Some 15 years ago in Philadelphia, island musician Kat Eggleston told her friend Utah Phillips about her father’s memories as a child in the Dust Bowl, one of the greatest agricultural disasters in American history.
“Every week, he’d see another funeral and another farm go up for auction,” she told him.
Phillips, a legendary folk singer, issued a friendly challenge: “You better get that line in a song. Otherwise, I will.”
A year later, Eggleston composed “Rain,” a song about a boy’s memory of rain during a drought in Oklahoma that lasted seven years, that killed grown men and young children, that blackened the skies and devastated a region.
“Rain … Millions of drops coming down / fills swimming holes deep, sings you to sleep / and it keeps all the dirt on the ground.”
On Saturday, Eggleston will sing it again, this time with the Free Range Folk Choir as backup and harmony. Shane Jewell, who directs Free Range, arranged the piece, a moving and full-bodied rendition that will likely speak to many on Vashon who know all about “millions of drops coming down.”
“When I first heard ‘Rain,’ I couldn’t help myself — I started singing along harmony during the chorus. It just begged for singers to join in,” Jewell said, describing a night six years ago when he heard Eggleston perform the piece. “What a beautiful song and a different relationship we have on Vashon — its miraculous and life-giving nature, the longed-for gift of soft rain.”
And what a gift, he added, to perform it with Eggleston.
On an island steeped in musical talent, Eggleston stands out. She’s been hailed not only for her rich, Celtic-inspired voice, but also for the emotional depth of her song-writing, her humor, her ease on stage and virtuosic guitar-playing. She has collaborated with David Bromberg and Tom Dundee, has been awarded album of the year by various music organizations and been praised by critics from small folk music publications to The Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune.
She’s also a storyteller, like her father, Al Eggleston, a garrulous and colorful islander who passed away last fall.
Kat was close to Al. In 2008, she left a career in Chicago as a musician and actor to return to her family home on Vashon and care for her aging father. Even so, she knew nothing about his childhood experiences during the Dust Bowl until she took her parents to see the musical “Woody Guthrie’s American Song” in 1989. The musical included much about the Dust Bowl — Guthrie, after all, was called “the Dust Bowl balladeer” — and after the show, Eggleston took her parents backstage to meet the cast.
“(Al) told them about Black Sunday,” she recalled, referring to the April 14, 1935, dust storm, one of the most devastating. “He said it looked like a black prairie fire, so extreme he couldn’t tell what it was.”
It was an eye-opening moment for Eggleston.
“I was fascinated by his decades of silence,” she said.
Over the next few years she continued to probe, getting more stories from her father about Oklahoma in the 1930s. The memories were painful, and he would sometimes put his head in his hands and cry. But he also described how he found a refuge from the environmental disaster through his vivid imagination and love, even then, of storytelling.
And so came two songs about her father’s years in Oklahoma: “Rain” and “Africa,” both of which Eggleston will perform with Free Range and both of which explore a dark chapter of American history through the eyes of an imaginative and irrepressible child.
“Rain … Coming down soft as a dream / sometimes for hours, drenching the flowers, / washing everything clean.”
Both Jewell and Eggleston see the concert as a tribute to her father.
“My dad would have loved it,” she said. “He would have been very moved by it. And it probably would have made him cry.”
The Free Range Folk Choir concert with Kat Eggleston will be held at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Vashon High School theater.
There is a suggested donation of $5 to $10.
— Leslie Brown, for The Beachcomber
