a tune!

Aug 01, 2009 16:46

friends, here is a tune for you:

Willie Nelson - In the Garden

I'm not Christian except in that white-girl-raised-in-NA-got-presents-for-Christmas way, but this song I love dearly. Eve Sedgwick wrote a whole thing about Willie Nelson's yearning version of this old spiritual; I follow her in saying that it's astonishingly, breathtakingly, about the tenderness and love between two men; in the song, one of them is ostensibly Jesus, but that doesn't really seem to come up. Sedgwick uses this song to talk about the connections between homosexuality, fannish excess, religious kitch, camp, and the wish for a safe space for the expression of gay erotic desire; then she uses it to talk about how Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard were ttly making out all the time.

anyway, I'm listening to that right now. It's gorgeous. Listen to it.

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sharing is caring, tunes

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