Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: I'm Aaron Nathans.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: I'm Michael Ronstadt. And this is part two of our great conversation with James Keelahan, writer of one of the most covered and admired folk story songs of our time, cold Missouri Waters.
[00:00:21] Speaker A: He wrote it about the man Gulch fire in western Montana, which happened in August 1949, 75 years ago this month. In part two of our conversation, we'll talk about how the narrator of the song managed to survive the fire by starting a fire of his own. And James will discuss his advice for songwriters, including the vital ingredient in writing powerful songs like this one, as well as Kerry's piano, McConville's and Captain Torres. And we'll listen to Keery's piano in its entirety at the end of this episode.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: This is the Nathans and Ron cast, a podcast about the song craft and musicianship behind the songs we love. Here's part two of our conversation with James Keelahan.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: I think this would be a good time to talk about what an escape fire is and kind of the central magic of this story that, okay, you've got. You've got this crew that goes to fight a fire. They discover that they're just overwhelmed and they can't fight it. And now they have to flee. And they're running and they run this way and that way, and the fire is closing in on them faster than they can run. And I'll let you take it from here. What does the foreman do?
[00:01:32] Speaker C: He basically takes a match and he throws it into the tall grass where they're standing because he reasons that the fire that he sets in that spot is going to be burning, not as hot as the fire that's coming up behind them. And if they walk a few feet into that and then lay down, there'll be just enough oxygen on the ground that they won't suffocate. Now, you know, like, that's obviously not what his thought process is at the time. His thought process is, I got to try something. And in the book, Maclean speculates that he got the idea for the trick from an old western novel. There's a scene in an old western novel where somebody uses a trick similar to that during a prairie fire.
And a lot of people think that what I'm describing him doing is a backfire. It's not a backfire. Or a backfire is what you light in order to burn the fuel off from in front of an advancing fire. But that's assuming that you have time to burn a significant area. And they did. There was just no time to burn a significant area to actually deprive the fire of fuel.
And also, what a lot of people don't realize is it's not actually. It's not burning to death that kills you. It's suffocation that kills you.
And especially when it's a big fire like that, when it hits you, it just sucks all the oxygen out of the area that it's in because it's oxygen in order to burn. And so all the. All the air gets sucked out of your lungs, basically, and you suffocate.
You'll be dead before you even feel the flame. So, like I say, Dodge reasoned that there would be just enough fuel, grass burned off, that he'd have a chance to get into a burned area and then lay down, and that there would be just enough oxygen on the ground that you wouldn't suffocate. And that is. That is standard procedure when crews are trapped. Now, it's. Now it also ends tragically like that.
Eleven firefighters that died at Storm King in Colorado about 20 years ago, you know, they were. They were trapped in a clearing and they. They all had time to dig very small pits and pull fire blankets over themselves. But it was, again, the lock. Locke killed them.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: So there's some insubordination that goes on here, right?
[00:03:51] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can call it insubordination. You could just call it a need for survival.
They thought he panicked. They thought he'd lost his mind. And this also is sort of covered in McLean's book, that this was a crew that was cobbled together. There weren't a crew that fought together regularly. None of the guys had fought under Dodge before. They didn't know him as a crew chieftain. They may have known other people in the crew, but the whole crew didn't know one another, so there was no group cohesion and they didn't know enough to trust him, you know, so when he did what he did, they just thought, this guy has lost it. He's. He's. He's out of his mind and we're not. And we're running, you know? And that's just a decision that you make. Yeah, I don't. I. You know, I've sometimes called it a mutiny. I don't think that. I don't think that's really fair. You know, I think. I think it's just like there's a need for survival and you don't understand what this guy is doing. He doesn't have time to stand there and explain to you what he's doing. He's just going, this is what I'm doing. Get into the fire.
And there's. And they didn't have enough trust in him to just obey an order like that.
[00:05:06] Speaker A: I know that there had been some lawsuits or a lawsuit after the fire that suggested that maybe the escape fire might have contributed to the death of the other crew members. Have you ever thought about that? And how much credence would you give that theory?
[00:05:23] Speaker C: Well, I mean, Dodge was cleared by board of inquiry, and so I take the word of the board of inquiry that the person who did the lawsuit and the names escaped me. But his son was killed near the top of the ridge, and he was high up in the forest service, and basically, he wanted to break Dodge because he thought Dodge killed his son.
