Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 40



“The Darkest Hour Is Just Before Dawn”

Twenty-First Avenue

Nashville, Tennessee

I’m sitting on a bench on the west end of Nashville, on a pleasant little chunk of grass that might be a park or might be part of a condo complex in which I shouldn’t be loitering. Either way, no one’s paying attention. The sky is turning a little gray. I wish it would rain, but it’s been threatening for a few hours.

I’ve been listening to Emmylou Harris and Ricky Skaggs sing “The Darkest Hour Is Just Before Dawn” and “Green Pastures,” alternating between them.

This is really my favorite of Emmylou’s work—her beautiful, respectful treatment of classic bluegrass gospel songs. I particularly like these two, both of which she performs with Ricky Skaggs. “The Darkest Hour” was written by the bluegrass duo the Stanley Brothers. “Green Pastures” was written by Ralph Stanley (half of the Stanley Brothers) and Avril Gearheart—and Emmylou and Ricky Skaggs’s performance feels like the embrace of one big happy country music family, with Willie Nelson playing guitar and Dolly Parton singing backup vocals.

When I listen to either of these songs, I feel like somewhere, someday, somehow, there is a home out there for me.

Is this a sort of Christian thing to say? It might be a little, even if I am not Christian. By “home,” I don’t mean heaven. I don’t mean Jesus’ open arms, necessarily, as I can’t say I’ve understood exactly what they signify. I mean some sense of peace, some sense of being forgiven. I can’t say I know where these will come from, only that when I listen to this music, I feel their possibility as something real.

These songs bring me back to what originally drew me to this music—this music that none of my friends ever listened to (except maybe when Jack White sang with Loretta, or just after Walk the Line came out). Music that puts words in my mouth and my head that would embarrass us all.

There is a simple acknowledgment of pain and struggle here that speaks to me. Surely most music has that, but this song is the one that draws me in, that changes my experience of that pain. This one comforts me, sings me home.

The people who originally listened to these songs certainly suffered more than I ever have, but I believe the song’s promise applies to me regardless. It doesn’t require of me a childhood in the cotton fields, wifely obedience, or even Sunday church attendance.

It does require something of me, though. It requires that I be honest about what’s in my heart and my soul. That I stop pretending. That I want to find my way home, and that I understand what that really means. And what that means to me is not necessarily something pastoral, or conservative, or even Christian. It’s just a rare feeling of trust that comes over me when I hear it. Trust not so much in my judgment, but something entirely outside of it. That everything, in the end, will come to rest. That everything will end, and that is okay, too. Rarely do I ever feel that way, and that is the gift of these songs.

Part of the beauty of Emmylou Harris is that she gracefully and unassumingly delivers songs like this to people like me—who never have and never will stand in an old Appalachian country church on a hill, but who need their stark, simple assurances all the same.



—Tammyland