Writer Gail Godwin.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: MARCH 01, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 030101np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Gail Godwin
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:06

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

As religion takes on increasing significance in the life of novelist Gail Godwin, it is also taking on increasing significance in her fiction. Her 1991 novel, "Father Melancholy's Daughter," was about the daughter of a priest who cares for her father as he gets older. He's known as Father Melancholy because of his depression.

Godwin's new novel, "Evensong," continues the story of the daughter Margaret after her father's death. She is now a priest and is married to a priest. They live in a small town in North Carolina. Godwin has said that she's tried to create a modern female spiritual seeker, a contemporary woman who wants and needs to live in God's time as well as human daily time.

Godwin is a three-time National Book Award nominee, and the author of the 1982 bestseller "A Mother and Two Daughters." Let's start with a short reading from her new novel "Evensong." I'll let Gail Godwin set it up.

GAIL GODWIN, AUTHOR, "EVENSONG": Margaret is preparing to be the celebrant at the wedding of two parishioners. One is called Augusta, her nickname is "Gus." And then Gus is marrying Charles. And Margaret is meditating on marriage and what her own prenuptial nervousness was like.

"On the eve of my wedding I sat in my seminary room almost afraid to move and said a certain colict (ph) for evening prayer over and over until I knew it by heart.

`Keep watch dear Lord with those who work or watch or weep this night. And give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ. Give rest to the weary. Bless the dying. Soothe the suffering. Pity the afflicted. Shield the joyous. And offer your love sake. Amen.'

That final entreaty never fails to arrest me, `shield the joyous.' The very arrangement of the words calls up joy's end even as you're revoking pictures of its many manifestations. What else to do but pray for the person on the verge of realizing a cherished hope.

For the couple about to consummate their love. For those children running on sure feet toward a mother's open arms. The future arches above us all like a giant question mark, looming or embracing by whims and turns. Just as in those medieval drawings, the wheel of fortune inexorably revolves pitching today's celebrity into tomorrow's trash heap and raising yesterdays beggar to the throne.

Rapture gets smothered in the rumple of dailyness. The clean passionate pledge becomes choked with weedy extenuations. Children stumble and hurt themselves and cry and even die. Mothers and fathers go away and never come back."

GROSS: Thank you for reading that, Gail Godwin. And that's an excerpt of Gail Godwin's new novel, "Evensong." I was particularly interested in your characters interest in the line in that prayer "shield the joyous." What got you thinking about praying to God to shield the joyous?

GODWIN: It's the first time I heard that colict in church -- it struck me, what a wonderful line. Whoever wrote that prayer certainly knew that sometimes when you're happiest or have everything to gain you're most afraid. You're afraid that it will not happen or it will be taken away from you.

GROSS: Your character thinks about a rapture getting smothered in dailyness. I think that's part of what the book is about.

GODWIN: Oh, absolutely. It is. It's the story of three weeks in a person's life. It's three weeks of advent. Margaret is a priest. She has so many problems and challenges just in these three weeks. Her husband is depressed. He also comes down with pneumonia.

A childhood friend of Margaret's, now a pop music star, has just released a memoir CD about his old love affair with her. A strange old man shows up in town and asks for hospitality at her rectory. At the same time her husband, who's a headmaster, has to expel an alcoholic boy, but he wants to bring him home and try to save him.

So they have this strange old man who says he's a monk and the alcoholic boy sharing their house. And then she had her husband have a serious falling out that calls in to question their whole marriage. And then on top of that, someone very close to her -- I don't want to give away the plot -- is badly injured. And this calls her relationship with God into question. And that's just the personal side.

GROSS: Margaret, the main character in your novel, is a priest. She is also the daughter of a priest and the wife of a priest.

GODWIN: Yes.

GROSS: And so this has enabled you as the author to immerse yourself in thoughts about the search for the spiritual life and the search for meaning in life. Why have you wanted to explore that in your fiction -- a search for the spiritual life?

GODWIN: Because I'm so passionately interested in it myself and I don't understand why there are more and more religion books on my shelf. There are now as many religion books as there are fiction books. I wanted to immerse myself in the life of a spiritual woman who wasn't the kind of smugly religious person, you know, the pious...