And, you know, grieving father is going to feel those kind of things. But as far as I'm concerned, the board of inquiry was the conclusive thing, and they judged that Dodge acted properly and that it wasn't his fire that caught the crew at the top.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: You said you write a lot of story songs. You write from one perspective, and you usually choose a perspective that's interesting, that allows some twists and turns to make the song more interesting as a whole. Or at least that's my crude summary. I'm curious of the many story songs that you have written. Is this one that stands out for most of your audiences, or are there some others that you love performing that don't get as much airtime as one might say?
[00:06:35] Speaker C: Cold Missouri Waters is requested every night. Keery's piano is requested every night. There's a song of mine called McConville's. I love that song, which is requested every night. And then, you know, to various degrees, Captain Torres, you know, Abraham, there's a number of them, but I'd say cold Missouri Waters is just the one that is just the most widely known. Although I find that in Canada, it's like Kerry's piano is a little bit more widely known for some reason than cold Missouri Waters.
I think that's just a fluke of where it is that they carry is, you know, definitely about canadian history and. And I think sort of takes its primacy and was out on an album two years before cold Missouri Waters. So I think just in terms of where it stands in the relationship of my. My music and my concert career. But I. Yeah, those stand out amongst the. Amongst the things that people request. I kind of feel of that batch. I feel that. That Keery is the more perfect song than cold Missouri Waters.
[00:07:38] Speaker A: How so?
[00:07:40] Speaker C: I just. I feel it.
I can't really describe it. Well, I'll tell you, one of the things it is about, Kiri, is the number of things that have happened around the song. Keery's piano. You know, Keery's piano is part of the permanent exhibit at the Museum of Human Rights. It's part of a permanent exhibition there. And to have a song that's part of a permanent museum exhibition about human rights I think is an amazing thing.
[00:08:09] Speaker A: Where is that museum?
[00:08:12] Speaker C: It's in Winnipeg. I had the person who was the head of the Japanese Canadian Historical association get a hold of me, and this was years after the fact, years after I'd written it. And she said, somebody has just passed this song on to me. And I. And, you know, I want to know where you got the story. And so I wrote it back and I said, well, you know, it's this family that my sister knew in southern Alberta. And I said, well, why are you asking? And she said, I heard that story when I was in an internment camp in Hope, BC, and I always thought it was apocryphal. Can you put me in contact with the family?
Which I did.
But to have somebody who had experience that by that song and then, you know, have it further their understanding of an event that they actually lived through is like quite an amazing thing. I know of four or five children who have been named after that song.
[00:09:04] Speaker A: Really? Wow.
[00:09:06] Speaker C: Yeah, it's just. It's just had this incredible ripple effect. And, I mean, the amount of schools that have used that song and their resource material for canadian history classes, you know, I get people coming up to me saying, we studied your songs, you know, in school for history. And so it's. It's just that sort of ripple effect just really kind of makes me feel that it's got a certain power all its own.
[00:09:31] Speaker A: There is a social justice aspect to that. But cold Missouri Waters and Carrie's piano and McConville's, they all have this one moment of magic in each song, and it's tragic magic and Carrie, but magic nevertheless.
[00:09:48] Speaker C: Well, you have, I mean, if you can't really call it a punchline, but you have to have, like, any good story, I feel, is a parable. And ultimately the parable is going to teach you something. And in kiri, it's about, you know, it's about, I wished I hadn't been that person and, you know, that I couldn't act differently in that time, but now I know differently, and so I can act differently. And in the McConville's, it's just that moment of that, they put up all their wages to buy that bottle of whiskey and then pour it on, you know, like, what an irish thing to do. What an irish thing to do.
[00:10:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:22] Speaker C: And, and again, you know, like, because a lot of the historical songs I write are sort of near in time to the period that we're living in, you, you have these strange interactions with the song. Like, again, about ten years ago, I got an email just out of nowhere saying, hey, you know, I heard your song mcConville's and just wanted to know where you got the story. And I went, well, you know, I was in mcConville's one night after a gig, and I played importedown, and the bartender and I became very good friends as the evening progressed. And he told me a lot about the bar. And one of the things he told me was the story. He's actually the voice in that song. I had to sort of conjure his voice in my head that he's the guy who actually the bottle of whiskey off. And I said, and I heard the story and I just thought that that's an amazing story. And I thought, I tell it. And then I got an email back and said, yeah, that was my brother. Wow, that died in that roofing accident. And he said, I, he said, you know, somebody had me listen to it. And he goes, you can imagine how it affected me, you know, when I, when I heard it. And I said, I I just want to thank you for, for writing that song. And he says, when you're imported down, next time, please look me up because I'd love to buy you a drink. And I really feel like you were the kind of person that my brother would have liked to hang out with, you know, with, with Captain Torres. Like the stinger in that song for everybody is when you get to the bridge in that song and it says, one of others wives who missed it came home to red lights blinking. You know, the answering machine played that song in Australia shortly after the album came out. It was 1999, and I had a friend who had been at the National Folk Festival, and then her and her husband. Their thing was they went to the national every year and they'd buy cds, and when they got home, they'd have a listening party for all their neighbors, and they picked songs off the cds to play for their neighbors and sort of tell them what was really good at the festival and what wasn't. And she said, you know, all the neighbors were, were in. And she starts describing the song, Captain Torres. And one of the neighbors gets up and has to leave. She was the widow of the captain of the ship.
