Catherine Russell: 'Real Thing' Gets Sentimental

DATE June 11, 2008 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Jazz singer Catherine Russell discusses her life and
career
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

There's a singer I suspect you haven't heard that I'd like to introduce you
to. Her name is Catherine Russell. On her new CD, "Sentimental Streak," she
does songs associated with Bessie Smith, Frank Sinatra, Hoagy Carmichael, Lena
Horne and her late father, Luis Russell. He was a pianist, composer and
arranger who served as Louis Armstrong's music director during much of the
1930s and in the early 1940s, and also led his own band. Catherine Russell is
now in her early 50s and spent much of her career as a backup singer for such
performers as Paul Simon, David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper and the band Steely Dan.
"Sentimental Streak" is the second CD she's made under her own name. Let's
start with the opening track, "So Little Time, So Much To Do," a song first
recorded by Armstrong with an arrangement by Catherine's father. That
arrangement is recreated in this new recording.

(Soundbite of "So Little Time, So Much To Do")

Ms. CATHERINE HARRIS: (Singing) There's so little time, so much to do
There's so little time for dreams to come true
Many a ship to sail, many a magic land,
Many a moonlit trail, many a road to walk hand in hand
There are songs of love we never had sung
Let's not waste an hour, the night is still young
Lifetime's not enough for the love that I have for you
There's so little time, so much to do

(End of soundbite)

GROSS: That's Catherine Russell from her new CD, which is called "Sentimental
Streak."

Catherine Russell, welcome to FRESH AIR. And I just want to say, where have
you been? How can you have been a backup singer for so long and only have
like two recent albums under your own name?

Ms. RUSSELL: You know, I started years ago. I just really wanted to have a
career in the music business, and I just didn't, you know, know how to start.
So I started with whatever blues I knew and sat in wherever I could in clubs
around New York City. And that kind of turned into a career in backup singing
and touring. So that basically, for a number of years, left me with no time
to think about having a solo career.

GROSS: The song that we opened with was once recorded by Louis Armstrong and
arranged by your father, Luis Russell. I know your father died when you were
seven, so you didn't...

Ms. RUSSELL: Yes.

GROSS: You didn't know him as you matured. But did you grow up with a lot of
early jazz recordings? Because you certainly have a feel for early jazz in
your own recordings.

Ms. RUSSELL: Well, his recordings were some of the first recordings I
remember hearing in my life, you know? So that element of swing and fun were,
you know, was some of the earliest music that I absorbed, you know, and I
thought, `Wow, that sounds like fun.' And "(New) Call of the Freaks," one of
his hits, you know, for Luis Russell Orchestra was one of the first things I
remember hearing. And I thought, `That's funny.' And every time I heard it I
would laugh, you know. So I just love the swing of music and when people went
out to socialize and dance to swing music. So that's really why I'm drawn to
that period of jazz.

GROSS: Well, I'm glad you mentioned "Call of the Freaks," because that's one
of your father's better-known tunes.

Ms. RUSSELL: Yes.

GROSS: And your father did two songs that are similar. There's "Call of the
Freaks," then there's "(New) Call of the Freaks."

Ms. RUSSELL: Right. Right.

GROSS: Let's play one of them. Which would you like us to play?

Ms. RUSSELL: I would say "(New) Call of the Freaks," because that one has
the vocal trio arrangement and the lyrics, "Take out the can, here comes the
garbage man," which I thought was so funny when I was a kid.

GROSS: OK. So this is Luis Russell, Catherine Russell's father, and his
band.

(Soundbite of "(New) Call of the Freaks")

Mr. LUIS RUSSELL and Unidentified Singers: (Singing)
Take out your can, here comes the garbage man

Mr. RUSSELL: (Singing) In the morning!

Mr. RUSSELL and Singers: (Singing)
Take out your can, here comes the garbage man.

Mr. RUSSELL: (Singing) In the evening

Mr. RUSSELL and Singers: (Singing)
Take out your can, here comes the garbage man

(End of soundbite)

GROSS: That's "(New) Call of the Freaks," featuring my guest Catherine
Russell's father, Luis Russell, who had his own band in the '20s and '30s, and
then became music director for Louis Armstrong. And, Catherine Russell, my
guest, is a terrific singer with a new CD called "Sentimental Streak."

And while we're giving a shout out to your father and his musical influence on
you, we should also mention that your mother, Carlene Ray, is a musician and
singer. Is it guitar or bass or both?

