Musical Metamorphosis

During my late teens and early twenties and while I was attending college, I worked in the evenings at a local grill your own steakhouse that was located in an old rehabilitated barn in the country.  At one end of the restaurant, there was a large charcoal grill, approximately twelve feet long and four feet wide, broken up into three grates that were each four feet long.  Another way to gauge of the size of the grill is that it took six bags of charcoal to fill the entire grill.  My job was to keep the grill hot, add charcoal when needed, and grill steaks for people who did not want to cook their own.  It was a hot job, and I reeked of charcoal and cooked meat by the end of each night.  On Friday and Saturday evenings when my shift ended at 9:30, I would put something on the grill for myself to eat, wash up and change my clothes, and then spend a couple hours in the bar, located in the barn loft, drinking on the house and socializing with customers and co-workers.    

On the weekends live music was a staple, and a handful of local musicians would rotate weekends.  They were all very different artists and I enjoyed listening to them all, but one musician in particular fascinated me.  This man was shy, soft-spoken, and very cerebral.  Between sets he would sit and read classic literature and philosophy and drink black coffee in the dark bar filled with conversation and laughter.  He wasn’t pretentious, just extremely introverted.  When he would pick up his guitar and begin to sing, most of the customers continued with their conversations like nothing was going on.  Even though I was only nineteen years old, I knew there was something unique about this guy.  His song selection came from a very lonely and broken place, and this impacted his delivery of the lyrics.   

The small makeshift stage was located at one corner of the bar near the stairs, and there was always one empty barstool right in front of him because most people wanted to be away from the sound system and have conversation.  When he played, I nearly always sat down on the barstool right in front of him.  Even though I listened to this man perform once a month over the span of about four years, due to his introverted personality I never had much conversation with him.  However, it was clear to me that he was well-aware that he had my attention, and he would sometimes glance at me knowingly with a smile or nod to acknowledge his appreciation for my interest and attention.  Occasionally I gathered the courage to request a song, which he always honored.  Sometimes I’d request the Beatles Norwegian Wood, other times his haunting version of a highly underrated and mostly forgotten Phil Collins song titled, The Roof is Leaking.  Among the many musical artists this man introduced me to, chief among them was Peoria, IL native Dan Fogelberg.  When he would sing Fogelberg’s Leader of the Band, Same Old Lang Syne, Believe in Me, Windows and Walls, or Tucson, Arizona, it was so out of place and in such contrast to the loud boisterous bar that it was comically tragic.  It sometimes seemed to me in these moments that he and I were having a private conversation.  This musician didn’t know me and he had no idea what a directionless and emotional mess I was at nineteen, but perhaps he just assumed this since I was young and sitting in this bar on a weekend night with people who were in their forties, fifties, and sixties.  I mean, really, what the hell was I doing there? 

At this time in my life, I had nearly cut myself off from people my age.  I was attending college courses with former high school classmates and other acquaintances from surrounding high schools, but I had ceased having any kind of social life with them outside of the classroom.  I still got along with them, but I was actively trying to disassociate from the person I was.  Their presence made this more difficult, so I isolated myself.  I was angst-ridden, heartbroken, directionless, and unable to process my emotions or channel them in positive, productive, and meaningful ways.  I was struggling with college, and I had no clear path to a meaningful profession or happy personal life.   

Work life became my social life.  I spent nearly as many hours at the restaurant off the clock as paid time.  The owners took care of their employees very well, allowing us to basically eat and drink whatever we wished, which was especially appealing to a college student with little money.  Little did I understand that I was also getting a free education those nights in the bar, listening to music that would ultimately awaken my intellect and change the course of my life.  Music was the primary catalyst of my personal and intellectual metamorphosis, and I now understand that the foundation of my pedagogical philosophy was forged in those late nights of musical exploration and introspection.  

I’ve written previously and often about music being an under-appreciated and under-utilized pedagogical tool.  Music is more than a good mood setter in the classroom.  Music can be used to open hearts and unlock minds in ways that are conducive to engagement, connection, and learning.  If teachers are to be effective in the classroom, students first need to be emotionally open to engage in critical thinking.  Teachers are ultimately story tellers of our discipline, and students have to feel the emotional significance and meaning of the story we’re telling before they can think about and analyze the details of the story.  Music is certainly not the only method to accomplish this in the classroom, but music is one instrument in the pedagogical toolbox.  Many of my students eventually understand that the music I play before class is not random but intentional and purposeful.   

