The concert was a good one, with a pleasant smattering of older songs—including lovely ones from The Trumpet Child, Ohio, and Good Dog Bad Dog—as well as some new pieces slated for their new album to be recorded this summer. Karin was sporting a new tattoo on her left shoulder, a hummingbird with the words, “comparison is the thief of joy.” There was a nice pace to the evening, periods of reflection and songs, never hurried but not dragging, allowing the luxury of the beauty of music, poetry, and instrumentation to be embraced without the normal struggle we feel as creatures of time.

Classic OtR phrases still echo in my memory from the evening:

     “…need a love like Johnny and June’s…”

     “…if you’re looking for trouble…”

     “…slow down…”

     “…all I need is everything…”

Kenny has texted us that sound check was running long, then in a while said we shouldn’t wait for him since there was no knowing when all the pre-concert preparations would be completed. We found a little Brazilian restaurant, Samba, a block away from the Hopkins Center for the Arts and ordered dinner. Turns out the band ordered in food because sound check was taking so long—food from Sambas.

One time a few months ago my cell phone rang, and it was Kenny. He was in a van, traveling to some gig where he was to play that evening. I had asked him to help me learn to listen with discerning ears to country music, a genre I have not been naturally drawn to. Over the road noise he told me to go onto iTunes and download a song. “Perfect country lyrics,” he told me. “The chorus sums up all of life perfectly like only a country song can.”

There is something about live performance that makes the experience of the music different, somehow, and even albums recorded live can’t match it. The band was in synch this night, the musicians seemed to touch the music, and there was a quiet electricity in the air, a quality that makes you feel a bit more alive.

Kenny had several long solos, where his ease as an instrumentalist soared, carving his own mark on the song while never seeming to call attention to himself. Not being a musician, I’ve longed to know what an artist feels in moments like that, getting lost in the beauty but not losing control. In the creation work is part of our being made in God’s image, and so is part of who we are and is essential to our identity and our purpose. At the fall work has been perverted into toil, and so we struggle with failure, the perverse seduction of finding our ultimate significance in it, and the difficulties that often keep it boring and unsatisfying. Still, in moments at least, we catch brief glimpses of what work was originally intended to be. When we lose track of time, and even forget to eat, so swept up in the delight of doing some task, some work of creativity with hands, and heart, and imagination, and mind, and hard-won skill. Those moments are glimpses of grace, a foretaste of what work will be like in the new earth, world without end. I hope Kenny had one of those moments, one of those brief glimpses of glory as we listened to him play that night.

The song Kenny had me download, by the way, is “People are Crazy,” from Billy Currington’s CD, Little Bit of Everything (2008):

This old man and me, were at the bar and we

Were having us some beers and swappin' I dont cares

Talking politics, blonde and redhead chicks

Old dogs and new tricks, and habits we aint kicked

We talked about Gods grace, and all the hell we raised

Then I heard the ol' man say

God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy

He said I fought two wars, been married and divorced

What brings you to Ohio, he said damned if I know

We talked an hour or two, bout every girl we knew

What all we put them through, like two old boys will do

We pondered life and death, he lit a cigarette

Said these damn things will kill me yet

But God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy

Last call is two am, I said goodbye to him

I never talked to him again

Then one sunny day, I saw the old mans face

Front page obituary, he was a millionaree

He left his fortune to, some guy he barely knew

His kids were mad as hell, but me, Im doing well

And I dropped by today, to just say thanks and pray

And I left a six-pack right there on his grave

And i said, God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy

God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy

On the day of the concert, Margie and I drove to the Hopkins Center for the Arts hoping to have dinner with Kenny at 5 pm after the band’s sound check was finished, two hours before the concert was slated to begin. As we drove through the final stretches of farm land the surrounding the southern edge of the Twin Cities Kenny texted us: sound check was running long, so it would be at least 5:30 before he could get free.

The day before our conversation had ranged freely across life. When Kenny plays he seems lifted away by the music, able to flow with it body and soul. His playing seems born of the moment, not calculated but known, as if his fingers are able to take what he knows and give it a heart-felt life of its own. Rather than the polished repeated-no-note-different-than-before style of the classical musician, Kenny plays with musicians who honor the age-old melodies with honesty but dance around it with melodies less composed than lived.

When Kenny talks there is a lovely merging of Southern cliché and story telling, with the care someone takes who loves truth and truthfulness as a matter of virtue. His sense of humor is mischievous, which is why his new eye, a grace of modern medicine is rather like the fabled stilettos of Southern gents hidden in their walking canes, always nearby to puncture the hubris of postmodern life. We talked of the ongoing global financial debacle, and how it was affecting the already changing music business and transforming the livelihoods of musicians like him and his wife, Katie Bowser. I was struck once again how the statistics, charts, graphs and averages used to summarize the financial news and shape political slogans can be so untrue even as they present carefully calculated facts. Unless we know real people we won’t know much even if we are deeply informed by the media.

Kenny told us, carefully and with great circumspection, of a disappointment he has recently faced in his musical career. We were safe people to be told of it because we are far from the music business. He spoke carefully, treating the people involved with respect even as they had disappointed him with a decision they felt they needed to make. He wanted to be forgiving and generous in return, accepting apologies when offered, refusing to hold grudges or to allow bitterness to take root in his heart. His attitude was one of reality—disappointments are real and have real ongoing consequences—and one of grace—the disappointment couldn’t be allowed to have the final word. Such authentic faith, shaped by a quiet determination to, by grace, be like Christ, is powerfully attractive.