Ms. RUSSELL: Well, it's both, actually. She was a member of the
International Sweethearts of Rhythm in the mid-'40s during the second world
war when a lot female musicians came to the forefront as a result of the men,
you know, going to war, so a lot of female musicians emerged at that time, and
she joined the Sweethearts, I think right after she graduated from Julliard
School of Music in 1946. And she was the band guitarist and then featured
vocalist at some points.

GROSS: And the International Sweethearts of Rhythm was an all-women's band.

Ms. RUSSELL: All female orchestra, yes. All female jazz orchestra.

GROSS: And here's another question about your mother.

Ms. RUSSELL: Yes.

GROSS: Did she tell you interesting things about what it was like in the '40s
to be a female jazz musician?

Ms. RUSSELL: Yeah. There were a lot of stories, you know, which formed who
she is and just, you know, she was playing guitar in the '40s and then
switched to bass, mainly, in the '50s. And you know how people would just
laugh when she'd walk in, you know, saying, `Oh, little girl, you know, what
are you doing with that big instrument?' you know, type of thing. And, you
know, people really did not take women seriously, and particularly, you know,
African-American women. And, you know, she would tell me stories about how
there was one night where, you know, the black and white started to mix. They
were playing some kind of a dance function, and they created a bomb scare
because they didn't want the races to be mixing on the dance floor. They'd
have ropes down the middle of the dance floor so the black and white couldn't
mix, you know, all kinds of different things like that. So, you know, I
really feel that the women that came up in that period of jazz were strong
beyond our imagination. They really were.

GROSS: So, you know, you sing a lot of jazz and blues. We talked about the
influence of your father, Luis Russell, who started leading his band in the
1920s. What was the music of your contemporaries, your friends, when you were
growing up?

Ms. RUSSELL: Mostly I'd say the first--you know, I started collecting 45
recordings when I was, I don't know, seven or eight years old, so the first 45
I think I bought was by The Supremes, and I was really into Motown because
that's what was, you know, playing on popular radio at that time. And then
later on, rock 'n roll, you know, all of the--Jefferson Airplane, Grateful
Dead, Led Zeppelin, you know, variety of classic rock. And then, actually,
soul music, so Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Joe Tex, all of those artists.

GROSS: Now, you had said that one of your influences when you were coming of
age was soul music and Sam Cooke, so I thought we'd go to your first CD.

Ms. RUSSELL: OK.

GROSS: And listen to you doing a Sam Cooke song.

Ms. RUSSELL: OK. Excellent.

GROSS: And you're going to hear "Put Me Down Easy."

Ms. RUSSELL: Yes.

GROSS: From your first CD, which is called "Cat," which is short for
Catherine.

Ms. RUSSELL: Yes.

GROSS: And my guest is Catherine Russell. You want to say anything about
this selection before we hear it?

Ms. RUSSELL: Sam Cooke also produced so many artists, and those productions,
those tunes are great, too, you know, the ones that he's not singing. So this
is one sung by his brother, L.C. Cooke, and it just struck me when I heard
it. And I said, `I just have to sing this song.'

GROSS: OK, and here's Catherine Russell from her first CD, which is called
"Cat."

(Soundbite of "Put Me Down Easy")

Ms. RUSSELL: (Singing) I don't know why it should be
But lately I can plainly see
You're cool to me
Do what you want to do,
But darling, all I ask of you
Put me down easy.

Unidentified Singers: (Singing) Put me down easy

Ms. RUSSELL: (Singing) Put me down easy, baby

Singers: (Singing) Put me down easy, baby

Ms. RUSSELL: (Singing) Yeah, don't you make it rougher
And don't make me suffer,
Just put me down easy

If you found somebody new
There is nothing I can do
But ask you to...

(End of soundbite)

GROSS: That's Catherine Russell from her first CD, "Cat," singing a song
written by Sam Cooke. Her new CD, which is her second, is called "Sentimental
Streak."

Let's talk a little bit more about what life was like for you as a backup
singer. I mean, among the people who you sang with were Al Green, David
Bowie, Isaac Hayes, yes?

Ms. RUSSELL: Yes. Yes. Al Green and Isaac Hayes were TV shows, so I also
gotten to do a lot of shows, you know, late night shows, with those artists,
so I got to sing with Al Green twice. And...

GROSS: Tell me something about singing with Al Green.

Ms. RUSSELL: I was in a section of three women, and we sang, "I'm Still In
Love with You." So...

GROSS: And what was the part like? What's the part that you were doing?

