Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet

Geeking out with my 92-Year-Old Mother and Tom Waits and Gavin Bryars

Since my father passed away last year, my mother and I have developed a new relationship. For a lot of my life, our relationship was fairly superficial, because my father was of the old school dominant type. They each had their places. When it came to deep thinking she was subjugated. She told me there were times when my father who loved intellectual conversations (he said in his autobiography that his IQ was 165), that he told her when visitors came, that she was not to join in the conversation.

Karen is 92. She tells me she does not feel old. In fact, since my father died and she is now able to manage her own affairs, finances, and make decisions for herself, she is undergoing a rebirth, finding herself again. She delivers a strong reminder that being aged does not mean you are waiting to die or should be treated like a child, or a patient as happens in many rest homes. She’s just starting to live again, and why not?

Here she is explaining to me about a 3D sculpture my father made, called McKenzie Country.

My mother studied classical music and performance at the Amsterdam University of the Arts / Conservatorium of Music and sang in the annual Amsterdam performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, which continues to this day.

A couple of months ago on a visit to Whangarei where she lives, sitting in the lounge after dinner, she asked me if I would like to listen to something special. She said most people she knows wouldn’t like it, but she thought I would.

So we sat in the lounge and she put on a CD and gave me the cover to read.

I know the music of Tom Waits but had never heard of Gavin Bryars. Anyway, we sat down and listened to the full 75 minutes of this work. It starts off with a looped sample, which is continued pretty much through the hour and a quarter, of an unknown man in a field, singing to himself, like a little rhyme.

“Jesus’ blood never failed me yet, never failed me yet,

Jesus’ blood never failed me yet.

This one thing I know, for he loves me so.”

Slowly additional instruments come in, an ebb and flow of shifting waves of instruments, beautifully matching the not quite symmetrical rhythm of the voice, which in itself takes a little to get your brain in synch with.

It was an amazing experience. It was somewhere between exploring a musical kaleidoscopic landscape and getting lost in meditation. The piece really moved me and when I went to bed on the rollaway in my father’s office, it was still haunting me. I loved it, although for me an hour would have been enough. In the end, Tom Waits sings with this old man, which rounds up the musical journey wonderfully.

Most people won’t have the patience to listen to the whole piece and if that’s you, you might appreciate this video, which is a version shortened to 23 minutes.

It was a wonderful experience to share with my mother, who was very pleased that I liked it. I have played it again and you will find it in my Spotify Top #500 Songs that is the thread of my Substack, in case you are intrigued enough to listen to the whole work. I tried it in the car once, but it didn’t work. You need to be somewhere quiet and undisturbed.

This from the performer notes:

“The field recording of the old man is quoted to be a favourite of junkyard minstrel Tom Waits, who shows up here near the finale of the piece to sing alongside and around the tramp in unison and in counter melodies. In the final minutes, Waits is left to sing alone with high strings, only to wander off into the cavernous darkness from which the piece came. This melancholy and repetitive disc may test the patience as it wears on, though Bryars squeezes every drop of sweetness he can into the slowly shifting score. It is said that no matter how many different ways you paint a house, it is still essentially the same house. Here, it is the hobo's verse that holds the piece together, but ironically it's also the thing that keeps it from taking flight with its relentless constancy; it is repeated over 150 times.”