Last Saturday night, folk singer and guitarist Dar Williams played a show in Hastings-on-Hudson at the Purple Crayon performance space. The Purple Crayon is a former Catholic church turned concert venue that I wrote about last March at R&T while exploring “When a ‘Sacred’ Church Becomes a ‘Secular’ Live Music Venue.”

Williams played to a sold out crowd (a few hundred) and commented on the space’s transition from a church to a community center and concert venue. She suggested that the overarching purposes of the space may have changed, but something of the mission is shared between its old and new uses: “A lot of person to person ministry happens” in live music venues, she said.

One of the oldest definitions of ministry is also one of the oldest definitions of theology: the “care of souls.” That is certainly the defining action of any church, and I think Williams was right to characterize live music venues as places where such “ministry” happens, as well.  By the deep attention given to her music, especially from women between 30 and 50 years old, it was readily evident that “soul care” was on offer. But not only between musician and fan, but between fans themselves. Fan culture in popular music is replete with tales of friendship built around a concert event.

I have been to enough shows by the Indigo Girls, Melissa Etheridge, Michelle Malone, and Ani Difranco (or for that matter, Alanis Morrisette or Erykah Badu or Tori Amos) to begin to sense the ways that women musicians create conditions for women to better care for each other’s souls, by creating narrative soundscapes that can house women’s stories — and for most of these artists much of the time, also being generous and deeply human enough to also house many men’s stories. I well realize that not all women are into “women-identified” musicians (going to a Lacuna Coil show, for example, with its lead singer Cristina Scabbia, or an Evanescence show with Amy Lee, seems to work somewhat differently in terms of that intra-women ministry — but that’s just my gut sense, and I would be happy to be wrong about any of this). But I know this topic is interesting to other of our contributors and no doubt also to our readers, so I will be curious about what others have to say.

I also want to comment briefly on Dar Williams’ song “Teen for God.” It’s a tune about her intense dalliance with Christianity as a teenager.

(Here is Williams telling a theological story and playing “Teen for God” at the venerable Club Passim in Cambridge, Massachusetts…)

It includes a verse about the ways that her teenage God could not have met her college self with any sufficiency, could not have survived the deep doubts she had as she grew up. I heard this song on Saturday night for the first time, and thought, yes, it was good and necessary and more or less inevitable that she would and should shed that God of her “teen for God” time, and it is true that more people are working from their teenage God than they can admit and would do well to graduate from that religious atmosphere. But the knowing laughs in the audience about the intense teen-God experience and the

graduation from God in young adulthood struck me, theologically, as a tad wanting. And not because I have any automatic judgment about people who graduate from God. That’s a path with which I am familiar. But because Dar Williams seems like such a substantial soul, a woman who senses life so deeply, that I wanted something more than the loving and lightly mocking reverie about the “teen God” and young adult disillusionment. Indeed, that need to make light of the “teen for God” she once was maybe indicates that she is not done with the God question. Such things are never tied up so neatly. That said, Dar Williams is an extraordinary musician who has, in my estimation, probably had a (strumming and picking) hand in “saving” more than her fair share of souls. And so be it.

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

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