Paperwork: Sometimes folksingers provide the best record of history

“Alexa ... play music by Joan Baez.”

This was an impulse request. I was feeling nostalgic and Baez could take me back to the late ‘60s. But she didn’t. Instead I heard …

“A young man came to a house of prayer.

“They did not ask what brought him there.

“He was not friend, he was not kin

“But they opened the door and let him in.”

The Baez voice dominated over a simple piano pulse. It resonated like a church hymn and told the story of the shocking shooting that took nine lives at the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. The focus turned to the day mourners gathered. President Obama was there, which helped draw national attention.

Baez had pulled me into more current events and the violence we are learning to live with. I researched more about the song.

Singer/songwriter Zoe Mulford felt a need to record that day ... for history.

Before singing what she wrote, she explains: “In the old days folksingers would tell us the news. Something would happen. A battle, a shipwreck, a horrible murder. And somebody would write it up on a broadsheet ballad and sing it in the street and over time the news would become history. And in time maybe the history would be forgotten but we still sing those songs.

“Now these days we don’t need folksingers to tell us the news. We all have the news in our pockets 24/7. And news becomes old news and is forgotten but maybe we need the songs to help us remember cuz it all comes round again.”

The song is on her 2017 album “Small Brown Birds” and revolves around this refrain:

“The President came to speak some words

“And the cameras rolled and the nation heard.

“But no words could say what must be said

“For all the living and the dead.

“So on that day and in that place

“The President sang Amazing Grace.”

“It’s an amazing little tune,” Baez told Ari Shapiro during an interview for NPRs “All Things Considered” in 2018. She first heard the song on her car radio. Eventually “The President Sang Amazing Grace” was on her 2018 album “Whistle Down the Wind.”

“When I first heard it, I had to pull the car over, because I started crying. And then for the first two weeks of trying to figure it out on the guitar, I kept crying. I was afraid that when I got in the studio, it wouldn’t be over. But I went into the studio, and then I just looked at the musicians and I said, ‘Let’s go to church.’”

So, I no longer felt nostalgic. Although Baez always was good at plugging me into the sadness and human suffering of current times.

There are times that humanity overwhelms me. Not politics or national debate, but simple actions on the street or some smaller stage. A single voice with purpose. In this case the voice was in song.

The lyrics didn’t feel political, but more spiritual and truthful because there are no words to bring back lives lost. There are no words to ease the pain. There are no words that will make it stop.

But there were words for a song. And Zoe Mulford was right.

“Maybe we need the songs to help us remember cuz it all comes round again.”

Lonny Cain, retired managing editor of The Times in Ottawa, also was a reporter for The Herald-News in Joliet in the 1970s. His PaperWork email is lonnyjcain@gmail.com. Or mail The Times, 110 W. Jefferson St., Ottawa, IL 61350.