GROSS: "...I have the answers." Yeah.

GODWIN: Yeah. "I have the answer. God spoke to me last night. I know what size shoes he wears and he wants us to do this." So I wanted to see how a person who lives in two worlds at once operates. I mean, you live in the human world and you live in God's world.

GROSS: You've said that we've all had what you've described as a "religious ache." And I like that expression, and I want you to describe what you mean by that -- the religious ache.

GODWIN: It is feeling almost constantly that you are in companionship with something else. Something that is larger than your life. Something that may be leading you through your life. It's a yearning. It's a connection-making think that lives inside of you and says if you stop and pay attention to this and this and this you will see that it all connects and it makes a pattern.

GROSS: One of the characters in your novel is an evangelist. And she wants to create a millennial end time parade to bring salvation and healing to the community.

GODWIN: Yes.

GROSS: And she says, "join the march. Commit yourself to live fully by the word of the Bible and the traditional morals and family values it espouses, and Jesus will come and do the rest." And then Margaret, the main character in your novel, accuses this woman of playing on people's discontent and unrest and on promising things in the name of Jesus that she -- this evangelist -- can't deliver.

And I wondered if you've had such contact with evangelists and if you've had a similar answer to them that Margaret has had to the evangelist in your novel.

GODWIN: I've had quite a few. Until recently, until I asked them to stop, we had visitors who would come up to our house and knock on the door and say they would like to discuss the Bible with us. And at first I was polite and let them come in, but then I realized they didn't want to hear what I had to say. They had their message already set out.

And then what really did them in was one day they came and Robert took out his Hebrew Bible and he said, "would you like to -- would you like me to read you that same passage in Hebrew?" They were not at all interested.

GROSS: Robert, we should say, is your husband. I mean your companion.

GODWIN: My companion.

GROSS: Yeah. So no more opening the door to people who knock at the door trying to convert you.

GODWIN: I can tell you I'm even better when -- I like to go to discussion groups where people with the spiritual ache get together and bring back honey from their different flowers. And I went to one, I thought it was going to be very good, it was called "learning to pray."

And there were about eight of us there, and the first night the first woman who began talking she just got all radiant, she said, "I talk to Jesus every night." She just looked so smug and pleased with herself. And I wanted to ask her the kind of questions that -- well, the young boy in my novel "Evensong" asks Grace.

You know, she said, "God told me." And then he says to her, "did he speak to you in English? Was it American English?" And she says, "well, of course it was. He's not going to speak to me in Russian." I wanted to ask that woman how -- I was jealous of her -- her conversation.

And yet I wanted to, as Margaret does, she wants to try to figure out when something is emotional ventriloquism and when it's a genuine mystical showing.

GROSS: Do you find that organized religion fulfills that spiritual ache for you?

GODWIN: No. But I need to have a boat, shall we say. You need something to sit in to go on the journey down those rapid waters. And so for me, I choose the church that I grew up in after being away from it for many years.

I could easily have grown up a Buddhist and been very happy going to a Buddhist temple. But that's my boat, my boat is the organized religious church called the Episcopal Church. And these days I find in church, at least my own, people are -- they are searching all over the place. And there's a lot of good religious scholarship out now concerning the historical Jesus and what is metaphor and what is symbol and what is universal. So it's a community thing.

GROSS: You went to a religious school when you were a girl and were taught by nuns. Did you get any of the kind of larger spiritual sense of religion when you were young, or did you just get the sense that there are rules and there are punishments and that's what we will teach you?

GODWIN: Well, there was a lot of that sort of talk naturally, but what I also got being in that building for so many hours with those women -- those nuns -- I also got the example of their lives. And I can remember how they would, after class, a particular teacher would rush off to chapel and she looked like she was going to meet a lover.

And this interested me. They had something. It was invisible. It was something to do with the mind and the imagination, but it was very real to them. So that came across to me. I remember also the priest in our own church, the Episcopal Church that I went to -- on Good Friday there's a point between noon and three when Christ is supposed to be dying on the cross every year, and he would strip all of his outer vestments off and just be down to the black kasick. And then he would lie down in front of the altar and just lie there face down.

