Category: Creativity

Andy Griffith, Art, Children, Creativity, Culture, Family, humanity, Love, Modern Life, Parenting, Spirituality, Television, Theology and Life13 Comments

Andy Griffith’s Kinder, Gentler Community

Gary Furr

I’ll admit it—I long for Mayberry and simpler living. 

Maybe it never existed, but something in us says, “It ought to.”

Andy Griffith died today on the Outer Banks of his native North Carolina where he lived.  A few years ago, I took my senior adults to the Outer Banks, and, other than seeing the place where “Nights of Rodanthe” was filmed and hearing about how one native got to be examined by Richard Gere as a bit part, the biggest thrill was hearing that Andy lived there still.  “You can still see him in the grocery store and he is an active part of the community,” she said solemnly.

We were the Baptist version of medieval pilgrims tracing the steps of a saint.  Andy Griffith, though Moravian, taught more Baptists their character virtues than almost anyone I knew.

Being a native of North Carolina, I fastened onto the Andy Griffith Show at an early age.  I was in elementary school when the show was on the air.  Andy, Aunt Bee, Otis Campbell, Thelma Lou and Helen, Goober, Gomer, Opie and Barney Fife were childhood friends.  I know a lot of the bits by part—I’ve watched and re-watched the reruns my whole adult life.  “Why do you watch the same shows over and over?” my wife asks.  But even she will watch “Aunt Bee the Warden” (she has a secret desire to imprison lazy men and beat them with a broom) and “Class Reunion,” and “Mr. McBeevy,” and all the others over and over.

It has been analyzed to death, of course.  From its lack of diversity to its nostalgia overdoses, the show has taken its share of hits.  And we all keep watching.  Having lived in small towns, of course, I can say “The Andy Griffith Show” was half of the equation—the ideal, good half.  Andy did capture the foibles, silliness and pettiness, but missing was meanness, racism and evil. Continue reading “Andy Griffith’s Kinder, Gentler Community”

Art, Books, Christianity, Creativity, Culture, Ethics, Family, Movie Reviews, Race, REVIEWS--Books, Movies, Music, Sports9 Comments

“The Blind Side” Gets Blindsided

Gary Furr

We prefer a safe mediocrity to a persuasive truth telling.

Baptist news wires recently carried the story about a successful protest by a Baptist preacher to remove a movie from Lifeway stores.  The movie is “The Blind Side,” starring Sandra Bullock.  It was based on the book by the same name by Michael Lewis, who also wrote, Liar’s Poker and Moneyball.

Michael Lewis

I happened to meet Michael Lewis years ago when he was writing the book, and he told me he was working on a “really interesting story.”  It was about a young man from the meanest streets of Memphis who was adopted by a family and placed in a white private Christian school.  The story is well known by now—Michael Oher went on to be a football star at the University of Mississippi and now plays for the Baltimore Ravens.

I bought and read the book when it came out, and went to see the film.  Football movies are pretty well required viewing in Alabama.  So I was more than amused with all the other moral problems at the moment—debt, wars, racism, the disintegration of families, and do I need to go on?—that a PG-13 movie could cause such an uproar.  According to the report,

LifeWay Christian Stores will no longer sell videos of “The Blind Side” after a Florida pastor proposed a resolution for next week’s Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting protesting the sale of a PG-13 movie that contains profanity and a racial slur…[the stores decided to] pull the movie, an inspirational film starring Sandra Bullock that tells the true story of a white Christian family that adopted a homeless black teenager who went on to play in the NFL, to avoid controversy at the June 19-20 SBC annual meeting in New Orleans.  [The pastor who brought the resolution] said there is much about the film to be commended, but there is no place in a Christian bookstore for a movie that includes explicit language that includes taking God’s name in vain.

I get it.  It’s Baptist to speak your mind.  I know language has become debased and misused.  And, it’s the right of any store and its owners to sell or not sell what it wishes.  Still, it stirred a few thoughts about the mostly non-existent tie between Christians, especially evangelical ones, and the world of the arts.  And why fewer people want to be Baptists.