I thought of that when the Old Testament reading in church yesterday morning was from Daniel 8. It was as if the ancient prophet was describing the callous businessmen who raked in fortunes on the backs of ordinary people who first lost homes, pensions, and jobs, and then had to stake the banks with billions of tax dollars.

He shall grow strong in power,

     shall cause fearful destruction,

     and shall succeed in what he does…

By his cunning

     he shall make deceit prosper under his hand,

     and in his own mind he shall be great.

Without warning he shall destroy many

               [Daniel 8:24-25]

I realize it seems likely that Daniel here is catching a vision of the career of Antiochus IV, who reigned for a tumultuous decade (175-164 BC), minting coins with his likeness on one side and the phrase, “god manifest” on the reverse. The deeper truth is that a taste for power, self-centered avarice, and an ability to rationalize evil soon cauterizes the conscience and smothers virtue. The need for regulation on Wall Street is self-evident (the free market, though undeniably preferable to a centrally planned one, is run by profoundly fallen people) but hardly sufficient. Virtue, keenly nourished over a lifetime in the decisions we make, both large and small, is also necessary.

Making virtuous decisions, wherever and whoever we are, allows us to be a presence of faithfulness in a broken world. This is what Kenny is demonstrating in the face of his disappointment, and it matters.

Those who respond that this is just one person and so is too little to matter are mistaken. They do not know the power of virtue, the interwoven reality of human community, and the explosive power of the gospel when it is brought into a human tower constructed of hubris and fortified by a profusion of idols. There actually is no real contest.

As I sipped my Bulleit bourbon and listened to the music, we were fortuitously seated on the side of the stage where the musician closest to us was Kenny. I watched as he wove harmonious flights with his guitar around the melodies of the songs, carving sonic sculptures in the air for us to rest in while the music lasted. His playing seemed to come out of his heart, not merely his head, and in that heart I knew was a deep yearning for virtue and goodness. He is a man I am proud to call my friend.

(to be continued)

Over the Rhine was slated to play at the Hopkins Center for the Arts, which meant I could find some time with my friend Kenny Hutson. Kenny is a consummate musician, on this tour backing Linford and Karin on electric guitar, pedal steel, mandolin, dobro, and occasional vocals. That’s not all he plays, and he plays them all well. I’ve seen OtR in concert before, so this time we planned to attend primarily to hear Kenny play.

The day before the concert, it’s the band’s day off, and Kenny says we can pick him up at Willies American Guitars on Cleveland Avenue in St Paul. Should have known that’s where he’d be on a day off. He is waiting for us on the sidewalk, waving his left eye over his head like Mad Eye Moody, who he doesn’t look like, but the image comes to mind anyway. I told him a patch would be cooler for a musician, but he thinks this has far more comic possibilities.

Kenny is one of those friends with whom I am immediately at ease, knowing that no one need try to impress the other and no agenda is needed for a pleasant conversation to unfold. We try to find someplace to eat, since Kenny is hungry and wouldn’t you know it, we get lost winding through the streets in downtown St Paul. How ridiculous is that, especially since we have GPS in our car. He carries fishing gear with him on tour so after eating we wander over to Lake Minnetonka so he can try the fabled waters of Minnesota. (Nothing was caught, but it was a beautiful afternoon to be outside. Red-winged blackbirds called, mallard pairs few by, and in the distance we could hear the rasping calls of Canadian geese.)

And so we talked. Of his wife, sadly not with him on this tour, Katie Bowser who continues to work on her wonderful project introducing jazz to children, Coal Train Railroad. Of the ups and downs in all our lives since we last were together at their home in Nashville. Of disappointments and hopes, plans and celebrations, doubts and faith. We talked of music. Kenny learned to play the old fashioned way, by hanging out with musicians as he grew up in the South. At first he sat at the outer edge of the circle as they jammed and played. Slowly as he improved he was invited into the circle, until finally the old blues pickers let him lead out on a song, and everyone knew he was now a musician to be reckoned with. That free style, life affirming yet deeply authentic music is rooted in his soul, so that it seems less that he knows songs than that he breathes them. His solos during the concert confirmed that, providing searing riffs, quiet harmonies, and lovely expressive asides when each was needed to bring the song alive.

We talked of touring, comparing his experience as a musician to mine as I travel to speak at conferences (a little similar, mostly different). We talked of blogging, and living faithfully before God when neither of us work for some corporation that guarantees us an income down the road. The first time we visited their home and saw his studio, the clutter was everything we expected to see on the desk of a serious musician.

And true to his Southern roots, we talked of bourbon, this time Kenny describing the mellow goodness of Bulleit. The next night, as we sat in the audience waiting for the concert to begin, Kenny suddenly appeared from behind the curtain, slipped over to my seat and handed me a paper cup with a bit of ice and two fingers of one of Kentucky’s finest. A moment later we exchanged texts:

Me: “Just one taste and you KNOW there is a God.”

Kenny: “Amen.”

(to be continued)