The River, by Clarence Clemons
To me music is like a river. I have lived my life beside the river. Every day I get up and I look at the river. I watch it and notice when it rises or falls. I see how the wind affects the surface and ruffles it, and how the lack of wind leaves it looking like a mirror. I follow the water as it flows over rocks and around obstacles. I have studied the river my whole life. I know it as well as I know myself.
Most days I swim in the river. Sometimes I float on it, looking up at the trees and the sky. Other times I dive beneath the surface and try to become the river. I feel it all around me and I feel like part of it. I find it difficult to distinguish between the water and myself, and I don't know where one begins and the other one ends. And then I am the river.
At night I sit beside it. I sit in the dark and listen to it and I feel like the Rain King and I listen to it and I close my eyes and I listen to the river. Some nights it's just noise. A nice noise, a peaceful noise, but just noise. But then something will happen. Something will move beneath the surface and the noise becomes something else. It's discordant like John Cage or Harry Partch, but then it sounds like music almost and it's Captain Beefheart and then Frank Zappa, and the noise turns beautiful and annoying all at the same time, and that's good and so unexpected that it makes me laugh out loud in the darkness.
But on other nights the river sings, and it can sing anything. It's a choir. It's the Edwin Hawkins Singers singing "Oh Happy Day," and it's all gospel all the time until it turns into opera and classical piano and violins and Wurlitzers and Hammonds and big church organs and Al Kooper on "Like a Rolling Stone" and Dave "Babyface" Cortez and whoever played organ on Del Shannon's "Runaway," and suddenly there are a million different voices and a million different instruments, and I can hear each and every one of them and they're all good. I can make out Speedo and Ivory Joe Hunter and some group singing about white port and lemon juice and Willie Dixon and Robert Johnson and Son House and Garnett Mims, and then the Darktown strutters dance by in the shadowy light, followed by the Viscounts playing "Harlem Nocturne" and "The Touch," and the Rockin' Rebels' "Wild Weekend," and then Hank Williams and Johnny Rodriguez and Mickey Newbury from a depot in Frisco, and the music just washes over me and makes me feel whole.
I can't be separated from the river. I cannot be away from it. It follows me; it changes its path to be with me and to stay with me and to define me. It is my purpose and it flows through my soul and it always will, and nothing in this world, including death, can stop that.
- June 18, 2021 - photographs by Don Reo
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