Happy Fourth of July --

Friends have said our home is “a museum of American folk art.”

A cherry drop leaf table in the wood-paneled dining room. Around it, six sturdy, mid-19th cent. chairs decorated with hand-painted dogwood blossoms. A cherry corner-cupboard with wavy glass windows.

A log cabin quilt, made by my wife’s great-great-great-grandmother when she was 9 years old, in the guest room. Paintings, prints and hand-hooked rugs hang on plain plaster walls. Wool area rugs on polished pine floors. Redware, Flow Blue china, Native American ceramics grace the shelves in some rooms, hand-painted toy soldiers, pewter mugs and carved shorebirds in others.

A fire-screen closes off the fireplace during the warmer months. I made that fire-screen long ago. It displays a ‘tree of life’ rendered in little pieces of painted wood glued in place: a brown trunk and branches, green leaves, red apples, birds, a robin’s nest, a scampering squirrel.

Forty years ago we lived in a house that had a small workshop at the rear of the carriage house. I installed a used jig saw I’d picked up for $100 and ‘made stuff’ out there -- a Noah’s ark with animals in pairs, Old Man Noah, bald with a long gray beard, and his gray-haired wife, Joan. (Joan of Ark, ha, ha.) I made an Arabian camel caravan, an ‘Eskimo’ family with an igloo, kayak, dog sled, walruses, polar bears and a whale as large as all the other figures combined -- designed, cut from wood and hand-painted by the undersigned. Ever since I can remember I’ve loved ‘making stuff,’ though mostly out of music or words.

Our next home having no workshop, I sold the jig saw for $100, ending with a sigh my stint as a maker of wooden folk art.

Two years ago we moved from the inner city to what will likely be our last home, a Federalist country house, built when the Greek Revival style reigned. It made the Register of National Historic Landmarks. We hope to live to celebrate the house’s 200th birthday in 2030. It’s the perfect place for our collections, a museum indeed. When I was a boy, one of the many things I wanted to be some day was a museum curator. Now I live in one.

Young people quest after what they perceive to be authentic and recoil from what what seems to them to be pretentious and insincere. In that respect, Jo and I, now septuagenarians, are still young. Our life’s work, including our furnishings, my writings and music, all sprang from and express our authentic selves.

“Know thyself,” said Socrates.

“Do your own thing and I shall know you,” said Emerson.

I think we could look those two old-timers in the eye and say, “We’ve done our best.”

So did a certain Virginia Thompson.

I set to music the words embroidered on a 19-century sampler by a certain little girl named Virginia Thompson, succinctly stating her name, nationality, home state and faith:

Virginia Thompson is my name,
America my nation.
Ohio is my dwelling place
And Christ is my salvation.

I admire her simple honesty. It’s good to be in the presence of someone who knows who they are and where they are, physically and spiritually. I tried to make my musical setting of the poem fittingly simple and honest.

The style of the music is in the manner of Aaron Copland’s “Old American Songs.” With one small and very un-Copland like touch.

After the singer has finished, the piano offers up an unexpected chord, briefly at odds with what the singer has asserted: a C sharp minor chord in a piece that is otherwise firmly in good old G major.

It could be understood as a hint of disillusion, a touch of irony. But I don’t ascribe a specific meaning to that little departure from the straight-up character of the rest of the piece. I only meant to make the song a little more intriguing by setting up an opposite to be reconciled. After the words are sung, listeners would expect the pianist to just “wrap it up” with a little coda. She accomplishes that, but, with that chord, four measures back from the end, the accompaniment comments on what has come before and on what may yet come for Virginia as she lives the life ahead of her.

Like the fire-screen I made, like much else in our home, this “American Sampler Song” is an artifact of Ohio folk art; it happens to be a song instead of a quilt, a plate, a painting or an antique walnut cupboard. It seems apt for this Fourth of July.

To hear soprano Heidi Miller and pianist Beth Troendly performing “American Sampler Song,” click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.