“Will it play in Peoria?” is a quintessentially American question, the underlying assumption being that if the good folks of Peoria, Illinois accept it, America across the continent will. Out of this quintessentially American region rose a quintessentially American man, who as a child born in the years following the Second World War heard stories of the struggles of his parents and grandparents…of the working class poor scratching to make a decent living, the deck stacked against them by the rich and powerful American elite…of unions and strike-breakers and of men who’d lost it all striking out for nowhere across the plains and prairies of the Vast American Heartland. All of this steeping into and deeply imbuing the impressionable soul of the wide-eyed boy standing at the knees of his elders while their narratives and songs swept through him like dust-devils through the late-summer cornfields of central Illinois.
The kid grew up and went to college. And to this college one day came a man who’d begun a half-century earlier to sing of America as seen through the eyes of the common, unsung men and women who are this country’s backbone: those of stolid feet planted firmly on farm and ranch land; shop and factory floors. The visitor’s name was Burl Ives, 65 years old. Our young man was Doug Adair, 23 years wet behind the ears.
Burl’s wife Dorothy noticed the bond which had quickly formed between older man and younger, and suggested to Doug that some day far in the future, when he himself had gotten to be Burl’s age, with all travails and experience for worse and better that usually come with years stacked upon years, he might pick up from where Burl would lay things down and carry it forward himself, so that Burl and his music and above all his message would not be forgotten. Burl heartily agreed.
Doug Adair has now passed 65 years on this planet. And the strangest, most wonderful thing has happened…
For a number of years Doug has divided his time between the United States and Brazil. And not just Brazil…the most magical part of Brazil: Bahia, a land of penetrating folk traditions, where ancestral spirits (are seen to) manifest themselves in people walking the earth today, offering guidence in navigation through and around life’s numerous difficulties and barriers.
It was at a ceremony in Bahia for caboclos — ancestral spirits of indigenous, African and European blood, revered not only for their advice but for their ecumenical spirit of help and cooperation, reaching out to each other and others across what less enlightened people saw (and see) as impassible barriers — that Doug’s demeanor changed in a way which has now become common to him, his eyes taking on a faraway look, a song arising from within, seeming to come from somewhere else…
Now, the good folks in Peoria might have a different way of looking at it, but the good folks of Bahia see these manifestations in Doug as clear and obvious evidence of what they see around them all the time: benevolent spirits from the past manifesting in the here and now to lend wings to beleaguered spirits of the present, these trying as best they can to carry ponderous loads — the onerous responsibilities of the living — heaped upon increasingly frail backs by all-too-often unjust life, and people.
And if you catch a practical Midwesterner after the sun has fallen over the horizon and the moon has risen, on one of those nights of Indian summer when the wind blows warm like living breath, rattling dried leaves on the corn stalks left over from harvest…oaks and maples and beech waving like Birnam Wood about to march…that Midwesterner just might be persuaded to believe what their oh-so-exuberant Bahian brothers and sisters believe…
A now-ancestral spirit sings through Doug Adair.