Love, Poverty, and Rickie Lee Jones

Rickie Lee Jones, whose music I have loved for decades, has a song that I’ve just begun to perform, “A Tree on Allenford,” which has the line: “Every drop of rain that fell or falls is falling on and on and on . . .”

The lyric speaks of continuity and interconnection — realities that human beings have a hard time recognizing and an easy time forgetting. Think of all the people you know here on the East Coast who’ve had coughs this autumn that lasted for weeks and weeks. No one mentions the fact that those Canadian wildfires had us breathing micro-particles all summer. Continuity and interconnection? “Oh yeah, I didn’t think of that,” people invariably say to me when I offer them my cough theory.

The truth is that nothing goes away: not drops of rain, not smoke particles, not trauma, not joy, not decades of occupying conquered peoples. It all gets recycled into consequences.

But never mind that, let’s go back to my chanteuse for a minute. Rickie’s chorus in the song chants: “Loved by someone. Loved by someone. Loved by someone. Loved by someone.”

“A Tree on Allenford” is a gorgeous, philosophical song, which I’ll be offering up one of these weeks at the People’s Cafe, a place in Kingston where my wife Susan and I play every other Tuesday while people come for free breakfasts and lunches. Most of the clientele are very poor, and they look it — raggedy, ungroomed, wearing layers against the winter because they can’t afford warm coats. There are more prosperous people among them, too, who come just because they like the place and support it with donations, but by and large the customers are pretty down and out.

At the beginning of our stint at the People’s Cafe, I felt kind of self-conscious singing love songs to this crowd. George Harrison: “It only takes time ’til love comes to everyone.” Burt Bacharach and Hal David: “The look of love is in your eyes . . .” Etcetera. I associated poverty and homelessness with isolation, lovelessness, untouchability, and resentment. I felt it more appropriate to pick up my slide guitar and play “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor” (“When I’m broke and I got nowhere to go”), or to offer up Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” (“Rich relations may give you a crust of bread and such”).

After a very little, however, while I realized that our audience doesn’t particularly perk up to hear Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay” or Bob Marley’s “Guiltiness.” They’re not in the People’s Café to be reminded of their hardships and plan the revolution, but to have a good, hot meal, gab with their friends and once in a while sing or dance to our accompaniment.

They’re just people, in other words, people with a large quotient of misfortune, perhaps, but they are probably loved by someone (including, on Tuesday mornings, by me and Susan). They include several musicians, who tell us how terribly they miss having instruments to play, and several immigrant women with little children to feed, and some oldsters who especially enjoy our American Songbook numbers, and some young people for whom the Beatles and Motown are prehistoric. Some of them applaud and give us eye-contact and thank us as they leave; others chat in very loud voices that simply get louder if we play louder.

As Rickie Lee sings it: “There’s nothing that has ever been/ That isn’t loved by someone/ who waits to be loved again.” If, between coughs, we could only retain this precious understanding, our human community would be doing a whole lot better — and the people eating at the People’s Cafe would have nice homes and lots more to eat, because who could stand to see it any other way?

Happy new year to you and yours — that is, to all of us.