Over the last 65 years, I've learned how we continue to find ourselves and each other in the stories we share and the songs we sing together.
It starts with a baby making some of its earliest connections as someone holds them close and sings a lullaby, and quickly becomes a child pleading for just one more story before the lights go out. The last thing my grandkids often heard at bedtime was their mother singing "The Water Is Wide."
For years I sang at friends' weddings, and these days more often at memorials and celebrations of life. In those intimate moments, it's often songs and stories that remind us of our shared humanity.
With The Brothers Four, we often end a concert by inviting everyone to sing "This Land Is Your Land" or "Goodnight, Irene." Hearing all those voices resonating as one is E pluribus unum, from many, one. In 1991 we sang in Kyoto at an event celebrating 150 years of friendship between Japan and the United States, close to the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. In 2008 we sang "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" at the DMZ between North and South Korea. Naive? Maybe. I will remember that feeling for the rest of my life.
For 25 years I brought my guitar to Seattle Children's Hospital to help remember and celebrate kids alive now only in spirit. I still bring it on trips through the American South, where we sing songs of the civil rights movement and form a circle to sing "We Shall Overcome" after walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
And there's my mother-in-law's final Christmas, in a memory care unit, when our family began to sing and the light returned to tired eyes around the room.
There's nothing quite like a good story or song to let us all know we're here, we belong.