This was a very authoritarian, in charge man, and there he was lying down -- face down. And I knew something was going on, and by that example I saw people connecting with an inner life.

GROSS: Inner life, yeah that's...

GODWIN: ...mmm-hmm.

GROSS: Of course, as a writer, I'm sure you have a rich one. My guest is Gail Godwin, and her new novel is called "Evensong." Let's take a short break here and then we'll talk some more.

GODWIN: OK.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR.

BREAK

GROSS: My guest is Gail Godwin, and she has a new novel called "Evensong."

Now the main character, Margaret, who is a priest who is also married to a priest -- her husband, the man she loves, is often deeply depressed much as her father, who was also a priest, used to be deeply depressed. Her husband is 20 years older than she is, and I've read that you've said that some of your readers were -- she married him in the previous book in which these characters appear, "Father Melancholy's Daughter."

Apparently, some of your readers were very sorry that she married him. I guess they didn't like him very much.

GODWIN: Well, she hadn't married him in the previous book. She was just hoping to go after him. And after that book was published I had letters from people saying, "well, does she marry him or does she not or does she get to become a priest."

And I had one letter from a critic friend who said, "I loved this book and I loved Margaret and I hope for her that in her life after `Father Melancholy's Daughter' she does not take up with that man because I dislike him very much."

And I remember thinking at the time well, I'm not going to write a sequel so he'll never know. But I also knew that she would marry him because their stories went together even before I was going to write a sequel. I knew that she belonged in his story and he belonged in hers, and they would balance each other somehow.

GROSS: He's very inhibited. He's depressed. And he's afraid he's limiting her. He says -- so he tells her he's afraid he's limiting her, and she says in response, "why shouldn't our having each other make more of both of us."

GODWIN: Yeah.

GROSS: And she actually says that when presiding over a wedding later about the couple whose marriage she's celebrating. I like that expression a lot, how having each other should make more...

GODWIN: ...should make more of us both, yeah. That could apply to husband and wife or friendship or just about any relationship. Maybe I would go so far as to say a relationship with one's self and God. Having each other should make more of us both.

GROSS: I guess in some ways I think you've created a very contemplative but unneurotic character in the sense that often in relationships people kind of like tear away at each other. Relationships can be very self-destructive, and she seems to not have that instinct at all.

GODWIN: Hmm. No, she doesn't. She -- see, one reason she loves him is because he has such an intense inner life and spiritual life. They have that together.

GROSS: Mmm-hmm.

GODWIN: It's like a marriage with three people in it: the husband, the wife, and the image of God. And the images that they have that they can pool and discuss. They always have a third -- a third aspect with them.

GROSS: Now her husband is also very sexually inhibited, and she learns in the course of the book that when he was young his priest showed him how to use a flagellum, an instrument for self-flagellation.

GODWIN: Yes.

GROSS: And he told him a little chant to say and to strike himself once with each syllable of the chant. And it's clear that the self-flagellation actually sexually aroused this older priest.

GODWIN: Yes.

GROSS: And I'm wondering what got you thinking about sexual, you know, sexual arousal and self-flagellation.

GODWIN: Well, I'll tell you what happened. This is one of the challenges of writing a sequel. In "Father Melancholy's Daughter," Margaret's father tells her that Adrian, this is who she later marries, has had some terrible things in his past when he was in a Catholic orphanage. But her father can't tell her what because he is Adrian's spiritual director and confessor.

So then when I did find myself writing a sequel, "Evensong," I thought I have said that there were some abuses in his past, and now Margaret is going to marry him. And I've got to -- I've got to fork over this history. And then I thought about it in keeping with the kind of person Adrian would be, and I decided it wouldn't be just the ever so popular sexual abuse, it would be something subtle.

And I realized what I had when I created the character of the priest who shows him how to do this. By the way, flagellation was -- it was still being used in the pre-Vatican Two. It was something that religious people did, you can even talk to nuns in their 50s and 60s today who remember being given the flagellum and being given that exact chant. And it was a way to over come the flesh, but as Adrian's teacher and as Adrian discovered, it also can do something that's just the opposite.

