Thursday night, I saw The Civil Wars perform at The Town Hall in midtown Manhattan. I wrote about this young mountain-music duo last spring (here and here) after I saw them at the Festival of Faith and Music at Calvin College in Michigan.

Let me start this review over again.

Thursday night, while watching The Civil Wars perform, surprise took hold of me a few songs into their set, as I realized that what I was seeing from Joy Williams and John Paul White, and what I love about them, and maybe, I wondered, why they have been selling out show after show on their tour, including tonight’s, is because when they play, they do something like blessing each other.

During songs, they will often turn toward each other, singing to and beyond each other, and then they will back up from the microphones and keep playing while face to face, bodies nearly touching, swaying and stomping and leaning into and across each other, as if through this intimacy they find out where the song lives tonight.

And so a few songs in, and this is happening, and Williams raises her hands, one toward White’s face, and the other toward his guitar, in a gesture of blessing, of too-muchness, of erotic seismography, of shaping the air around White as music. And it was as if his bent head and the presentation of his guitar under stress of a heavy strum were returning the blessing – or had it been the initiator?

And I realized I had never thought that band members might be understood to be blessing each other in performance, despite having spent a considerable portion of my life as a bass player interacting with drummers, guitarists, and vocalists in live performance in all manner of exchanges of creative spirit.

And after tonight’s show, I wondered what we are saying theologically by the language of “blessing.”

Blessing retains more than a trace of ancient practices of drawing down divinity through ritual gesture (in other words, what many theologians today would dismissively categorize as “magic”).  These associations are never completely left behind, even if rarefied theology takes pains to distance itself from this past.

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And here is “Poison and Wine” (in music video and live versions), which must surely take its place in the small pantheon of realistic love songs.

Accompanying people, and giving their experience respectful and searching intellectual expression, as they work through such feelings as described in this song about their human relationships, and also their relationship to “what is,” whether that be called nature, God, the sacred, the open, the void, or the unknown, is one of the most important theological tasks.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

On Friday night, I saw The Civil Wars perform at the Festival of Faith and Music at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It is one of the few times I have seen a relatively new band and been utterly convinced that they deserve to hit the big-time, and in fact will do so.

They are a duo, Joy Williams and John Paul White, who play bluegrassy-honky-tonk-mountain-music-styled songs about, so much as I could understand the lyrics, the relationship between love’s certainties and uncertainties. And their musicality is so efflorescent as to unfurl in waves off of them into the audience and up to the ceiling, a slow-rolling steam with the rare and simple power to beckon.

Live, there was a tender and robust erotic interplay between Williams and White that showed out dimensions of carnal revel in the songs that might not otherwise be imagined. They sang with a physical closeness unusual for a musical duo. Make that a wailing and straining, humming and moaning physical closeness. But that physicality is subtle: on Friday night, White seemed to be as much in communion with his guitar as he was with Williams, and during songs she addressed herself vocally or physically to his guitar almost as much as to him.

Here, I thought, were witness, agency, pleasure, gestures of unadorned address, and surrender: domains of experience that overlap with what theology has wanted for centuries to elicit.

Tom Beaudoin
In the air between Chicago and New York