What is the sound of spirituality? Traditional? Choral? Ecstatic?

Robin Holcomb’s catalogue of CD’s – the Appalachian Robin Holcomb, the jazzier Rockabye, the concerto-like Little Three, and her more recent, sonorous The Big Time
play like a sibyl hanging from a branch of the American Tree.

For most of us church goers, hers isn’t spiritual music at all. We won’t find virtuoso performances of familiar hymns. No heart-felt praise music here, either. In fact, we won’t find the names of God or Jesus invoked anywhere in songs titled “Yr Mother Called Them Farmhouses,” “Widowmaker,” and “Like I Care.” Yet, forgive me, I hear more American spirit in her quirky, sonic synthesis than in a hundred choruses of Handel’s Messiah.

To my ear, Robin Holcomb has a spiritual imagination as big as America. She grew up in Georgia, lived for a time in a shack on stilts, and writes such lyrics as “A deer struck down by a car/Brings two cows in trade,” as well as melodies woven together from snippets of childhood memories. Her voice is not familiar, nor is it unpleasant like the voice from the back of a white, clapboard church on Monday at four in the morning.

And it is exactly this sound of empty churches, of American sanctuaries, some of them cathedrals, some of them houses, some of them “hollers,” that allows the spirits to reconvene, recombine, and sing forth. She has captured the melody of Pacific weather as it rolls across the Northwest in “Primavera,” singing “Liquor on the breath/of a wind bearing rain.” She has sounded out in simple piano our passing humanity in “Graveyard Song,” singing “Wipe the sorrow from your eyes/Take comfort in the sound.”

Robin Holcomb’s bio reads that she studied ethnomusicology and composition at U. C. Santa Cruz and co-founded both Studio Henry and the New York Composers Orchestra with her husband Wayne Horwitz while they lived in New York. She now lives in Seattle, performing a little, and claiming that she does not like her recordings. I do not find this surprising. None of them ever play like she imagines, which is common for those who do not reproduce tradition but play with it like a child.

Her most recent recording, The Big Time, more often grabs a hold of the language of Christian spirituality. In “Tell the Good Friend on Your Left,” she sings of “Light[ing] up the face asleep/It’s one of the saints in one of the poses,” sounding a fleeting Presbyterianism which finds the spirit-filled in a moment of the ordinary. For Robin, the spiritual is so ordinary that we need to simply “Tell the good friend on your left/(the story improves the more it’s repeated)/Wake up a little each day/That’s all there is to being born again.”

A sibyl hanging from a branch of the American tree – all we need to do is listen to Creation. If we’ve forgotten, Robin Holcomb can remind us how divining the spirit is done.