Stephen Foster, the Wildebeest and Me The difference between the way a swarm or herd moves and the way, say, a crowd of panicked people disperses is this: individuals in a swarming herd have no need to understand why they're running before they run. Each creature in the herd reacts to the movements of her immediate neighbors so that when one caribou tenses because she sees a wolf on the ridge, a ripple of tensing muscles travels through the herd, one caribou at a time, at lightning speed. They are all running before most of them have considered why they're moving or where they're going. This mad dashing makes for quick escapes, but it has drawbacks. The wildebeest herds sometimes gallop straight off a cliff and hundreds are dead before they can manage to come to a stop. Still, watching a flock of birds or a herd of wildebeests move is dazzling to the human eye. It is meant to be so. Humans have a natural predator's gaze and the undulating movement of swarming creatures confuses the hunter's attempts to spot a single animal to kill. Yet our eyes are drawn to swarming creatures by more than hunger. Why do we pause to watch a flock of starlings whirl up in the wind? Why should the synchronized tapestry of darting minnows stop us at the edge of the pond? Our eyes hunger, of course, not only to see food. They may yearn just as much to see beauty. Our ears, too, are equally famished. We pause to listen to bird song regardless of whether we're in the mood to eat birds. Those twittering melodies may fill us not with the urge to kill, but rather with the urge to sing ourselves. What strange ears we have! Still, I can't help wondering - what does it feel like to be a creature born inseparable from its flock, to know and do little that is not connected to the movements of your brothers around you? No matter how wondrously we imagine such swarming unity, the wildebeest herds do not run to revel in their own grace. Herd movements are motivated by fear and need, even if our eyes insist on seeing grandeur in the panicked hooves galloping past. Yet think of it - to feel such connection with another's moving muscles that you lose track of your own flesh within the multitude! A single bee or a single wildebeest - neither can survive long on their own, but each within its swarm is part of a mighty force. What peace must descend upon them in those rare moments of calm when they are all simply alive together, resting in the safety of the multitude. Pondering such alien serenity on my living room couch one afternoon and trying to find a way to make it into song - it suddenly occurred to me that I actually did know a little of what it felt like to run with the herd. Songwriting is just such a storm of calling and answering voices, one song connected to and inspired by the last, all of them galloping forward as we sing the collective song of our species. None of us will ever hear our grand song in its entirety, but we may take comfort - like wildebeests calling, "Gnu! Gnu!" back and forth across the plain - in knowing that we are part of something far bigger than each little voice alone. It's estimated that the Serengeti wildebeests have been running their circles around the African plain for at least two million years! Life for the individual wildebeest, though, is fraught with peril. Within minutes of birth the wildebeest must stand and run or be left behind. Its life will be a constant race toward food and water and away from death. Year after year they run on, preyed upon by lions and crocs at every turn, weaving in and out of one another's path in their endless fearful galloping. And yet, inevitably the day will come when each of these massive creatures will be pulled from the running swarm by the snap of a jaw. Wildebeests are born to run a race that they will all lose, one by one. This individual failure is the herd's great strength. The old and the ailing are culled, and the strong gallop onward, never slowing their thundering pace. We are not accustomed to thinking of failure as a kind of success, but one creature's survival is always another's defeat. A songwriter's failures, of course, do not often end in the jaws of a croc, but crafting a song is also a doomed pursuit. The pleasure we take in listening to music is a pleasure we can't really recreate by writing songs, yet we who try, we continue to try and try. Save for fleeting moments of transcendence when we are able to hear something bigger and brighter in our music than the trail of our small thoughts, most songwriters cannot hear their own work with the same pure pleasure they take in hearing someone else's music. Yet it is just this restless self-scrutiny that drives us to write another song. And another. The only easy pleasure for a songwriter, or a calling wildebeest, is the moment we cry out, "Gnu! Gnu!" and hear an audience answer back with applause (or an answering cry of "Gnu!") and we know we have been heard and are not alone. Even Stephen Foster, arguably America's greatest songwriter, surely never took the same pleasure in his music as his audience did (and continues to do). Foster's songs were written for profit and he sold them as sheet music by the thousands to the two main markets for songs in mid-19th-century America: the parlor and the minstrel tent. Parlor ballads, like Foster's, "Beautiful Dreamer," were sentimental songs meant to be sung by the family gathered round the piano. Yet what Foster knew of the quiet hearth of family life was probably fleeting. He was an alcoholic, abandoned by wife and child, a man who squandered his money, spent much of his life in rented rooms, and died at 37 in a flophouse in New York's Bowery. Minstrel songs, like Foster's "Oh! Susanna," were surreal and bawdy entertainment. They were written in the imagined dialect of American slaves and performed in blackface. What Foster knew or cared about the plight of American slaves probably didn't amount to much. He was a Northerner who had rarely visited the South and had had perhaps only fleeting glimpses of actual slaves. There is some evidence that Foster was part of an abolitionist movement, and he may have thought he was giving voice to a voiceless populace by writing minstrel songs, but to the modern ear it is impossible to listen to most of these songs without being dismayed by racist sentiment and slurs. Yet Foster's songs, despite his seeming disconnection from his subject matter, are often far better than they ought to be. "The Old Folks at Home" is a minstrel song with a reprehensible conceit to its lyrics: an ex-slave sings of longing to end his wandering and return to the carefree days of life on the plantation. In spite of this song's meager understanding of real slave life, and surely in spite of Foster's intention to depict the slave's voice as childlike in its naïveté, well, the song is still great. Its melody, plaintive rising cadence, visions of home and family - it's glorious. It is, in fact, still the state song of Florida. "All up and down de whole creation," the freed slave sings. Sadly I roam. Still longing for de old plantation and de old folks at home. The song evokes a deep sense of the innate loneliness of the human condition - that unquenchable feeling we have even when surrounded by friends and family; that we are a creature separated from the rest of the world's living things, outcast from the garden of Eden, ever in search of our true home. Of course no modern ear can listen to "Old Folks at Home" without considering the baser intentions of its author and the terrible historical context he was writing in. The song is surely a triumph, but a blind failure at the same time. That's the great mystery of songwriting - like wildebeests madly galloping, songwriters sometimes stumble unexpectedly to the edge of a gleaming shore. Our song "Wildebeest," is about this restless search for deep connections that haunts the human heart. I hope you hear echoes of one of Foster's greatest songs, "Beautiful Dreamer" within our lesser song as well as the solemn call of the hymn, "Shall We Gather at the River." Both of these songs (as well as our own song of "Wildebeest") are concerned with baptism in magical waters. Carl Jung wrote of a collective sea of dreams from which all human dreams come streaming. Are songs then the lonely rivulets of forgotten dreams searching a way back to that inner sea? We have finished our song, "Wildebeest," but I still haven't finished the song that will lead us back to the long-lost shores. I may not know how to finish such a song, but I do know how it begins: "Gnu! Gnu! I await your answering cry across the arid plain. Rennie Sparks is the lyricist and banjo player for the folk duo The Handsome Family, and the author of "Wilderness," a collection of essays and art to accompany the group's latest album, also titled "Wilderness."