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The last time I saw singer-songwriter David Olney was on the greenway in Sylvan Park. He had a beard that was part prophet Isaiah, part Letterman. We stopped a minute to talk not about music but something else weighing on his thoughts — Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” He was learning lines from the play. I wasn’t surprised.
Olney was a much-loved blues/roots/rocker whose agile mind defied category. He wrote about jailbird daydreamers, letters from Mexico, soul desolation, undying love, sweet sugaree, John Dillinger, Panama City, Socrates. Life’s bewildering extravagance was his material. To me, his high-spirited shows got better as he got older. He started quoting 19th-century poets like Browning and Shelley during performances. It worked no matter how raucous the crowd.
Olney died in January, age 71, on stage in Florida. There’s a memorial service for him at 6:30 p.m. Monday at the Belcourt, 2102 Belcourt Ave., in Nashville.
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Over the years, we had coffee occasionally. Religion always came up. Rhode Islander David came here in the 1970s, helped define the music scene, and pondered Nashville’s spiritual compulsions. He once told me he went to church but was still sorting out the Trinity — reciting the creed, he quipped, he felt uneasy encountering so many “whoppers” so early in the morning.
But he kept at it, the puzzle of faith. “Christmas has a lot of hoopla, but anybody can be born,” he said. Easter announces a different kind of news. “Now, I can either blow the whole thing off and stop going to church — and I’ve done that before — or I can go at it this way: Someone started telling the Easter story and they believed it, and I have to honor that. … We have the free will to pick the stories of this world that we will be moved by.”
Indirection was David’s thing, and it made him a poet. He wrote songs about Jesus without naming him, a startling innovation in this world of God-talk. In his great song “Jerusalem Tomorrow,” a con man ends up tagging along with Jesus just before the blindsiding catastrophe of Good Friday.
Later David recorded a menacing number called “Situation” about a guy in a tight spot, and everything’s about to blow, so he picks up the phone. “Boss I know you’re a busy man — don’t mean to worry you none — but someone better get down here — we got a situation.” I took it as a prayer and still do.
Shakespeare’s Lear was turbulent and tragic. David Olney’s defiant art answered life’s turbulence and tragedy and will always give me joy.
Ray Waddle is a former Tennessean religion editor. See raywaddle.com.
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