GROSS: Gail Godwin. Her new novel is called, "Evensong." She'll be back in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

BREAK

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Back with novelist Gail Godwin. She's a three-time National Book Award nominee, and the author of the 1982 bestseller "A Mother and Two Daughters." Her new novel, "Evensong," is a sequel to her 1991 novel "Father Melancholy's Daughter" about the daughter of a depressive priest. In the new novel, the daughter Margaret is a priest herself. She's married to a priest who, like her father, is prone to depressions.

Adrian, the husband in this novel, is a very depressed person. You know, subject to very serious melancholies. And I know that there's a history of depression in your family as well. I believe your father shot himself. Your father's brother killed himself.

GODWIN: No, he was just very depressed. That got...

GROSS: ...exaggerated?

GODWIN: Yeah, exaggerated.

GROSS: Who are you referring to as just deeply depressed, was that your father or his brother?

GODWIN: No, my father killed himself, yes. And then his brother, my uncle, managed to have his depressions and then keep working everyday. He was a judge. At the end of his life, in the midst of one of his depressions, he was not only a judge but he was mayor. I mean, he went from being a judge to being mayor.

And when things got really bad for him he would just whip up to Duke Hospital and get shock treatment. So he didn't actually commit suicide. And then I did have -- my half brother, my mother's oldest son, also killed himself.

GROSS: Was there a name for depression in your family when you were growing up?

GODWIN: No. Well, see, my mother and grandmother and I lived somewhere else not with depressed people. So it was just never mentioned. I never heard the word until -- actually until my early 20s and I had met my father who had just come back into my life. And he had gone for observation at a hospital, and then he had written down on a piece of paper what the diagnosis was.

And he had put "mandate depressive with compulsion to drink." And he handed this little piece of paper over to me with this sweet smile as if it was all solved now because it was written down on a piece of paper.

GROSS: Do you have depression in your life as well? Do you have to deal with that?

GODWIN: I have had. I had a ten-year depression.

GROSS: That's a long depression. That's a decade.

GODWIN: But, you know, I was like my uncle in that it didn't seem to affect my work. In fact, I wrote "Father Melancholy's Daughter" during that depression, and it helped me a lot writing about someone else who had it -- a man, a priest. A person who saw it in images.

Father Gower saw his in terms of a black curtain -- kind of a damp black curtain that just comes down. And his daughter, when she's very young, has this fantasy that she's going to save him. She's going to crawl behind the black curtain and lead him out into the sunlight.

And people have pointed out that she's going to get into the very same thing again with this husband. And indeed she does, but there's a difference and she thinks about it in the book. Her father's depression always had a lovely little flame of self-love at the bottom it. And her husband's had self-hate, but her husband was more courageous. He just kept going, I guess like my uncle did.

He just keeps going and he keeps fighting and keeps doing his job, and then just goes home and hates himself. Whereas her father would be -- although he kept doing his job, he would be completely wiped out at the end of the day.

GROSS: Now did anyone when you were going through your decade long depression have a rescue fantasy about saving you from it?

GODWIN: Oh, yes, my best friend came up and stayed for a while, and she and Robert conspired together and they told me that I should quit wearing brown sweaters.

LAUGHTER

And just little things like that. And I'm not going to say that I didn't go and get help. I did. I went to my family practice doctor and told him. So we tried a little bit of Zoloft (ph).

GROSS: Did it help?

GODWIN: Well, somewhat, but what was really happening was something that I was working through and I guess I finally worked through it after ten years through writing "Father Melancholy's Dollar." And then the next novel was "The Good Husband." And that also had some things I wanted to work out in it.

So I'm very very blessed that somehow my making fiction is a form of therapy for me as well as its also been a form of conversion.

GROSS: Conversion? What do you mean?

GODWIN: Well, when I began writing "Father Melancholy's Daughter" I -- let's see, I hadn't been to church in 25 years. I hadn't -- I didn't -- I was not in the habit of praying. And then because I had these characters who did that I thought what I was doing was research, but it was a form of changing myself inwardly to be more like my characters and see what they were feeling.

And at the end of it I emerged changed myself. God and the spiritual life had become a daily habit, and one that I didn't want to break.

