A homiletic organ part from Garth opens “Daniel and the Sacred Harp,” frames the song right away with weight, seriousness, the melody hinting at mortality with funerary allusions, surely, though Garth’s playing here takes me somewhere else, back to mass as kid, to those brief, well, I don’t have the technical terms for them, but those brief intros and outros to the segments of mass, intros and outros played on the organ, the pieces serving, I recall, as signals of transitions, this organ with just utterly massive pipes in rows that fascinated me as a kid, dozens of pipes in various sizes, many running all the way up to the high vaulted ceiling (maybe 75 feet), an entire wall of pipes behind the altar and sanctuary, so much bigger and, as I picture it now, seemingly out of proportion with the celebrant down there, to whom my brother and I were supposed to be paying attention, my own memory though being really specific now: warm and slow organ chords that somehow combined light and darkness in one, the overwhelming wall of pipes with no pattern or symmetry that I could ever discern, the organist not, I recall, ever visible from the pews, though you’d maybe catch a glimpse of her, stage left, depending on which line you were in for communion, so small-seeming, almost hiding there within the mountains of sound. The church closed down in 2014, I read on the internet, and the building was sold; another denomination now occupies the space and as I watch a video on their website in the hopes of seeing this organ that looms so large in my memories of church, I see that even though the basic layout of pews and sanctuary remains, where those organ pipes once reached up to the lighted vaulted ceiling above, a large and flat screen is now hung. After Garth’s organ comes an acoustic guitar, which reading around I learn is actually Levon strumming a twelve-string to set the rhythm, then some thudding, apparently Richard playing tom-toms with his hands while Levon kicks the bass drum and sings lead in the verses, handing off to Richard for the parts in Daniel’s own voice, sharing the song in other words, the chorus just an aching, haunting harmony of human voices, the arrangement of this timeless world with Robbie’s tingling autoharp accents and mournful lead guitar and Rick’s sad, sad country fiddle building momentum like a coming storm.
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Excerpted from Levon’s Blues.