Hiss Golden Messenger - Forward, Children: A fundraiser for Durham Public Schools students '2020

Tracks list

Tracklist

01. Call Him Daylight (Live)
02. Biloxi (Live)
03. My Wing (Live)
04. Red Rose Nantahala (Live)
05. Saturdays Song (Live)
06. When the Wall Comes Down (Live)*
07. As the Crow Flies (Live)
08. Highland Grace (Live)
09. I Need a Teacher (Live)
10. Heart Like a Levee (Live)
11. Jesus Shot Me in the Head (Live)
12. Happy Birthday, Baby (Live)
13. Cats Eye Blue (Live)
14. Southern Grammar (Live)*
15. Blue Country Mystic (Live)

*24bits - 44.1kHz

When M.C. Taylor moved to North Carolina more than a dozen years ago now, Hiss
Golden Messenger was his private enterprise, an outlet for the curious songs he
composed quietly at his kitchen table in the country. But soon after Taylor and
his budding family moved to a modest home nestled back from busy roads in the
gentle Durham hills, he began building a network of local aces, all sympathetic
to songs that documented his quest to be a better human being. Hiss Golden
Messenger became and remain a community endeavor, an indelible part of North
Carolina’s historic and contemporary musical fabric. The 15 songs of
Forward, Children: A fundraiser for Durham Public Schools students are an
instant illustration of that decade-long arc, a one-night snapshot of Hiss
Golden Messenger’s metamorphosis from solitary songwriter fare to
full-band jubilee.

Just days into 2020, the quintet—well-rested from a holiday respite after
a busy 2019 that included some 60 shows across the United States and the release
of the gripping Terms of Surrender—loaded into their home region’s
legendary hub, Cat’s Cradle, for a two-night stand. For nearly 90
minutes, they smoke, sorting through the greatest hits of the Hiss Golden
Messenger songbook with the intuition of a band that accepts these tunes as
gospel but plays them with the verve of five folks delighted to be back on the
same stage.

Lifted by trombone and organ, “Highland Grace” sounds here like a
prayer for the salvation of love. Buttressed by bounding piano,
“Saturday’s Song” feels like a relief anthem for these
fraught times, a beaming reminder of celebration and communion. Drifting and
then roaring, “When the Wall Comes Down” is an urgent reminder that
catastrophe and humanity know no arbitrary borders, that we are all forever
bound to one another. During “Jesus Shot Me in the Head,” they
unravel into a cleansing 12-minute upheaval, the sound of self-doubt looking for
the relief of resolution—and finding it, at last.

The son of two teachers, Taylor taught for a spell at the University of North
Carolina-Chapel Hill, arguably the nation’s first public university,
after finishing his graduate degree there, joining one of the country’s
proudest educational lineages. His wife, Abby, is now an ESL instructor in
Durham, and his children, Elijah and Ione, are in the fifth and first grades
there, respectively. In mid-March, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Durham Public
Schools closed like most others nationwide, at least through mid-May. The
necessary move means that many children throughout the school system
don’t know where they’ll get their next meal, a profound failure
of our social safety network but a profound opportunity for our collective help.
All profits from Forward, Children will benefit the Durham Public Schools
Foundation. “It’s my duty as a dad of students and the spouse of a
teacher,” Taylor says, “to give what I can.”

Forward, Children is not just the sound of a great band at work, which it surely
is. And it is not just the sound of the community that helped create Hiss Golden
Messenger coming together to hear what it’s made in a homecoming of
hundreds. It is, all told, the sound of communion, blessedly preserved to tape
for times like these, when we need any communion we can get.

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