If I’m lecturing about poverty, I might play Bruce Springsteen’s Ghost of Tom Joad.  Sexism?  Ani DiFranco’s Fixing Her Hair or Dar Williams’ When I Was a Boy.  Social Movements?  Rage Against the Machine’s Renegades of Funk.  Institutional racism?  Brother Ali’s Before They Called You White.  The infamous Stanley Milgram experiment?  Dar Williams’ Buzzer is a must.  And yes, sometimes my song choices are cliché, like playing Green Day’s Wake Me Up When September Ends at the end of September, or John Lennon’s So This is Christmas: War is Over heading into holiday break, or even Guns and Roses’ November Rain when, well, you get the idea.  And sometimes, I may just need to pump some energy into a dead classroom.  In my case, this means Michael Franti’s Yell Fire, Brandi Carlile’s Raise Hell, or the Foo Fighters’ All My Life.  These songs are just a very small sample of my pedagogical soundtrack that I’ve curated during my teaching tenure.  This music reflects MY personality and teaching style and illuminates MY curriculum.  This music serves as the backdrop and sets the vibe for MY classroom.  To be clear, I am NOT advocating for replication; I am sharing an explanation for why I do this in an effort to encourage consideration of different ways to accomplish the same ends. 

Conducting my classroom in this manner has produced some pretty interesting and rapport building moments between me and my students.  A couple years ago, as I scrolled through songs before class, an otherwise quiet student who rarely spoke suddenly asked me, “Have you ever listened to Miley Cyrus sing Blondie’s Heart of Glass?”  I stifled the urge to laugh at her and nearly dismissed her question, then I pulled up the video of this song from the iHeart Festival on YouTube.  Shame on me.  BTW: If you’ve not heard Miley Cyrus sing Dolly Parton’s Jolene, check out the “Backyard Session” version on YouTube. 

My students surprise me, often.  Several years ago, I started to play a YouTube video of Billy Strings singing Dust in a Baggie, and before I even started the video a student excitedly exclaimed, “I have a friend who will not stop watching this.”  If you’re not familiar, I implore you, please go to YouTube.  Select the version of this song with the thumbnail of Billy Strings sitting on a couch in a dingy looking basement at a house party.  It’s the video with 29 million views.  Strings looks like he’s twelve years old and just walked off the set of the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?  It’s one of the most amazing and raw things I’ve ever heard.  You’ll fully understand how he picked up the name Billy Strings when you watch this. 

Another time, I asked a student who had previously expressed an interest in music to request a song.  He thought a moment, smiled, and said “The White Stripes, Catch Hell Blues.”  I was impressed, and I turned the volume way up!  He smiled with pride and joy and was more engaged in class that day.  Another student in another class, around nineteen years old, replied to my offer to take requests with, “anything by Gordon Lightfoot.”  I almost said, “What the hell are you doing listening to Gordon Lightfoot?”  Then I remembered that I was listening to Fogelberg when I was his age, so I played Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald without question or judgement.  Recently, a student asked me to play Fast Car.  Knowing this student meant Luke Combs, I played the original by Tracy Chapman without comment.  It was a teachable moment. The same thing happened when a student requested that I play Humble and Kind.  Nearly everyone assumes Humble and Kind is a Tim McGraw song, but he didn’t write it.  Lori McKenna wrote it, and she recorded it.  And her version is better, IMHO. 

I can recount many interactions like these that span my teaching tenure.  Engaging in these conversations with my students helps me understand who they are, what interests them, and what makes them “tick.”  Some people may object to my use of emotional appeals within the classroom as manipulative or a dereliction of my responsibility to cultivate thinking.  However, there is nothing problematic about using emotional appeals as long as doing so serves as a bridge to a deeper understanding of the curriculum and critical thinking.  Emotional appeals cannot replace cognition, but direct cognitive appeals often fall on deaf ears.   

I remain fully committed to the idea that one of the most effective paths to the brain is through the heart.  What I learned as a young person from sitting in that bar and listening to live music is that music has the potential to engage the disinterested, unlock the mind, heal people who have been damaged, soften hearts of those filled with misdirected anger, and motivate and politicize the apathetic.  Music has the capacity to facilitate personal metamorphosis, cultivate thinking and societal transformations, and generate political movements.