Ms. RUSSELL: Let's see. (Singing) Oooooh, oooooh, ooooh. (Spoken) You
know, some oohs and ahs. And, (singing) don't you know I'm still in, sure
enough in love with you. (Spoken) You know, and so the three of us were
harmonizing behind him, and, you know, in the clip that I taped from the show,
I'm just grinning from ear to ear. I'm just so happy, and I'm laughing, you
know? And so, you know, just see me on camera laughing basically between
phrases.

GROSS: OK, let's try another. Touring with David Bowie. What did you have
to do?

Ms. RUSSELL: Well, I got that gig because David was looking for someone that
could sing backup parts, you know, backup vocals and play keyboard parts,
which I can do. I did that with Cyndi Lauper. And so it turned out, though,
that David let me do everything that I can do, which is play mandolin, I
played guitars, I played percussion, and I was really integrated--it's a real
band situation with him. So, you know, he's a member of the band. He just
happens to be the front person who wrote all these amazing songs, you know,
but it's a very integrated situation. So it was a fabulously busy gig for me.
So on every song, I was going something else--string arrangements, you know,
that I'd learned--and it was just the most incredible musical experience for
me, you know, to be singing "Ziggy Stardust" with him and playing, you know,
power chords on an electric guitar. That was fantastic.

GROSS: What were your lines?

Ms. RUSSELL: Well, it was kind of, (singing) so where were the spiders,
while the fly tried to--(spoken) you know, and so it's all of those parts of
the song. And also (singing) Come on, come on. We really got a good thing
going. Come on, come on. If you want to dun-a dun-a, better get
on...(unintelligible). (Spoken) You know, and that was another song from "The
Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust" that I just loved.

GROSS: So what do you do on stage when you're a backup singer during the
parts when you're not singing?

Ms. RUSSELL: Well, if I'm not playing an instrument, I'm either in a section
with other women moving together, so we make sure that, you know, we're moving
right and then we're moving left so the section looks coordinated. And if I'm
playing an instrument, I'm just doing that and being animated, you know.

GROSS: Right.

Ms. RUSSELL: You can't really--yeah, you have to be animated. You can't
really, you know, stand still and look bored and all that type of thing. You
really must reflect that you're happy to be there, you know? So, you know,
which is I think something that horn players could do more of.

GROSS: Instead of walking out and having a smoke while somebody else solos or
something?

Ms. RUSSELL: Instead of waiting, yes.

GROSS: Yeah.

Ms. RUSSELL: It would be, you know, nice to see some animation, but that's
just my personal thing.

GROSS: My guest is singer Catherine Russell. We'll talk more after a break.
This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: My guest is singer Catherine Russell. Her new CD is called
"Sentimental Streak."

One of the things you did--this is before you started recording under your own
name--is that you sang between acts at the comedy club Catch a Rising Star.

Ms. RUSSELL: Yes.

GROSS: That strikes me that like it might have been a real thankless job.
How was it?

Ms. RUSSELL: You know, it was my first kind of real steady gig in New York,
and the drummer at that point, they had a trio there who used to play the
comics on and off. And the drummer called me up because I had been doing a
few other gigs with him, and he said, `You know, why don't you come by? You
know, I think they would like you here. Come by and sing some blues, you
know?' So I was scared to death, went the first night, and was there for four
years, and actually it was a great gig.

And, you know, it really toughens up your character because they put me in the
spot, which was called the check spot, which meant that that was the spot in
the evening where they would be handing out the checks, so I could sing louder
than the people haggling over what they were going to leave their waitstaff
and so forth, you know. And they would also put me on after big names, like
if they had Eddie Murphy or Robin Williams or somebody else come in of
note--Jerry Seinfeld, all these people, Rodney Dangerfield, all these people
would come in there--and try out their new acts and so forth. And so they'd
always put the singer on after the stars because other comedians, of course,
didn't want to follow those people. So it was really good, you know. It was
good training. I did it six nights a week for four years.

GROSS: But to sum up, you got the two worst spots, the spot when the waiters
were handing out the checks.

Ms. RUSSELL: That's right.

GROSS: And after an act that was too tough for anyone else to follow. And
was this also the sexist comic era?

Ms. RUSSELL: No. It was, you know--well, it's interesting. I'm not sure
about that because, you know, also people like Joy Behar, Susie Essman...

GROSS: Oh, right, yeah, uh-huh.

Ms. RUSSELL: Yeah, yeah. So they were there and they were emceeing just as
much as--you know, everybody was really there every night, so we were all
hanging out together.

GROSS: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Ms. RUSSELL: You know, so I didn't feel that.

GROSS: Well, I want to play another song that you do on your new CD that was
written by your father, Luis Russell.