And so Carol wanted me to send a CD down to her, which I did. I sent her a letter and said, you know, I just, I want you to know that I didn't write this song to exploit the memory of your husband. But just so you know, that that particular day that ship sank, there was, was full of tragic events, oddly, in Canada, and nobody in Canada knows about the Torres. Nobody knows about that ship that went down. And I just wanted to honor your husband and the other men on the, on the ship. And she wrote me back and said, you know, thanks so much for, for this. I looked at the lyrics. She said, and I can't. I just can't listen to the song. She said, but at the time that the ship went down, I was six months pregnant.
My daughter, of course, has never known her father. She says, but I'm saving the cd until her 18th birthday. I'm going to give her the cd on her 18th birthday. Oh, man. Yeah. So these songs, like, when you, like, when you write these story songs and they're sort of so close to our time, they have ripples that sort of resonate out and actually touch the lives of people who are actually involved in these events. And so it's not like I keep that foremost in my mind when I'm writing the song, but I want the song to be as true as it can to a point of view within that story or to be about that story. And because there's going to be somebody who listens to it, who's connected to it. And that also means that the song sometimes doesn't stay the same, like, like cold Missouri waters. In my original version of it, I felt so stupid about this. It says, august 49, North Montana. And playing the song in Montana one night, and somebody came up to me and said, great song. They said, but we'd never call it North Montana, man. It's west Montana. And it's like, oh. So when I did re record it, I re recorded it with West Montana as the location. So sometimes the songs change if, like, other facts come to light, as it.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: Were, you've influenced one of my friends who's a songwriter, and he's a former firefighter. His name is Phil Spies, and he plays that at every show. And he's written songs about his experiences fighting fires, dealing with emergencies and drug overdoses. And you name it, he's seen it all and had some injuries that had him, I guess, at a very young age, 20 something, have to stop firefighting. But he tours as a folk artist, and I've never heard a show where he doesn't sing cold Missouri Waters. We were both. He and I were probably both introduced to the song through the Paul McKenna Band. Paul McKenna is a scottish songwriter.
[00:15:14] Speaker C: I know Paul well.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: His version is just so beautiful. And he moved the entire room multiple times that week that they came out with their full band to teach and perform and play at the festival. But anyway, I just know there's a young former firefighter named Phil Spies that has been very influenced and inspired by you.
[00:15:35] Speaker C: Well, thank him for me.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: I will. I will.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: James, do you have any advice for songwriters? I mean, I like to say that when you have the idea for the song, you're more than halfway home, but the song, the stories that you find are so compelling. Do you have any advice to songwriters about how to find really good stories?
[00:15:53] Speaker C: Well, you have to listen to the people around you is one thing, because people are always telling stories, and you have to have sort of an ear for what might be the thread of a great story and read. You know, if. If you're a reader, and especially a reader of history, as I am, it's just so many great stories. It's just knowing which ones are gonna fly, as it were. And so you. So you're looking for. For dramatic. You're sort of looking for dramatic moments more than anything else. And this is now, this is. This is contained in, like, a chapter in Dar Williams latest book, the write a song that matters, where she describes my process. Part of my process is when I have a story, before I've even started to write the story, I'll tell it to people, and I'll take 20, 30, 40 times to different people in my life over beer, in different bars and different places. And as you tell the story over and over and over again, what happens is the story starts to condense itself right down to its really salient points. And by the time you've told it, like 20 or 30 or 40 times, you can sort of look at what it was you said the very last time you told the story, and pretty well go, those are the important points.
