Glyn’s Mixed Music Bag

I have a blogging friend, Glyn, who shares a link which is known as Glyn’s Mixed Music Bag. I’ve seen his posts for it and those by others that I follow but haven’t previously taken part myself. It’s about time that I did! This month his theme is for us to play a song with September in the title or lyrics, as he tells us here.

I have a particular favourite for this and as no one else has yet played it I thought I’d give it a spin. I have actually played this twice before, but I’m banking on no one remembering that! Most recently it was in a Song Lyric Sunday piece around eighteen months ago, and before that I included it in a post way back in 2013, when traffic on my blog was much less plentiful that it is nowadays – it somehow managed to garner seven ‘likes’ which was pretty good back then! This is my chosen song, a really poignant, beautiful gem:

That was Roseanne Cash in a duet with her father, Johnny, with September When It Comes. Roseanne is the eldest of four daughters of Johnny and his first wife, Vivian, and she has clearly inherited some good musical genes. She co-wrote this song with her second husband, John Leventhal, and it was released in March 2003 on her album Rules Of Travel. It is a lovely album, with a number of fine duets, but this for me is the standout track. The song is a partial story of Rosanne’s life, a remembrance of birth, childhood, and the profound bond she shared with her father. The American Songwriter site quotes her as saying “I was obviously thinking about my dad because he was really sick. And John [Leventhal] said ‘If there was ever a song to sing with your dad, this would be it.’ At first, I really resisted that, and then I realized he was right. So I asked my dad. I called him and said ‘Would you want to sing the song with me?’ He said ‘I’ll have to see the lyrics first. Ever the professional! He was very sick, but he went to the studio with me and did it. And then he said, “You take that back to John. If he doesn’t like it, I’ll do it again, but I told him “It’s good enough.”

I think that is a massive understatement! The album came out six months before Johnny died, making this one of his final recordings. The second verse, that Johnny sings, is a look at what his life is now with a look ahead to his demise. It uses September as the metaphor for when it might end for him which, sadly, was prophetic: he died on 12 September 2003. That background adds to the beauty of the song, and as I said it is incredibly poignant when you know that. When he sang the line “I cannot move a mountain now, I can no longer run” it reduced Roseanne to tears, and I can understand why. In fact, the whole song has that effect: it is just so beautifully evocative.

Before I leave you, I have noted that today is 11 September, one day before the 22nd anniversary of Johnny’s passing but also the 24th anniversary of 9/11. It would be very remiss of me not to mark my respect for the day, and I’m doing so by playing the song I have shared for it several times previously, as it is in its own way a song about September. This is the wonderful Mary Chapin Carpenter, with Grand Central Station: