On Hearing an Old Disc Featuring Singer Jean Ritchie
We're catching here her blue-eyed sound,
her moist Kentucky old-world tones
lost in the melodic past....
But what's this?
Her voice is changing character -
becoming a gentle ghost
to haunt her blue, to shed the scent
of another hope, another age.
"Let the sun shine down on me!"
The song
learns windows on her tongue - as if
sudden a bird in a noon-lit room
finds freedom from its cage - as if
unaccountably
from lip to lip distilled
those words flow to her down the folk-sung years....
The wood thrush in her echoes now in us:
the yearning on this disc is being fulfilled.
