Itchycoo Park

Do you ever have that down and out longing for a place or person from the past? That’s called hieraeth /he-rye-th/ if we’re keeping it Celtic.

Shortly after deciding that there would be Celtic magic in the novel manuscript, I crossed paths with Jocelyn Godfrey in Chapel Hill. Jocelyn mentioned her interest in creative writing and her love of Wales. I knew we would become friends. In the summer of 2005 I borrowed a book from Jocelyn about hieraeth.

Hieraeth is great material for artists. Stephen Foster's diet must have been high in hieraeth. Every Derby Day "My Old Kentucky Home" brought a tear to my dad’s eye, even before my mother died. Now that I’ve moved from Kentucky, it seems to have the same effect on me.

Songs can be a poultice for hieraeth. I wouldn’t say a cure because songs can make the longing more poignant.

If a song could take you back, where would you go?

If a song could take you back to someone, would you follow that song down?

Songs might just be a portal or at the very least that thin place in our memory where our souls can pass through to our past.

The Jayhawks song “Crowded in the Wings,” has been playing in my head all morning, but that’s not quite the same thing (and it’s not at all random because I read in the paper yesterday that Mark Olson and Gary Louris are coming to town next week). What I really mean is the phenomenon of hearing a song and being transported back to one of the days you would have heard it regularly.

Steam’s version of “Na Na Na Na” takes me back to St. X -Trinity football games the same way the song “We Will Rock You” does. “Shake Your Body Down to the Ground” takes me back to my first and only job choreographing with a set of pom poms. “Tainted Love,” the summer after I graduated high school. John Anderson’s, “Just a Swingin,’” the Phi Delt house at Centre. “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” med school. “Follow You Down,” driving around in rental cars in cities like Phoenix, Nashville, and Birmingham to interview for my first big job. “You’re Still Standin’ There,” the one that wouldn’t go away until he moved three time zones away.

Songs are time machines that have the power to take us to places and people we’ve left behind. The song that takes me back to sitting on my mother’s lap is “Itchycoo Park.” The year was 1968 and I was attending preschool on Bardstown Road, across the street from Assumption High School. Each day before school, I would sit on my mother’s lap and she would scratch my back. That part of our day was called Itchycoo Park.

Fast forward ahead to maybe 2005. I’m talking to a member of the Bump Band in the parking lot of the Saxon Pub, and I ask him why Ian McLagan never plays “Itchycoo Park.” He tells me that Ian doesn’t like to rehash his Small Faces drug days.

Then a year later I’m driving my daughter to her confirmation class at Christ United Methodist Church and hear an NPR interview with Ian. He says the song is so beautiful that he must record it again. That summer he played the song at the Lucky Lounge. I got to thank Ian and tell him what the song means to me now that my mother is gone.

If a song could take you back, where would you go?

If a song could take you back to someone, would you follow that song down?

That’s Raven’s conflict in “Acoustic Memory.”