Ms. RUSSELL: Yes.

GROSS: And this is "I've Got That Thing."

Ms. RUSSELL: Yes.

GROSS: It's really delightful. Say something about why you chose this song.

Ms. RUSSELL: I was looking through one of his early compilations, and I, you
know, I think it was the 1929 to 1930 compilation of Luis Russell Orchestra,
and I came upon this, and it just--it was kind of another "Call of the Freaks"
situation where I thought, `This is funny. This is hilarious.' You know? And
the track was funny, and I started laughing immediately. And I thought, wow,
let's recreate this and have, you know, Howard Johnson, you know, come in on
some tuba, and it just turned out so great because Steven, you know, came in
and played like this Dixieland, you know, made this Dixieland arrangement of
it. So we have...

GROSS: And this is Steven Bernstein who did the arrangements on your new CD?

Ms. RUSSELL: Yes. Yes.

GROSS: So this is Catherine Russell from her new CD, "Sentimental Streak," a
song written by her father called, "I've Got That Thing."

(Soundbite of "I've Got That Thing")

Ms. RUSSELL: (Singing) I don't care if the sun don't shine
Because I've got that thing
No one on earth will be right in line
Till they get that thing
Before all the fellas would look at me
Now they all rave for my company
I knew someday they would fall for me
Because I got that thing.

No one on earth knows what it's all about
Till they get that thing
It seems as though all the world is out
Looking for that thing.
It's a funny old thing, that's without a doubt,
Makes everyone on earth want to scream and shout
Why, I wouldn't whisper, I'd tell it out
That I got that thing
Yeah

(End of soundbite)

GROSS: That's Catherine Russell from her new CD "Sentimental Streak," and her
father Luis Russell co-wrote the song we just heard.

You taught voice for a few years. Was there any particular piece of advice
you would give your students that really came from your experience that you
think like not all teachers would impart?

Ms. RUSSELL: The way I teach, I mean, I really stress enjoyment of, you
know, performance. Also, picking material that you can express yourself
though. Don't pick something that, you know--just because we love Aretha
Franklin, we all love Aretha Franklin, you know, but maybe that's not the
person that you should be picking. You know what I'm saying? So I love Chaka
Khan. As a vocalist, she's fabulous. But this is not my particular style.
So I would say it's very difficult for singers to find their own style. So
you really need to find songs that you can express yourself through, you know,
more so than hearing another artist and saying, `Oh, I want to sound like
them.'

GROSS: Catherine Russell, thank you so much for talking with us.

Ms. RUSSELL: Thank you so much, Terry. I appreciate it.

GROSS: Catherine Russell's new CD is called "Sentimental Streak." I'm Terry
Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Novelist and ordained deacon Ron Hansen on his novel
about Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Exiles," and Jesse James
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Although he became a famous and influential poet after his death, the British
writer and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins was never published in his
lifetime. He died in 1889 at the age of 44. For several years he renounced
poetry because he believed it was in conflict with the life of a priest. His
silence as a poet was broken after he read about a shipwreck in December 1875
that killed five German nuns. It inspired his famous poem "The Wreck of the
Deutschland."

My guest Ron Hansen has written a new historical novel based on the life of
Gerard Manley Hopkins called "Exiles." One of the novels Hansen is best known
for, "Mariette in Ecstasy," is about a young nun in the early 1900s. Hansen
is Catholic and recently became a deacon. He teaches at Santa Clara
University. He's also the author of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the
Coward Robert Ford," which was adapted into a movie that played last year and
starred Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck.

Ron Hansen, welcome to FRESH AIR. I'd like to have you read a short excerpt
of your novel "Exiles." Would you like to just set it up for us?

Mr. RON HANSEN: Yes. This is early in Hopkins' career when he was a Jesuit
and he was not yet a priest. He was studying theology in Wales. And he came
across this account of a shipwreck, the Deutschland, off the east coast of
England. And he woke up with the sound of "The Wreck of the Hesperus"
sounding in his ears and he realized that's not the kind of poetry he wanted
to write, even though Longfellow's famous poem was widely known throughout the
world. But after he woke up, I get into something of Hopkins' background.

(Reading) "The scruples to which he was prey caused Hopkins to consider the
worldly pursuit of poetry writing in conflict with his vocation to the
priesthood. Just before entering the Society of Jesus in 1868, Hopkins
resolved to pen no more verse unless his religious superiors requested it.
And in a theatrical act of renunciation, he incinerated some copies of his
Oxford poems in a secret ceremony that he inconspicuously noted in his
journals simply as `the slaughter of the innocents.'