GROSS: Was it easier to do it by testing it out through your characters before assuming it in life yourself?

GODWIN: Oh, absolutely. Because I'm a very skeptical person. I still am. I've used my doubt perhaps more than any other means to seek the ineffable, and my doubt is always walking ahead of me like a little person with a shield. And then whatever gets around that or penetrates that is very strong and very mysteriously alive. And I think of that as God getting through.

GROSS: Let's get back to what you described as the religious ache.

GODWIN: OK.

GROSS: Do you think that for you that connects at all to depression?

GODWIN: Well, you know, no one has ever said that before but a bell rang when you said it. I think it does. And I think that may be why Father Gower, in "Father Melancholy's Daughter," just refused to take any pills for it because he wanted to see what the dark night of the soul was like.

And of course his wife in that book -- you know, he was saying I wish I could follow my dark night of the soul down to the bottom like St. John of the Cross did. And then his wife said, well, St. John of the Cross was not married and didn't have a child. So I think she would have liked him very much to seek some little pills.

GROSS: My guest is novelist Gail Godwin. Her new novel is called "Evensong." We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

BREAK

GROSS: My guest is Gail Godwin. Her new novel, "Evensong," is about a woman who is a priest and is also married to a priest who is prone to long depressions.

You didn't start publishing, I believe, until you were in your 30s. How did you start writing?

GODWIN: I started writing when I was nine years old. I wrote a story that I sent off to a magazine called "Child Life." It was a story about a hen-pecked husband who goes out to work and gets in trouble and hits some man and then comes home and finds out that the wife has invited this man for dinner, and then he gets hit again.

So I sent it off and it came back, and they said keep trying. And I basically kept doing that. I kept writing stories and sending them off and they kept getting sent back. In my teens I wrote "True Confessions," but they weren't really evil enough.

LAUGHTER

GROSS: Now, am I right in saying that your mother was a writer and she wrote romance stories occasionally too for publication?

GODWIN: Yes. She was a reporter for a newspaper, also a teacher, and then in her spare time she had taken a creative writing course and learned how to plot these pulp romance stories. She had a card file with names of heroines and what their outfits would be like and what their problem would be.

And there was a definite formula, you have man meets woman. They fall in love or they're interested. Then a problem as to arise that separates them or causes a misunderstanding. And then it's overcome. And she -- she would sometimes have two stories in a single issue under different pen names.

GROSS: Did those stories influence your idea of romance at all?

GODWIN: They did in that I saw that her life certainly wasn't like the lives of those heroines, and I realized there were such a thing called sentimentality and euphemism. She did too. She would laugh and say, well, if I wrote a story about a divorced woman raising her little girl alone nobody would publish it.

GROSS: Right. I think your father left when you were one.

GODWIN: Uh-huh. Well, it was a mutual -- a mutual thing. Yes, he left. He was always pretty much an attractive, disturbed person. I'm glad I got to know him for a couple of years before he went his way.

GROSS: That's when you were already an adult, or close to it?

GODWIN: Yes.

GROSS: That story that you submitted when you were young about the hen-picked husband.

GODWIN: Yes.

GROSS: Where did that come from? Where did the idea for that come from?

GODWIN: It came from the fact that the man that hit him on the street was the mayor of the town. And every time I misbehaved my mother and grandmother would say to me, if you don't change your ways we're going to have to tell uncle Bill who lived across the street. And he was the mayor of the town. So I think that was my first way of fictionalizing a personal conflict. So I had -- the hen-pecked husband was me, and the wife was, I guess, a combination of the mother and grandmother saying you better do this, you better do that.

And the mayor of the town was the one who said, watch where you're going, and then hit me over the head with an umbrella.

LAUGHTER

GROSS: OK. If you're just joining us my guest is novelist Gail Godwin. And her new book is called "Evensong." Now the dedication to your husband in your new novel is written in Hebrew.

GODWIN: Yes.

GROSS: So I'm assuming he's Jewish.

GODWIN: Uh-huh.

GROSS: Now because you have been so involved in thinking about religion both in your life and in your literature, I'm wondering if that's something that separates you or if you find it very interesting to have two different religions in the family and to kind of consult both of them.