Walter Brueggemann once said that in the book of Leviticus, which for some odd reason has become a moral center for a lot of people today, there is an emphasis on holiness as “purity.”  There are other forms of holiness in scripture—moral and ethical righteousness, for one, that sometimes comes into conflict with the notion of purity.  Jesus encountered this among the Pharisees, who could not do the deeper right things for fear of disturbing their own ethic of remaining personally removed from what might compromise, taint and violate their ethic of purification holiness.

I have thought a lot about Brueggemann’s distinction since I first read it.  Somehow, a fully biblical notion requires more than avoiding “impurities.”  Yet purity is important.  An obsession seems to lead always to a rather puny moral energy that dispirits more than it inspires.  Inevitably, it ends up with an account of morality that is always boycotting, removing itself from sinners and sin, and circling the wagons.

Continue reading ““The Blind Side” Gets Blindsided”

Art, Banjo, Bluegrass, Country Music, Creativity, Culture, Death, Doc Watson, Folk, Modern Life, Music1 Comment

Doc, Doug and Earl…Bluegrass Goodbyes

Gary Furr

A few days ago, I wrote about the too-soon loss of Doug Dillard, an extraordinary banjo player who was a bridge figure between Bill Monroe and the “pure bluegrass” (which is itself an irony, since Monroe was actually an innovator himself.  He took a hodgepodge of what is ssometimes called “old time music,” consisting of fiddle tunes for dancing, old folk tunes, blues and other music that flowed from Appalachia and the south and forged a unique sound dominated by the mandolin and banjo and fiddle.  He was not beyond experimenting himself, even bringing an accordion in a time or … Continue reading Doc, Doug and Earl…Bluegrass Goodbyes

Andy Griffith, Art, Banjo, Bluegrass, Country Music, Creativity, Dillard and Clark, Earl Scruggs, Folk, Music, The Dillards, The Dillards7 Comments

Doug, Doc and Earl…Bluegrass Breakdown and Cry

Gary Furr

The Darling Boys are no more This has been one of the unkindest of years in acoustic music.  First, Earl Scruggs, the Founding Father of bluegrass banjo, passed away (read my post on Earl’s death here CLICK)  back in March.  Then a few weeks ago, Doug Dillard, a rollicking banjo player who blazed a trail with the banjo across genres in the 1970s when he left the Dillards to join Gene Clark of the Byrds to form Dillard and Clark. Of course, you’d know old Doug for another reason, if you ever watched the Andy Griffith Show.  He was the … Continue reading Doug, Doc and Earl…Bluegrass Breakdown and Cry

Art, Brain, Creativity, humanity, Love, Memory, Music, music therapy, Oliver Sacks, Physiology4 Comments

The Songs Remember When: Part I

Gary Furr

“The Lord…gave me these sounds.” 

Oliver Sacks is a British-born neurologist whose maverick investigations inspired the Academy-Award winning movie, “Awakenings” and who gained notoriety for his book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of unusual cases of mental and emotional issues.  He is, as his website puts it, “physician, a best-selling author, and professor of neurology and psychiatry at the Columbia University Medical Center,” even being named the first Columbia University artist forhis contributions to the arts.  In his book Musicophilia, “Dr. Sacks investigates the power of music to move us, to heal and to haunt us.”

In his “Music and Memory Project,” Dr. Sacks collected and investigates the power of music on memory.  It is tempting, and I have even said this sometimes myself in thinking about identity, that when memory goes, so does our sense of identity and self.  Who am I when I can’t remember any more.  So often in my vocation I hear people say, “Mom left us long ago.”  In Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders, an individual descends into a solitary cocoon of long-term memories, and then finally into silence before death.  Where did what we knew as “the person” go?

A friend recently shared a very moving video posted on YouTube of Sacks’ project.   CLICK HERE TO VIEW    It is a remarkable record of a man named who has debilitating case of Parkinson’s disease which rendered him inert and lifeless most of the time.  They learned from his family about some of his favorite music from Cab Calloway and others early in his life and put it on an MP3 player and put on the ear phones.  The transformation is remarkable.  He is alive again, eyes bright and he begins to move to the rhythm and sing along.  A glow of life continues after the music is taken away.

He says, at the end, “The Lord…gave me these sounds.”  There is something remembered in our bodies, our minds, our selves, deep and irreplaceable.  Human beings and the earth God made are sacred, all of it.  We should treat it that way. Continue reading “The Songs Remember When: Part I”