"And that act of renunciation was confirmed for him when, as a novice Jesuit,
he was urged to relinquish disordered attachments that would impede his
freedom and availability for variety of ministries as well as tempt him to the
sin of pride. Since then he'd written only the slightest kinds of poetry,
joshing doggerel to entertain at picnics or Latin greeting card verse for
visiting dignitaries. And yet there was always an interior and hard to quell
`and yet.'"

GROSS: So do you think that the Jesuit order would have wanted him to
renounce poetry? Was this something that he just felt obliged to do?

Mr. HANSEN: I think it was his own feeling, because certainly the Jesuits
were writing poetry. They had a magazine that published poetry. So I think
it was just--the fact that he was a convert made him extra earnest and
probably more constrained in his feelings about what a priest is like and what
a poet is like and how they're kind of indivisible.

GROSS: And why did he feel he had to renounce his poems and burn them in a
secret ceremony?

Mr. HANSEN: I think it was in a secret ceremony just because he realized it
was kind of a maudlin gesture. And we don't really know to what extent this
was a complete renunciation of poetry because there's certainly a lot of
fragments and poems that exist from his Oxford days. Somebody had copies of
them; I don't know who. So it seems like it was more of a gesture more than a
real complete incineration of all of his work.

GROSS: So, you know, there's this shipwreck that kills five nuns, five nuns
who were leaving Germany for the United States where they intended to work
with the poor. And he's so moved by their deaths that he decides to write a
poem about it, even though he's renounced the writing of poetry. And as you
mention, he has the sound of "The Wreck of the Hesperus," Longfellow's famous
poem in his head. And you say he thinks that's kind of corny. I mean, that's
not the word he uses.

Mr. HANSEN: Exactly.

GROSS: Read one verse of it for us. Give us the sense of Hopkins didn't
like.

Mr. HANSEN: The "Wreck of the Hesperus" has a stanza that goes...

She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With a mast went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
`Ho! ho!' the breakers roared!

GROSS: Right. Kind of sing-song.

Mr. HANSEN: Yes, it is. And I had the impression that Hopkins would have
heard that ho, hoing in his mind when he was sleeping. And it was exactly the
kind of prose or verse that he was trying to avoid. He wanted to have a verse
that mimicked the sound of human speech, was really more prose-like but
actually had the same elevated language. And that's why his poetry is so
difficult, because he did lots of inventions and new experiments in poetry and
insisted on having real packed words, imagery that was sometimes hard to
figure out at first but was ultimately very powerful.

GROSS: Let me ask you now to read a stanza of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem
about the wreck of the Deutschland in which five nuns were killed. And we'll
compare the language of Longfellow and Hopkins.

Mr. HANSEN: OK. This is stanza 17. The Deutschland has sailed
from...(unintelligible)...in early December and it encounters what is called
the Kentish Knock, it's an undersea island of sand that the ship founders on.
And it seems as if they're going to be rescued, but the waves are too high,
and then the tide rises up, and pretty soon everybody is being assaulted by
these giant waves. The ship essentially becomes a reef of its own. And
Hopkins picks up with that on the night of December 6th, where he writes...

Mr. HANSEN: They fought with God's cold--
And they could not and fell to the deck
Crushed them or water and drowned them or rolled
With the sea-romp over the wreck.
Night roared, with the heartbreak hearing a heartbroke rabble,
The woman's wailing, the crying of a child without check--
Till a lioness arose breasting the babble,
A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told.

GROSS: Who's the prophetess?

Mr. HANSEN: That's the tall nun, Sister Barbara, who was seen to have peeked
her head out through this window that was being assaulted by all this wave and
cried out, `Oh, Christ, come quickly.' And there are those people who wrote
about this who said that she was dejected. But the London Times wrote it in a
much more positive way of a person seeking intercession from Jesus. And I
think that's what really struck Hopkins and made him want to write the poem.

GROSS: You know, Hopkins referred to his own style of writing as sprung
rhythm.

Mr. HANSEN: Yes.

GROSS: What did he mean by that, and can you hear it in what you just read?

Mr. HANSEN: Well, what he did was count stresses. For example, we have
iambic verse where you have a stress and unstressed, and then we have other
kinds--anapest dactyls, but what he would do is the stressed part of a word,
and he would use it with like a childhood rhyme like `high diddly dee dee, the
banker's life for me' where you hear the various stressed parts of each of
those words and just disregard the other ones. So he invented this thing
called sprung rhythm, for some reason, to give much more the value and power
of human speech.

