Sweet Music for a Spring Evening
 by Cliff Garber  ·  31 March 2007

With Passover coming Monday night I thought I’d jump right on it and get this posted for all of you to read. Thank goodness this past Friday night was just a delightfully mild and moonlit night, with its pale yellow beacon that leads us all safely nearing fullness in the evening sky. The drive northeast from Lynn was just as relaxing and perfect as could be.

I settled into my usual right front-row seat facing the stage as Debra Cowan took on a tall, gentle and sweet presence before the audience. She opened with an “a capella” rendering of “Darlin’ Corey” in a pure, velvety second-soprano flavored with a gentle and mellifluous vibrato. Debra used her hands fluidly and expressively throughout the song; it was a singing narrative full of tender emotion.

The next song Debra could not “name”, only that it was a light comic relief for which she asked the audience to join in. It spoke of a starry night that was “twinkily, twinkily, twinkily”, and the moon shone in the sky “blinkily, blinkily, blinkily” while a skunk passed by “stinkily, stinkily, stinkily,” ending with hands thrown up in the air by all as everyone exclaimed in unison “Oh my!” The tune was sung five times, each time increasing in speed, at the conclusion of which both performer and audience broke out in delightful gales of laughter. Another hilarious tune followed with the audience joining in called “Walloping Window Blind”, one of eleven songs on Debra’s CD from the huge lifetime library of early historic songs of music collector Helen Hartness Flanders. Debra actually spent hours listening to tapes of these tunes before hand-picking the final eleven that she would record. The lyrics to this tune include the lines, “I’m off to find my love wearing boxing gloves”.

This was followed by another tune in which a young girl is told by her father that “you cannot marry the young man with whom you are in love because he is your brother by a woman with whom I had an affair and please don’t tell your mother”. The young woman is distraught and decides to confide in her mother anyway, upon which her mother says to her, “my dear daughter go ahead and marry him anyway because your father is not really your father”. Well, you get the idea.

Debra closed with a beautiful tune entitled “One More Before We Go”, and it was the general consensus of the audience that her time on stage was just too short-lived, and that she should have performed a few more tunes. Her CD’s seemed to sell well during intermission and after the show, and this warm, charming woman spoke to many of us at length about the songs in her repertoire and her singing for the pure love and joy of it. It was MOST EVIDENT in her performance. Many, including myself, asked Kathy to bring Debra back again for a longer performance, possibly next season.

Gordon Bok immediately came out on stage, seating himself on the piano bench and his 6-string and 12-string guitars next to him while he adjusted the microphones. From the moment this gentleman came on stage, his demeanor was relaxed, mellow and very laid-back, something I guess that went along with the spring-like weather outside. There was a grace about him as he opened with “The Week Before Easter”, a tune that tells of times in early England when men would do most all of the dancing, called “Morris Dancing”, and how when all the men eventually went off to war, many of them not coming home, the women took up the dancing and carried it on.

There were tunes from Australia when Gordon and his wife traveled to Sydney such as “Banks of Reedy Lagoon”, and others in the second half of the show. A fellow from Maine named Dave Goulder was a mason who built stone walls and had names for all of the stone walls he saw, whether 18” or 28’ wide. Gordon told of building one with this fellow, after which he said “Once you make ‘em, you see ‘em everywhere”, and went on to build many more. Before singing “Stone on Stone”, he spoke of how this fellow lived and worked in Maine, and was an avid collector of songs, and that he actually wrote the latter tune. Gordon closed his first set with “Barbrie Allen” set to an unusually different but still-haunting melody.

Mr. Bok’s introductory tales to his tunes were colorful and varied, narrated simply and often humorously, as if he were weaving a quilt of many patterns and colors. His repertoire is expensive and diverse, as is his skill on both the 6 and 12-string guitars he both strums and picks, and includes songs of the sea, ships and fishermen, songs of the woods, life and landscapes of Maine, characters he’s met in his life’s travels, and so much more. There is reliable consistency, an evenness, in every tune that he sings, from one song to the next.

The second set was just full of every imaginable sketch of his life experiences. He recalled an evening, somewhere around twenty years ago, an evening in Marblehead when the moon was full and he sang in a park for the ME AND THEE audience, how they went nuts when he performed David Mallett’s (also from Maine) “ I Knew This Place”, and then sung the song for us with warmth and heart. A hilarious and repeated conversation over the years between the two artists was David telling Gordon he sung his (David’s) songs much too slowly, and in turn, Gordon telling David he sung his (Gordon’s) songs too fast. Having seen both perform, I can attest to the fact that David’s style is stark contrast to Gordon’s laid-back style; he’s a very intense and kinetic performer. The difference is actually quite humorous.

After he spoke of living and working in cities in the wintertime, Gordon told how he’d return home on occasional weekends and live on board a schooner where he’d write his songs in the peace and quiet. He’d often stand atop the ladder that led to the deck and peek out a small opening to watch the beauty of seagulls flying and gliding against the winter sky, and then played his only instrumental of the evening (on the 6-string) entitled “Gulls in Morning”. It was an exquisite piece, and I could actually picture the scenes he mentioned when I closed my eyes and listened to the music.

Once again he returned to tales of his trips to Sydney, Australia and spoke of realizing that we aren’t the only country to be dealing with what we’ve done to negatively change our environment, singing of Australia’s struggle with “Wind and A Million Leaves”. The words that particularly struck me as profound were “humankind is but one child of earth”. He spoke of listening to conversations over Marine Radio while out on the sea, and read a hilarious tale he’d overheard between two fella’s one night. Next he spoke of the tin and coal mines of Cornwall in the south of England. In “Last Shift at the Crowns”, Gordon described how, if you find a stream of coal in the mines of Cornwall, you often follow down to where the mines go out to sea and under water for miles. When there was an accident down there, no one was coming out alive. The song was sad and chilling as it told of the families that waited and prayed for the miners on land, of those men who died in the mines beneath the sea and never returned home again, and loved ones left behind with their grief and tears.

His final song of the evening was an encore entitled “Pretty”, a collection of memories about his journey through life, about his travels, overheard conversations on Marine Radio, and the end of harvestime in Australia. All in all, we all took a trip through life and a sort of trip around the world with Gordon Bok last night. I, for one, took home a knap sack full of wonderful memories through his stories and his music, and had the bright light of the moon high in the sky to guide me on the peaceful ride home.

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