I’ve been enjoying the album “On the Road from Appomattox,” the latest release of outstanding local bluegrass band Southern Rail.
I’ve also been asking myself what makes a song on the album, “Mr. Beford’s Barn,” so moving.
An old man comes to the narrator’s farm and says he wants to see the barn he helped his daddy build years ago. The barn is very solidly constructed, nearly 100 years old now, and the refrain says it will probably last another hundred years.
It makes a person think about how fine it is to make something that lasts hundreds of years. But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if maybe the hundred-year-ness is not what’s moving.
The old man will not be there for hundreds of years and will not be enjoying the fact that the barn lasted so long. The reason he wants to see it is that he knows he helped make something that’s very fine. It’s the well-built-ness that is valuable. The hundreds of years are merely a feature of the value.
I think you will like the song. Although it is not on YouTube, the band lists its YouTube songs here, and you might want to listen to a few if you are thinking of buying Appomattox.
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