Our Halloween series continues with the voice, music, and words of Dave Moore today as I present his piece “Sam and the Ghosts.”  And as bonus autumn content, this one takes place in a garden just past harvest time.

I haven’t kept a garden in decades, but Dave and long-time friend of this blog Paul Deaton do. They remind me that at about this latitude north, October is the time to have removed the final products and to prepare the bed for the interval until spring planting time returns.

I may not have done this for decades, but this process goes back — way back. Folks were planting crops in the Midwest long before colonization. The mound builders here, like the earthworks and standing-stone raisers in the British Isles, fed themselves on the invention of agriculture. So in that way, every garden — that small geographical gesture — is a memorial. William Blake said the rebellious angels of art must need to drive their plows over the bones of the dead. I don’t think he was speaking of colonization or commerce when making that point, but his maxim is true reportage anyway. Whether we are speaking of poetry or music or tomatoes, were we plant has likely been tilled before by dead people. Isn’t it proper then that we should honor them before we make our gestures in the soil?

The song sheet Dave handed me the day we recorded this song a few years back.

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In Dave’s poem which he made song, Sam* has forgotten this. Some ghosts remind him. In his poem they are ghosts of settlers. Outside of the poem, they are people created by Bob Dylan.**  Those definite levels in history are not the beginning, not the end. Who knows who ran the land from where the settlers’ family left to come to America? Then we do know who lived the land, and were so harshly displaced before the settlers’ opportunity. Who knows, maybe Hollis Brown’s farm is no longer farmland now after some other money has changed hands. How many songwriters are tilling Bob Dylan’s land?

Every seed you plant came from somewhere before you plant it. Every land has ancestors. Every garden is, or should be, a memorial. Winter will bury our gardens, turn our blank pages to blank pages again, and we wait and expect for spring.

The ancestors expect for spring too. We are that spring. The gaps of expecting are where the ghosts live.

To hear the LYL Band perform with Dave Moore singing his song “Sam and the Ghosts”  you can use the graphical player below if you see it. No player? This highlighted link is your alternative.

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*Neither Dave nor I can resist a pun. For extra Halloween-relevance points, Dave has named his gardener “Sam Hane.”

**”The Ballad of Hollis Brown”  is an exceptionally stark early Bob Dylan song set in an indeterminate time in rural South Dakota. In Dylan’s song, the seven-member Hollis farm family are starving. Here’s how it sounded when the first recording of it was released in 1964.