GODWIN: It's worked very well for us. Both of us, when we met, were skeptics. I didn't go to church. He hadn't gone to synagogue since he was a boy in Vienna. And so we both have this religious ache. I mean, we're interested in God whatever God is. As he says, I don't know what shoe size he wears, but I'm interested.

And we have actually written two short musical -- musicals or operas on religious themes, and we're writing right now, "Mary Magdelen." (ph) We wrote one last year, after I finished "Evensong," on St. Hilda of Whitby (ph). And our first collaboration was about 15 years ago about -- it was called "The Last Lover," about an apochrophyl woman saint called Palagia (ph), who was a loose woman and then decided to be -- become not only a nun but a monk.

She dressed up like a monk and went away and was holy. And we collaborated on that, that was performed. We're both interested in what's at the bottom of all of this.

GROSS: I just thought that I'd say his name -- he's a composer, and his name is Robert Skerrer (ph).

GODWIN: Robert Starrer (ph), yes.

GROSS: Starrer. Thank you.

GODWIN: Uh-huh. You're welcome. The dedication, by the way, in Hebrew means -- it's from ecclisiastes, and it simply says two are better than one.

GROSS: That's nice. Now, I understand you're not married. That you've been together a long time, but tell me why you decided not to get married. If that's not too personal to ask.

GODWIN: It's not too personal. It would interest me. I got married twice and both times were ill considered -- almost impetuous things. And so this time around we just decided not to. Sometimes we think about it, but it's worked so well that we don't want to mess things up.

GROSS: Right.

GODWIN: Still might happen one of these days. But my first marriage only lasted three months. It was right after I got fired from the "Miami Herald," and I proposed to a photographer. And that didn't work. We got married and it was a bad thing to do.

And then when I worked in London in my 20s I went to a creative writing class and I met this very interesting doctor, a psychiatrist, and we got married after a few months. That lasted for a year. And I have to credit him with helping me realize that I simply had to be a writer. And he worked with me, we talked about it, and one day the light went on and then I left him. But we still keep in touch.

GROSS: When I was reading your new novel "Evensong," which I enjoyed immensely, it struck me as almost a novel from another era in the sense that your main characters seems kind of cut off from her generation and from contemporary life; in the sense that writers often surround their characters with the things that define the moment. You know, the music, the movies, the slang, the TV shows.

And your main character herself seems cut off from all of that, all of the things that generations often define themselves by now. And it also strikes me as a very unironic novel, and irony is so much the tone of the '90s I think. And there's really not much of it in your novel. So, I guess I'm wondering if you would agree at all that there is something almost of another era about the writing in this novel and if it says anything about the kind of fiction that you enjoy as a reader.

GODWIN: I think there is an air of timelessness about her. I would say timelessness rather than old-fashioned. I mean, she does watch the news.

GROSS: That's good.

GODWIN: It's just not that important.

GROSS: Yeah. Yeah.

GODWIN: I mean, she sees it in context. I mean, when she watches the news and hears about the millennium -- the millennium, she puts it into this larger context of how -- how it all looks from some eye looking down on it probably. That is not a good answer. I just simply...

GROSS: ...no, I think it's a good answer in the sense of timelessness as opposed to old-fashioned is exactly right. I wished I realized that myself.

GODWIN: But so much of timeliness is fadism, and it's because you just haven't had time to think or to contemplate or -- so you pick up whatever society is flogging that day.

GROSS: Do you feel that you live your life kind of detached from certain things of the moment and try to capture that type of timelessness?

GODWIN: Oh, well, I think I live with one foot in each world. I mean, I watched all the Senate hearings, and I exercise three times a week on pilates (ph), turning myself upside down. And I watched the "X-Files" last night because someone had told me about them. I had never watched them, and I wanted to figure to what it was that attracted people to them. And I was able to by watching -- it's a left brain, right brain thing.

You know, you get -- here you get the skeptic and you get the believer in the unseen and they're a team. And it's like we're trying to get ourselves back together. So I live in both worlds.

GROSS: Well, Gail Godwin, I really want to thank you for talking with us.

GODWIN: You're welcome.

GROSS: Gail Godwin's new novel is called "Evensong."