And then watch people as they listen to that story, and you can see where their eyes go wide, or whether their eyes narrow, or what their reactions are to that story as you tell it. And that gives you. That'll give you a good indication of what parts of the story are salient. And the other thing is that don't try and get too many facts in. Don't try and crowd it with. With information. Just keep the. Keep the facts to the minimum and try and go for the. Try and go for the feelings and try and paint pictures, you know, give us the landscape that the. That the song is happening in, you know, and add those. Add those kind of details because those are the kind of details that are going to stay with people rather than, you know, sort of a dry recitation of facts and tell it from the first person.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:18:02] Speaker C: Yeah. You know, it's aggravating because I've got this amazing story about the liberation of Genoa at the end of the Second World War, but it's. It's just too vast to be a song. And so I've decided that it's time that I'm going to have to write something book length because there's just no. There's no way that I can condense that story into a song. It's going to have to be something that's much longer.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: What were some details in cold Missouri waters that you wanted to add into the song but just couldn't find room for?
[00:18:33] Speaker C: Oh, um.
So long ago, I may have forgotten, but if you give me just 1 second.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:18:40] Speaker C: My mic is. I'm just going to the back here because I think I know where that is.
Just seeing if I can.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: So these are your original notes from the song?
[00:18:55] Speaker C: Yeah. Hopefully. I may have actually taken that one particular song out of here and put it someplace else and left the songs that I didn't finish in here, which is why it's a really good thing to actually have a look at it, because all these notebooks, when I finish, I always start a new notebook for each album, and I begin by ripping the pages out of the old notebook that I didn't use. The pieces that I didn't use. No, I don't know where that song's gone, so I can't really tell you. I can't really tell you what didn't make it into the song at this point.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: Have you ever been to man Gulch?
[00:19:32] Speaker C: Yes, I have.
[00:19:33] Speaker A: What was that like? At what point in time and how rugged.
[00:19:37] Speaker C: Oh, was it? It was when I was. It was when I was young. It was, like, 18 years old before.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: You wrote the song.
[00:19:43] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wow.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: So how did that work? You. You came upon somebody recommended the book to you, and you're like, I've been there.
[00:19:49] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:19:50] Speaker D: Well, it's not.
[00:19:50] Speaker C: It's not. I mean, if you were, like, hiking in the mountains, like, in Alberta, eventually you're going to go, well, I'm going to do some hiking. And some people will say, well, you know, you want to. This would be a good one. Or, you know, you really want to, you know, go to Merryweather because you get to do a little boat ride up to Meriwether at the same time on the Missouri. But. And if you're going to Merryweather, if you go over that ridge into the next canyon and up onto the saddle, you find these crosses and, you know, so it just becomes a feature of the hike.
[00:20:20] Speaker A: Did you find that evocative even at that young age?
[00:20:24] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very evocative. It's a. It's an evocative place.
[00:20:28] Speaker A: So when, when that fellow hands the book to you, you're like, I I'm familiar with this story.
[00:20:34] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. But, you know, but not on that level.
[00:20:38] Speaker A: Right.
[00:20:38] Speaker C: You know, you know, you're. You've only ever thought about it in terms of, oh, yeah, it's this place where there was a fire and these 13 guys died there. And here's the. Here's the crosses. But you never actually sit there and think about, you know, everything that's involved in that. And so the book brings out all those. All that detail that is probably missing from your tiny little mind when you're up there.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: After you wrote the song, did you know that this was a special one?
[00:21:05] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I know. I know. Immediately is there's. There's an actual physical. Well, the, the. The point at which I know immediately is when I found the point of view that I'm going to tell the story from. That's the right point of view. My hair stands on end. Like, literally, my hair stands on end. And I go, that's. That's the point of view. That's the voice. And then once I found the voice and the point of view, then everything falls into, into place really quite quickly about that. But I may have the story in my head for, like, two years before it actually makes it out onto the paper.
[00:21:46] Speaker A: Who was the first person you played it for? Do you remember?
[00:21:48] Speaker C: Well, it would have been whoever was in the studio as I was writing it.
[00:21:53] Speaker A: Do you remember the reaction?
[00:21:55] Speaker C: It was a bit of a delayed reaction. So it's like once, first off, there was relief. Like, oh, my God, he finally finished the freaking song.
And then. And then, you know, like, in those days, we weren't recording digitally, right? So, you know, all the bits are there on two inch tape. And it's not until you actually get to the mix that you actually get the first real idea of what the whole thing sounds like in total, with. With everything mixed in. And mixing was a very physical process. Again, I don't know if you ever experienced this where you're doing a mix and you got 24 channels, but you got 24 sliders, and none of it is automatic.
