two Paul Simon tunes – “The 59 th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” and “Homeward Bound” – when another one of our members, who’d been at a different meeting, told us that he was downsizing his household and had a number of music books that he wondered if we would like to have.
We were interested, so Doug went to his nearby home as we practiced, and a few minutes later, he brought in about ten books. There were some guitar instruction manuals and collections of songs by Tom Paxton, Utah Phillips, Bill Staines and a few others . . . and a collection of the songs of Kate Wolf.
Wolf was a California-based singer-songwriter who lived musically on the border between country and folk, recording six albums before her death in 1986. I came across her work during the 1990s when I was haunting the used record stores in south Minneapolis, and two of her LPs came home with me. And sometime around 2000 when I was living in Plymouth, Minnesota, I found her 1986 anthology, Gold In California and a couple of others in the folk section of the local branch of the county library.
All of her work was good, some of it was superb in writing and composition, and one tune on the anthology caught my ear above all: “Across The Great Divide,” a track from her 1981 album Close To You. It’s a meditation on regret and the passing of time (and anyone who knows me well knows that such a song scratches one of my deep-seated itches). Every time the tune came up on random on my computer or any of the portable devices I used, I’d usually stop for a second and soak it in.
There are at least two other songs with the same title, one by Dan Wilson of Semisonic and one by the recently departed Robbie Robertson of The Band, so when I first came across Wolf’s song, it was a little bit difficult to track down information about it, as it was the lesser known of the three. The anthology’s notes, of course, told me it was from Close To You but that was all. And I guess that’s enough.
(As I was writing this, I googled and found a folk music website that says “This beloved song by Kate Wolf is sung in song circles all over the country,” so there’s that.)
The website Second Hand Songs tells me that there are eighteen covers of the tune out there, but I’m only familiar with one of them, the one Nanci Griffith included on her 1993 album, Voices From Another Room. Griffith’s version also makes me pause for a moment when it pops up on the iPod. I suppose someday, I’ll look for more covers, as I tend to do with songs I love, but for now, Griffith’s cover and Wolf’s original are all I need.
Here are the lyrics:
I've been walkin' in my
sleep
Countin' troubles 'stead of countin' sheep
Where the years went I can't say
I just turned around and they've gone away
I've
been siftin' through the layers
Of dusty books and faded papers
They tell a story I used to know
And it was one that happened so long ago
It's
gone away in yesterday
Now I find myself on the mountainside
Where the rivers change direction
Across the great divide
Now, I
heard the owl a-callin'
Softly as the night was fallin'
With a question and I replied
But he's gone across the borderline
He's
gone away in yesterday
Now I find myself on the mountainside
Where the rivers change direction
Across the great divide
The
finest hour that I have seen
Is the one that comes between
The edge of night and the break of day
It's when the darkness rolls away
And it's gone away in yesterday Now I find myself on the mountainside Where the rivers change direction Across the great divide
And here’s the track:
– whiteray
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