GROSS: So it wasn't like iambic pentameter, where it would have to be
accented, unaccented, accented...

Mr. HANSEN: Right.

GROSS: ...unaccented syllable.

Mr. HANSEN: Yeah, so his lines were of uneven length and uneven number of
stresses.

GROSS: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Mr. HANSEN: He was a fan of a lot of Greek verse, and he also learned from
the Welsh, a Welsh form of chiming they called it. And he combined his love
of Greek verse with the Welsh and came up with this idea of sprung rhythm.
But he didn't write real poetry for about seven years. And during that time
he was coming up with this concept of what a new kind of verse could be.

GROSS: The nuns who were killed in the shipwreck on a stormy sea that Hopkins
writes about, these are nuns who were leaving Germany in part to do their
mission in America, but in part because the Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was
cracking down on Catholics. There were crackdowns against Catholics in
various parts of Europe during this time in the mid-1800s. And what was it
about the story of these five nuns that moved Hopkins so much that he wanted
to renounce his renunciation of poetry and actually start writing again?

Mr. HANSEN: Well, I think he thought of himself as in exile as well, that
when he converted to Catholicism while at Oxford University it meant that he
was essentially giving up any chance of being a fellow of the college because
there were rules against Roman Catholics doing that. Also his family
disapproved of his conversion and he felt somewhat exiled from them. It's
remarkable to me that his mother and father never visited him all the time
that he was a Jesuit except on his deathbed. And I think that that was kind
of a persistent feeling of his, that he had been ostracized by family,
friends, and by his school, and knew that there was going to be certain
privations he was going to have to suffer through for the rest of his life
based on his religious conviction.

GROSS: You know, Hopkins renounced writing, but at some point continued to
write anyways. You said in an interview back in 2005 in Sojourners magazine,
"I write about faith because writing for me is a form of prayer." How do you
reconcile your sense, you know, of writing as a form of prayer with Hopkins'
sense that the life of prayer that he had dedicated himself to was
incompatible with poetry?

Mr. HANSEN: Well, I think Hopkins was wrong. And I think he came to realize
that his poetry was a form of prayer. And certainly a lot of people use his
poetry now as at least a start of their prayer and inspiration for it. You
see in the year that he is ordained he writes some of his greatest poetry,
like "God's Grandeur" and "Pied Beauty" and "The Windhover." And each of
those, there's a kind of reflection of how his theological concerns ultimately
get reflected in nature.

GROSS: You seem to be very interested in earlier periods for nuns and
priests. You know, you write about Gerard Manley Hopkins, who became a Jesuit
priest in the 1800s. Your earlier novel "Mariette in Ecstasy" is about a
young woman who becomes a nun in the early 1900s. What interests you about
what the religious life would have been like at a much earlier time?

Mr. HANSEN: I think it's a little less complicated. And also, I can master
a historical period to a certain extent, and everything I say will be believed
because I've done the research; whereas if I'm talking about a contemporary
period, I think people all have their own opinions about what was going on and
might think I had it wrong in some way. But I think primarily, as when I was
writing my books on the Old West, it seemed like the coloring was more bright,
the situations were starker so that the elemental questions arose to the
surface more than they do where so much is going on and the business of our
lives in the contemporary world.

GROSS: My guest is novelist Ron Hansen. His new novel "Exiles" is based on
the life of the poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. More after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Ron Hansen. His new novel
"Exiles" is based on the life of the poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley
Hopkins.

You are now a deacon in the Catholic Church. You were ordained as a deacon
last year.

Mr. HANSEN: Yes.

GROSS: When did religion become a serious part of your life?

Mr. HANSEN: I think it always was. I went to parochial schools for grade
school, and went to a Jesuit high school and college. So I always had very
strong influence of the Jesuit priests who became my friends. And like a lot
of Catholic boys, I anticipated becoming a priest at one time, and then the
whole problem of celibacy dissuaded me. The idea of being a deacon didn't
enter my mind until around the year 2000. And then I inquired about it and
got into the program just simply because I became a eucharistic minister, a
lector, and I found that all those ministries nourished me in some way. And I
found, since becoming a deacon where I celebrate weddings and preach and so
forth, that it's an exhilarating experience helping these people in the high
points of their lives and to--or their down points as well. It's wonderful to
walk hand in hand with them and see what the spirit is doing to them, or doing
through them.

GROSS: In addition to writing novels about faith, you've also written about
criminals. You have two books about gangs and the West, one about the Dalton
gang and one about Jesse James' gang. And you wrote the book "The
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" that was adapted into
a movie that opened last year that starred Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck. It
was a really good film. You've talked about why you're interested in writing
about religion and why you are a man of faith yourself, what about Western
gangs?

