|
|
|
YOUR TALENTS ARE YOUR CALLINGS By Dalton Roberts Chattanooga Times-Free Press April 7, 2000 Recently I was interviewed for a documentary on the trials and tribulations of the music business. Take my word for it – I know something about that. Embarking on a career as a musician and songwriter is something like whipping yourself regularly with barbed wire, climbing Billy Goat Hill barefoot through broken glass, and shinnying up a well-greased flagpole. It is not suitable work for the faint-hearted. Yet, I have pursued this career for 36 years. It literally took years for me to get anybody who was somebody to listen to my songs. Then it took several more years to get one recorded and even more years to get a decent hit. All in all, I have had less success with it than any of the other half dozen ventures of my life. If I could stomach wading through all my songwriter's tales of woe and your gourd would tolerate that much drilling, you would surely conclude that I am in an advanced stage of masochism. You might graciously offer to find me some hot embers to roll in to assuage my deep need for pain. Hey, hold off on the embers. There may be another explanation for it. It came out in this question posed by the interviewer: "If a person wants to be a singer or songwriter and gives it all they've got for a long, long time and nothing happens, shouldn't they just quit?" Most do. In the short time I lived in Nashville and worked the streets around Music Row, I saw some of the finest singers and writers I have ever known starve out and head for home. Each time I felt I was watching a funeral. It's the same feeling I had when I saw a young man at the religious college I attended sell off some things for bus fare home, setting aside what he strongly felt to be the call of God to preach. How do you quit doing what you are here to do? If you can write good songs and have written good songs and know you have many more in you, you are a songwriter. Are you going to quit being who and what you are? All the good writers and singers I have known who gave up and quit became bitter. I had rather be a man coping with constant disappointment but ever hopeful of eventual success, than to be a bitter quitter. Let us also remember there is such a thing as having great fun with writing or making music. Simply doing it for its own sake, for the inherent pleasure of flexing original equipment spiritual muscles. The great poet is the one who writes poetry for poetry's sake. The great doctor is the one who had a passion for healing in his soul long before his fingers developed the skills of a surgeon. The songwriter whose mind was tossing out lines long before there was any knowledge of proper lyrical and melodic construction is in the throes of a calling and will not be happy until the call is answered. Emerson rightly said our callings are in our talents. If Mother Teresa can honor her calling as a nurse, ministering to dying people decade after decade with nothing but a subsistence level of pay, then musicians and writers can be true to their callings in the same spirit of service and fidelity to the Giver of all gifts and talents. If invoking the Deity in a discussion of talents is a turn-off for you, structure it in terms of heeding the call of your own highest self to the work that is dearest and most meaningful to you. Whatever we call it, it is living from our core. It is being who we are and doing what we long to do in those moments when our hearts dare to dream their dreams. If you give that up, it's a funeral.
|