And so sometimes in order to do the mix you want to do, you have to have, like, four people on the board all making moves on the faders, you know, and everybody's moves are choreographed. And you have to, like, go through it a couple of times so that everybody. You know, the. How everybody hits their marks and then you.
Then you run the mix and hope that everybody got it right. And it's not until you're now going to hear the song in its totality, with everything sort of surrounding it. So it was whatever night it was that we did the next to final mix, you know, because. And again, in those days, what we do is we'd, you know, you'd. You'd hear it in the studio, which is a great place to listen to because it's got everything. But we would then always make a copy of whatever mix it was.
You'd mix it onto a cassette deck, onto a cassette tape, and then you'd go out to the van, out back in the studio and pop it into the tape player in the. In the van to hear what it sounds like in that environment. And we never finalized a mix until it sounded both great in the studio and in the van. Right. Because the van is where most people were going to be listening to it. So it's probably at that point where we've done like a. Like a semi final mix. And we were out in the van listening to it, and it would have been me and dawn and Richard champagne, who engineer going, yeah, that works. And then. But the. But the real test would have come when we've gone back to Don's house and Don's wife, Linda. If Linda liked it, we were good, and Linda loved it, so we were good. You just always have to remember that listening to the music in the car is like squinting at the Mona Lisa.
[00:24:20] Speaker A: Who was the first person to cover this song?
[00:24:23] Speaker C: It would have been cry, cry, cry.
[00:24:24] Speaker A: Do you know how. And I guess it was Richard Schindell that lucked it, that chose it.
[00:24:28] Speaker C: No, I think it was actually. I think it was actually dar. Like, really? Or might have been. It might have been a group thing because they were all tossing names into a hat. And I think Dar told me at one point that that just. It came up and she said, well, that's a no brainer.
[00:24:42] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:24:43] Speaker C: And so do you.
[00:24:46] Speaker A: Did you have a friendship with her at that point?
How do you think she knew about that song?
[00:24:51] Speaker C: Well, just, you know, through the. She would have heard me play it on a workshop stage at a festival somewhere was the most. Would have been in the most likely place. Because, you know, that's the great thing about festivals, is it? And especially canadian festivals, because we always do the, like, the canadian festival model has, like, daytime stages that we call workshop stages, but they're actually, like session stages. And you put, like, three or four musicians on that stage, and then they. You give them a topic or, or something to focus them, and then everybody plays. If it's songwriters who go round robin, you know, and sometimes people join in on other people's stuff as they learn it or, you know, and so I'm sure would have been at a. On a workshop stage at a canadian festival that both Dara and I were on, and I would have played the song and she would have heard it.
[00:25:41] Speaker A: Had you heard of Richard Schindell before?
[00:25:43] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:25:45] Speaker A: What did you know of him?
[00:25:47] Speaker C: Oh, a little bit of hanging. We did a couple of joint shows together in Illinois, like 92, maybe 1992.
So we did a series of gigs together. And then again, I'd met him at festivals and stuff, and, you know, just, he was a great guy to talk to and a great guy to hang out with, and we shared a lot of stuff in common.
[00:26:08] Speaker A: Is it correct that this was, that the cry, cry, cry version was the one that kind of opened the floodgates to all the covers that came after?
[00:26:16] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, totally. Totally. Like, most people.
Most people that cover probably haven't heard my version of it, and I can tell which version of it they've heard by what their cover is.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: How so?
[00:26:27] Speaker C: Oh, because there's certain subtle differences between what I wrote, which is all just part of the folk process. So you can tell by those sort of subtle changes. You can tell whether they. If they add shenandoah at the end of it, they've listened to my version. If they don't, they've listened to cry, cry, crydeh. But my reaction was probably the most surprising to me in all because Richard and I had the same agent at the time, and I was in New Jersey, and the record had just come out, and my agent, who lived in Woodlawn, New Jersey, had gotten a couple of advanced coffees, and I was driving by, so I went and I got one.
I got this copy from him and then just continued my drive, and I put it in the cardinal to squint at the Mona Lisa and ended up having to pull off the road because what affected me more than anything else was hearing it sung with an american accent.
[00:27:24] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:27:25] Speaker C: You know, just suddenly hearing the song sung in the native accent, not the name, you know, the exact native accent, but sung in an american accent, which Dodge would have had and which obviously, I don't just really make the song something different for me.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, I was just.