Mr. HANSEN: I think I'm really interested in outlaws and outsiders, people
who were marginalized, people who look at the normal world from a vantage
point that's somewhat different, who've adopted different strategies to live
by. And I think that's what unites the outlaws with the nuns and whoever else
I write about. And I think that in some ways that's the artist's perspective
on the world. Most writers and artists I know feel like they're somehow
outside the normal life and kind of are spies looking in on what other people
are doing, but recognize that they don't have a quotidian life themselves.
It's quite different than that.

Also, as I said, I like the idea of the elemental forces at work when you're
dealing with criminals, especially those in the 19th century. These outlaws
who took the frontier rugged individualism to its extreme and just decided to
do what was best for them and not for other people. And it was fascinating
for me to see where that comes from, what kinds of world views these people
have that allow them to take money from other people or kill other people,
seemingly thoughtlessly.

GROSS: A lot has been written about Jesse James, but your novel is more about
Robert Ford, who assassinated, you know, who killed Jesse James. Why did you
want to write about Robert Ford more than Jesse James?

Mr. HANSEN: Well, it struck me as a Shakespearean tragedy on the order of
Julius Caesar, that a young person somehow ingratiated himself with this
famous outlaw, so much so that Jesse invited him into his company and into his
own home. And then Bob Ford felt compelled eventually to kill Jesse James.
He had at one point made an agreement with the governor to capture Jesse
James, but then the governor gave him the permission to shoot him if it was
necessary because it seemed apparent to a lot of the law officials at the time
that Jesse James was riding around killing off anybody else who would possibly
turn him in to the government. He had become paranoid. It was kind of a
rehearsal of what "The Sopranos" was all about, a person afraid of what is
going to happen to him so he tries to eliminate any opposition or any person
who would turn him in.

GROSS: From what you've read in history, how much of Ford's interest in
killing Jesse James was to collect the bounty on his head, and how much was
just to make a name for himself?

Mr. HANSEN: It was the latter. I don't think the money meant that much to
him. I think Charlie Ford is the only one I can remember actually saying he
did it for the reward money. I think that was important for him. But I
think...

GROSS: And Charlie Ford was Robert's brother, who was a member of the James
gang.

Mr. HANSEN: Exactly. And both Charlie and Bob were living in a house in St.
Joseph, Missouri, when Jesse was shot by Bob. I think they were both afraid
that they were going to be tried and convicted of various crimes, and they
were both afraid that Jesse James was so paranoid that he was going to try and
kill them. And so they had extra motivation to see him done away with. And
it seemed to be a kind of cat-and-mouse game, almost a dance with death that
Jesse was entertaining with Bob, especially when he decided to take off his
guns and present his back to Bob. And it was the only time Bob had ever seen
him without a gun in his hand or nearby. And he decided to take that
opportunity to kill him.

GROSS: Your book about Robert Ford is in part about the nature of celebrity.
Jesse James was a celebrity in his time for being an outlaw, and then Robert
Ford became a celebrity for shooting Jesse James. In fact--and anyone who's
seen the movie will remember this--Robert Ford, after he assassinates Jesse
James, ends up reenacting the shooting on stage every night in the theater.
And that's how he makes his living.

Mr. HANSEN: Right.

GROSS: It's just kind of bizarre. Who knew something like that happened
then. I mean, what year are we talking?

Mr. HANSEN: This was 1882.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. HANSEN: And I think he did something like 800 performances in one year.
And the performance was called "How I Killed Jesse James." And I don't think
there's any surviving script of that so I kind of made it up. But it was
basically Charlie Ford acting as Jesse James and standing up there dusting off
a picture and Bob Ford shooting him in the back. And for a while Bob Ford was
heralded as this hero. And then eventually that song that was made by Billy
Gashade came around where it talked about the dirty little coward who shot Mr.
Howard. And the attention turned on Bob as a coward and a villain, and he was
eventually chased off the stage and headed out West.

GROSS: Was it the play itself that turned the image against him and made him
seem like a coward, because people who saw the show would see that Jesse James
had turned his back to Ford and that he'd taken off his gun so Ford shot an
unarmed man in the back?

Mr. HANSEN: I think that's probably it, yeah. It's odd, though, because
nobody seemed to have the same feeling about Jesse James shooting somebody in
the back. They treated Jesse as something of a hero. But I think, as you
say, it's about celebrity. And they missed having Jesse James around, missed
having the subject of these kinds of comic books. He was kind of a source of
vitality for a lot of these people. The world seemed paler with him gone.

