“Now when you die
your life goes on
It doesn’t end here
when you’re gone
Every soul is filled with light
It never ends, if I’m right”
A band brought together nearly 45 years ago as an attraction at Opryland USA theme park in Nashville, Diamond Rio is still going strong and touring all these years later.
The group worked through name and lineup changes until 1990, but once they settled on the band name and lineup, things took off fast, signing to a national record deal in 1991 and recording their first No. 1 single that same year.
“I Believe” was the group’s fifth top-charted single in 2003, with lyrics that were used by many at funerals, though the music video shows the lead actor’s wife waking up from a terrible accident as the song concludes.
May 3-9 is National Music Week, sponsored by the National Federation of Music Clubs. This year’s theme for the week is “Music is our constant companion.”
As I was preparing for this week and talking with Jamee Kattner about what was going on in Huron to celebrate the week, I lay in bed one evening, and this song came on my Apple Music. The quoted portion got me thinking of all of those, dead and alive, who have influenced me in my music journey, and about the time I was starting to digest that thought, this line at the close of the song rang through:
“There are more than angels watching over me. I believe.”
In Randy Alcorn’s book “Heaven”, the writer examines the actual Biblical text regarding heaven and the difference between what has become societal belief. One of those is that nothing Biblical points to humans ever becoming angels in heaven; in fact, the Bible points out that angels and humans are quite different in the afterlife in form and function.
So when that line about “more than angels” watching over came through in the song, it caught my ear.
Music is all around us, and one of the most amazing things to consider is that music was here before us on Earth, and it will be here long after we’re gone.
What carries our legacy of human-made and human-formed music forward are those who are willing to teach it and encourage it in new generations. Their lessons to love, experience, and further share music become a companion for us moving forward.
I think of elementary music teachers who had us go out into the playground and tap a drumstick on playground equipment to hear the different tone for each spot we hit or the former Plainsman editor who happened to be my first church choir director and encouraged me as a young member of his adult choir, or my own grandmother, who in her final year of life asked me to sing as she accompanied on the organ at church, one of my final long-standing memories with her.
…and finally to Barb Valer, whom I wrote a column about at her passing last November. She was a consistent encouragement to me when I would sing in church and was part of that first church choir I participated in, but the legacy of her daughter then taking over as choir director and working with me individually to get me out of my shell to use my singing talent for things like singing telegrams or as entertainment for women’s club meetings in town, and now Barb’s granddaughter, Jamee, who used her platform as Miss South Dakota to encourage the love of music at all ages…that’s a legacy that is more than an angel.
When you think about a companion, the first definition from Merriam-Webster’s dictionary is “one that accompanies another,” which is what most people immediately think of, but it’s the third definition of the word listed by the dictionary that seems to more accurately portray music, at least to me: “one that is closely connected with something similar.”
We are music. How we interact with the world creates our own individual soundtrack, and the intentional music created is a companion, the way that a movie based on a book is a companion to the book.
Those who passed music to us in our lives are part of the verses of the soundtrack we live each day, but we get to continue writing in order to pass on the tune to generations to come so they can learn to embrace and interact with their constant lifelong companion, music.
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