Our small apartment is filled with books. Many, many books. Our growing family currently makes their home in a third floor, one bedroom apartment, within an old Victorian in West Philadelphia. Our two girls crawl and stomp around, loudly, sometimes chaotically, other times quietly like they are keeping a secret, but sometimes I think, they are making music all their own, a little orchestra of everyday life. “Caw, caw! A crow, Mama!” comes excitedly from my toddler as she echoes the sound she hears from outside our window, high up in the trees.  “Croo, croo,” responds her baby sister.  Their instruments are not violins, or trumpets, or trombones, and while a piano sometimes makes its voice heard, along with an out of tune banjo, mostly the sounds of bouncing balls, sighs and giggles, and wooden shaker eggs, and turning pages, and clapping hands make up their musical suite. 

In our living room, the walls have been replaced by bookshelves and framed art prints and finger-painted art creations. But on one wall hangs a print that stands out from the rest, mostly because of its sheer size. It is a laminated museum poster of Thomas Hart Benton’s The Sources of Country Music.

It is a wonderfully loud painting. In the center of the background a puffing train storms through the scene, a light beaming, guiding its way, and doubling as a spotlight for the musical performance taking place. Voices, both human and instrumental, sway and move and merge and marry, and as the viewer I’m both pulled into the scene, almost as if I’m flying in Mary Poppins chalk-style. But I also can just sit and remain a viewer, receiving the beauty being offered. 

The top left corner is home to a choir of singers. I like to imagine they are a shape-note choir, a mix of voices high and low, with notes bouncing, lilting, halting, pausing, waiting, stretching, guided by the conductor’s strong arms. Front and center is a quintet, three men and two women, join their skilled bodies, fingers, to fill the air with sweet melodies, perhaps also melancholic melodies too. Songs that speak of God and suffering and joy, and also mama telling stories and papa coming home. Songs filled with memories and songs filled with dreams, some with the sadness of dying, others with the hope of new life and growth, alongside the purple mountain flower in the bottom corner.

Several couples twirl and spin, holding each other close, moved by the music, moved by the sky, moved by the Spirit, dwelling high on the mountain in the distance, moved by the landscape which is swaying along with them. 

And then there is a lone voice, fingers like magic on those banjo strings. He is the hidden center to the painting, in many ways, he is the soul of the painting. Eyes and voice point us, the viewer, towards the church high up on the hill, just in case we’ve missed it there in the background. His creation is the origin of much of the music that fills the rest of the canvas. His voice speaks of pain, of freedom, of hope, of trust, of unimaginable suffering, and yet there is always a perfect sweetness, a serenity, that lifts us up into another place, a meeting point between the here and there.

And behind this banjo player, four African American women stand by the river’s edge, dancing, praising, standing in the light under the clear blue sky. I imagine their arms and legs and hips moving to the rhythm of the plucking of the banjo’s strings, a spiritual, a hymn.

And so sometimes I look over at this painting and think that the shaking rattles, drumming of tin box, undisciplined recorder, flipping of pages, the everyday orchestra joins in with the fiddles and dulcimer and guitar and banjo and shape note singers. Sometimes when our record player is on, and our toddler spins and twirls and stomps in her magical toddler way—“Dance, Mama, I’m dancin’”—it seems like the painting has poured itself out into our living room and we’ve joined the scene. And while sometimes I lose my patience, snap at my toddler, or get annoyed at my 11-month-old’s fingers that like to pinch my neck, perhaps it’s just all part of the musical performance. Just like the shape-note choir in the corner, our space is filled with bouncing, lilting, halting, pausing, waiting, stretching; and sometimes this brings joy and tears of laughter, but other times there’s a pain and difficulty in the process of being expanded. If we let it, the art we live with can move us towards an experience of a kind of wholeness. A wholeness that can change us, inspire us, rattle us, transform us, expand us to greater love, and perhaps a fuller humanity.