We were talking about the different accents, being that it's sung in, and Paul McKenna singing with a scottish accent was so fascinating and pulled all the emotional stops out in such a way that I hadn't anticipated.
[00:27:59] Speaker A: It seems like a lot of the covers have been sung by irish singers.
[00:28:03] Speaker C: Well, the Irish have exceptionally great taste.
[00:28:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:08] Speaker B: Yes, they do.
[00:28:09] Speaker C: And being, you know, being. Being Irish once removed, myself, I can dig that.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: What does your tour schedule look like these days? Are you on the road a lot? Are you on the road a little bit? Are you generally doing workshops, festivals, or.
[00:28:24] Speaker C: I'm doing. I'm doing this.
Well, I'm doing some. I got a big tour coming up, three week with my buddy Jez Lowe, who's an amazing british singer songwriter. We're doing a tour across Canada, February, March, and then April, May. I'll be doing some scattered stuff, I think, in the northeastern us, but I'm really going to be concentrating on starting to work on the book at that point. And then I've got festivals, and I'm also the artistic director of a festival up in Canada, a festival called Summer Folk.
I've been artistic director of the festival for twelve years, so I'm deep into booking that at the moment. And that takes up a, you know, a certain amount of time in the summer. You're doing the Lunenburg Folk Harbor Festival for sure. And then, you know, another. Another tour in Ireland, two weeks in the maritimes in October. So, yeah, you know, there's a certain amount of traveling still, but I've still got kids at home, so I try not to go away for too long.
[00:29:28] Speaker B: Ah, yeah. You can't do the ten months out and come home. My dad did that a while, not when I was young, but he was touring with the Santa Cruz river band. It was a trio he had, and they were out about ten months of the year. And it was definitely a lot. He loved being on the road, and I love being on the road, too, but I also like to come back home and teach my private students and do the studio work. Aaron and I go on, I guess, musical weekend benders, minus the alcohol. So, you know.
[00:30:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I've got kids about your, your kids age, James, and, yeah, I don't want to be away from them for very long.
[00:30:09] Speaker C: Yeah, no, they're, they're 18 and 14, so, you know, like, they're just as happy for me to go away, but I like to think that they like to have me here.
[00:30:16] Speaker A: Well, I know that we've kept you a long time, and thank you for, for being willing to let me ask you all the questions that I've always wanted to ask you about song.
It's such a thrill, and I'm so.
[00:30:28] Speaker C: Thank you so much, and thanks for your interest, and good luck with the podcasts and the show.
[00:30:35] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:30:35] Speaker A: We'll let you know when it's going to run.
[00:30:41] Speaker B: Here's James Keelahan's Keery's piano in its entirety.
[00:30:58] Speaker D: Of all of Kirito's joys, the thing she loved the best was to play her prized piano.
When the sun had gone to rest.
I used to hear the notes drift down along the side water as Kiri played the notes and scales for her dear sons and daughters.
Na mia played piano, not as good as kiri.
She went in for that long haired stuff, but my, she played it pretty.
The old piano had a tongue that set my heart to waking.
It always sounded sweet, as though when it was Kiri plain.
In December, when the 7th fleet was turned to smoke and ashes, the order came to confiscate their fishing boats and caches, and Kiri's husband forced to go and work in labor camps, and Kiri left alone to fend and hold the fort as best she can.
But the music did not drift as often from up the COVID at Kiri's house. And when it did, it sounded haunted, played with worry, played with doubt.
For Kiri knew that soon she, too would be compelled to leave and the old upright would stay behind.
And Carrie, she would.
I loaded Kerry on the bus with stoic internees.
The crime that they were guilty of was that they were not like me.
And if I was ashamed, I didn't know it at the time.
They were flotsam on the wave of war. They were no friends of mine.
And I went up to Kiri's house to tag all their belongings and sent them out for auctioneer who'd claim them in the morning.
One piece that I thought I'd keep and hold back for myself was that haunting ivory upright that Kiri played so well.
Kiri had not left it there for me to take his plunder she rolled it down onto the dock and on to the harbor.
The old upright in the stranger's hands was a thought she couldn't bear.
So she consigned it to to the sea to settle the affair.
So many years have come and gone since Kiri's relocation.
I look back now upon that time with shame and resignation.
For Kiri knew what I did. That if we must be free, then sometimes we must sacrifice to gain our dignity.
Yes, Kiri knew what I did not. That if we must be free, then sometimes we must sacrifice to gain our dignity. Jenna.
