Broken Halos

By Bobby Neal Winters

Life is a classroom. If you keep your eyes open, you will learn.  Sometimes the process takes repeated applications. You go around in a circle and see the same thing over and over and each time you pick up something different.

For example, I’ve been listening to Don Mclean’s song American Pie literally for decades.  I think I probably heard it first when it was first out on the radio.  At first it was just the chorus.  It has a wonderful chorus.  You can sing along with it and have fun without understanding it, without knowing the slightest what the song is about.

Then you learn about Buddy Holly and the plane crash in which he, The Big Bopper (J.P. Richardson, jr.), and Richie Valens (Richard Valenzuela) died on February 3, 1959. You learn about the Rolling Stone’s songs “Jumping Jack Flash” and “Sympathy for the Devil.” You learn about the Beatles’ politics. You learn about Bob Dylan (the Jester)  and Janice Joplin (the girl who sang the blues).  

And I could go on, but you get the idea.  It’s a song about the history of rock music.

But there’s more. 

You come back to it, and there are multiple interpretations. That’s the magic of poetry: You look at it from one angle and it’s one thing; you turn it slightly to another angle, and it’s something different.  But if it’s true, it holds together as a whole.

I was listening to it yesterday, and heard the last line again, that I’d heard for thousands of times, but it was like I’d heard it for the first time:

And the three men I admire most/

The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost/

They caught the last train for the coast/

The day the music died

The plain reading of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost refers to the Christian God, but within the context of the song, these are interpreted as Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens.  Them catching the “last train for the coast” is their death.

However, if you refer to the part of the song just before this you have

I went down to the sacred store/

Where I'd heard the music years before/

But the man there said the music wouldn't play/

And in the streets the children screamed/

The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed/

But not a word was spoken/

The church bells all were broken

If you go back in the history of music, there was a time when gospel was a big market.  People who sang country also sang gospel; people who sang folk, also sang gospel. People who sang country would also sing rockabilly; people who sang folk would also do the same.

But at some point, gospel music got pushed out of the mainstream market.

While “the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost” was code for those killed in the plane crash that day in February, it can also be read plainly as a reference to what the philosophers and theologians refer to as the “Death of God.”

The Death of God is a phrase I’ve struggled with over the years.  It makes me mad.  

It was meant to.  It was meant to get attention.

Once you get past the anger, you can figure out that the “Death of God” is not about God, it’s about a change in society.  Nothing has happened to God, but society has pushed him away.

My two keys to understanding the change that has taken place have been from a miniseries taken from a book. The title of both was “The Pillars of the Earth.”  The second key was Ellis Peters

Cadfael books (also a miniseries), but the book “A Morbid Taste for Bones.”

These works give you an idea of a society in which the only way of knowing anything comes through the church and through holy scripture.

The thing to understand is that however pious you are, however much you believe in God, you don’t believe as much as they did.

While there has been a gradual change from that medieval state of mind due to the Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation, it accelerated in the 20th Century and was going forward with the pedal all the way to the floor in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

Positive references to God and Jesus gradually disappear from popular culture.

You don’t have to take my word for it.  Get on Spotify, Amazon Music or whatever, and listen to the popular music of those decades.

But...

But they never entirely died out.  It was always there in Country Music.  Sometimes it was below the surface, but it was there.

I heard Chris Stapleton sing about “Broken Halos”; I heard Jellyroll sing about being a “Son of a Sinner.”

God is there. Humans are broken, but God is there.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.