This is FRESH AIR.

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
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TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Washington, DC
Guest: Gail Godwin
High: Writer Gail Godwin. Her latest novel "Evensong" continues the story of Margaret Bonner began in "Father Melancholy's Daughter." Godwin's other books include "The Odd Woman," Violet Clay," and "A Mother and Two Daughters." Godwin is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the 1981 Award in Literature from the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Spec: Entertainment; Lifestyle; Culture; Religion; Gail Godwin

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Gail Godwin

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: MARCH 01, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 030102NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Ken Tucker
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:52

TERRY GROSS, HOST: Lee Williams and the Spiritual QC's are a popular Southern gospel quartet who have been performing throughout the South for more than 35 years, but have made only a few recordings. There new one is a live album called, "Love Will Go All the Way." And rock critic Ken Tucker says it's music contains the soul of spiritual music.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP -- LEE WILLIAMS AND THE SPIRITUAL QC'S PERFORMING)

(Lyrics unintelligible)

KEN TUCKER, ROCK CRITIC: You can hear in sometimes of African-American gospel music the fundamental underpinnings of rhythm and blues and rock-and-roll. Certainly, in the music made by Lee Williams, born in Tupelo, Mississippi the birthplace of Elvis Presley and perhaps roughly his contemporary, you can hear were our faith in the afterlife coincides, complements, and enhances a passion for life as it is lived by the singer.

In that song, "I've Learned to Lean," Williams testifies to the strength he receives by giving up his soul to a higher power and in turn feels he is given an artistic power.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP -- LEE WILLIAMS AND THE SPIRITUAL QC'S PERFORMING)

I'm running for my life
Running cause I want to see Christ
I made it in my mind
I'm gonna run

While I still got time
I'm gonna run
Gotta run
I gotta run

I gotta run
(Unintelligible)
(Unintelligible)

TUCKER: "Love Will Go All The Way" was recorded live at the East Birmingham Church of God and Christ in Birmingham, Alabama. And you can hear the congregation respond to Williams' crooning vocal there with all the alacrity and ardor that a soul singer like Sam Cooke or Wilson Pickett or Otis Redding or Teddy Pendergrass might have provoked in a secular audience.

All of the singers I've cited, of course, came from the church themselves, and on this CD Lee Williams offers his own version of Wilson Pickett's "In the Midnight Hour," stripping it of its carnal subject and recasting it as a metaphor for the story of Moses and the Pharaoh.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP -- LEE WILLIAMS AND THE SPIRITUAL QC'S PERFORMING "IN THE MIDNIGHT HOUR")

Let me tell you
What we gonna do
We gonna wait til the midnight hour
We gonna (unintelligible) go to sleep

We gonna wait til the midnight hour
When it's just Jesus you and me
Cause he's the only one I know that can deliver us
And save our souls

Wait until the midnight hour
Wait until the midnight hour
Wait until the midnight hour
Wait until the midnight hour

TUCKER: With the exception of that Wilson Pickett song, Williams has written every song on this collection. There are very few places you can go these days for the sort of brawny soul vocalizing that Williams and the QC's provide on a tremendously delicate cut like "Don't Wait."

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP -- LEE WILLIAMS AND THE SPIRITUAL QC'S PERFORMING "DON'T WAIT")

Silly boy
Silly girl
You you you you
Better make peace

With your maker
One of these days
One of these old days
(Unintelligible)

You got to meet your undertaker
So don't you wait

TUCKER: I freely admit that I'm into this music as music not as spiritual uplift, but you can't help but feel a little bit of the rapture Lee Williams seems to constantly be in touch with throughout this wonderful album.

GROSS: Ken Tucker is critic at large for "Entertainment Weekly." He reviewed "Love Will Go All the Way" by Lee Williams and the Spiritual QC's.

I'm Terry Gross.

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

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Dateline: Terry Gross, Washington, DC
Guest: Ken Tucker
High: Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews "Love Will Go All The Way by Lee Williams and the Spiritual QC's.
Spec: Entertainment; Music Industry; Lifestyle; Culture; Lee Williams; Ken Tucker

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End-Story: Ken Tucker
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