(Announcements)

GROSS: My guest is Ron Hansen. His new novel "Exiles" is based on the life
of poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hansen wrote the novel "The
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," which was adapted
into a film last year.

You know, when I was growing up in Brooklyn, I watched a lot of Westerns and
movies and on TV, and for a while it was my ambition to be a cowgirl someday,
which is probably the most ludicrous thing in the world that, you know, a kid
in Brooklyn would be, I'm imagining. Did you grow up with a lot of Westerns?

Mr. HANSEN: I didn't grow up with Westerns, but I grew up with a grandfather
who was alive in 1865, and he knew people who were still wearing their Civil
War greatcoats. And he was out in Colorado and he had the first indoor
bathroom in his house, and he had horses and he had hired hands and all that,
so I knew of kind of that milieu.

And where I grew in Omaha I could drive only 10 minutes and be out in a rural
area and wilderness. We used to play as boys in an area that was reputed to
be a hideout for the James gang after the Northfield, Minnesota, raid. Jesse
James, shortly before his death, was planning on buying a farm in Nebraska,
and that was only about an hour from where I lived. So I felt I knew the area
and what kind of people these guys were, partly because my grandfather said he
actually met the James gang at one time. And he, among all the people I've
heard say that, he was the only person in the right place at the right time to
have actually encountered them. So I grew up with those legends, and it
seemed very familiar to me.

GROSS: What was your grandfather's memory of meeting the James gang?

Mr. HANSEN: He was a young man--actually, probably a boy--and they had come
up to the farm he was on to water their horses. And then they heard hooves
off in the distance and they immediately got on their horses and ran off. And
that was the last he saw of them, but he knew that they must have been
desperate to run off at the sound of hooves. Nobody else would have.

GROSS: You're somebody who seems to want a sense of community--the community
of family, the community of the church, the community of the college where you
teach--like the characters we've just discussed.

Mr. HANSEN: Yeah, I think in some ways when you're writing you're imagining
another life. In fact, that's one of my favorite things to do still as a
daydreamer is to sit around and think of another life, what it would be like
if I had been an Air Force pilot or if I was a doctor or a lawyer. I think
when you're in your room writing things, you're just dreaming of another form
of you. And it'll be imbued by a lot of your qualities but it'll be a person
who has challenged himself from taking risks to go in a different direction.
And that's a way of exercising your imagination.

GROSS: It almost sounds like--you have a twin brother.

Mr. HANSEN: Yeah. Exactly.

GROSS: And I was going to ask you, can you imagine a path not taken, looking
at your brother's life knowing that--he's an identical twin isn't he?

Mr. HANSEN: He is, yeah.

GROSS: Yeah, so you have an identical twin who's headed in a different
direction than you have.

Mr. HANSEN: Right.

GROSS: It sounds like, you know, seeing his life is very similar to like
imagining an alternate life.

Mr. HANSEN: Yeah, I remember as a really young kid standing in front of a
mirror with my brother and being confused by it because I couldn't tell which
reflection was which. And I think that that's probably the start of my
writing career, probably, is realizing that it's a way of individuating
yourself, is to write, but it's also a way of becoming somebody else
simultaneously.

GROSS: Do you actually talk about that with each other, the kind of confusion
that you had looking at each other knowing that you looked identical but were
different?

Mr. HANSEN: We've never really talked about it. We've certainly experienced
it, though. And I remember the sense of outrage I had as a young boy when
people couldn't tell us apart. So it would be like there's John, there's
Jerry, and there's the twins. So we didn't really have separate names because
people would confuse us, and that was hard for me. And I think I struggled
under that burden for several years and then finally we did kind of go our
separate ways and we are not confused anymore.

GROSS: Do you still look alike, or has time changed you sufficiently?

Mr. HANSEN: No, time--yeah, time changes you. He's involved in business.
I'm involved in teaching. And I think that makes it--you look different
automatically.

GROSS: Ron Hansen, thanks so much for talking with us.

Mr. HANSEN: Thank you, Terry.

GROSS: Ron Hansen's new novel "Exiles" is based on the life of the British
poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins.

(Soundbite of "Jesse James")

Mr. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: (Singing)
Well, it was Robert Ford, that dirty little coward
I wonder now how he feels
For he ate of Jesse's bread and he slept in Jesse's bed,
And he laid poor Jesse in his grave.

Well, Jesse had a wife to mourn for his life,
Three children, now they were brave
Well, that dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard
He laid poor Jesse in his grave
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