Читать книгу The Fiddler Is a Good Woman - Geoff Berner - Страница 4

Dear Reader,

This book is a document of my failure. I will explain:

The song “You Are Home to Me,” by the Low Johannahs, was a hit in eleven countries. The official video has been viewed on YouTube over eight million times. Numerous acts, large and small, have recorded their own version, notably the pop star Spe$ha.

This has led to a great deal of interest in the song’s author and composer, a woman known as DD.

What is DD’s “real” name? I suppose “real” journalists would delve into that, but I’m not a journalist, or even a reporter, and I make a policy of calling people what they would have me call them and leaving it at that.

Fan interest in DD has been fed by the circumstance that nobody seems to know where she is.

A missing persons case was filed in Winnipeg in July 2012, the day after she walked away from her band’s tour bus at two in the afternoon, saying she was going to get a pack of cigarettes. The Winnipeg Police were unable to find any leads. Members of her band voiced frustration at what they saw as a lackadaisical tenor to the official search efforts, and speculated publicly that the officers’ zeal might have been dampened by the fact that she is a woman, a musician, and of Indigenous heritage. Those kinds of people disappear all the time, after all.

In a twist of corporate kismet, my publisher, Dundurn Press, picked up the rights to the publishing and recording revenues from “You Are Home to Me” when they were able to buy most of the assets of Moevment Music at a fire-sale price, after that once-legendary recording, publishing, and management company went bankrupt. I understand that Dundurn mostly bought it for the sheet-music rights.

I had been struggling to write a follow-up to my first book, Festival Man. Dundurn asked me to write a “quickie bio-book” about DD, since she appears in Festival Man, and I have, in fact, played with her on many occasions.

They also suggested that I make some inquiries to see if I couldn’t actually locate DD, since it would certainly be a coup to score the first interview with her in years. Also, Kirk Howard of Dundurn is that rare animal in business, an ethically punctilious man, and it troubled him to be holding almost half a million dollars’ revenue from “You Are Home to Me” in a trust account.

So I set out to do all that, to write the bio-book, to find the fiddler. And this book is the record of my giving up. I failed to write the book, and I failed to find DD. Well, after I failed to find her, I sort of found her, briefly, in a manner of speaking, but not really, and in a way that did not diminish my failure, in my opinion.

I take full responsibility for my failure, which consists of a combination of a lack of daily discipline, as well as what I hypothesize to be a lack of insight into truths that might have been revealed to a more observant and deductive mind.

Over the course of a few years, in my travels as a touring accordion player/singer-songwriter on the independent folk- and world-music circuit in North America and Europe, I interviewed many people connected with DD, and collected a great deal of material. I was not able to make a coherent, digestible biography out of it.

Instead, what I offer here is a boiled-down version of that maddening mess of material, organized by me and my trusted editor, Shannon Whibbs. We did our best to throw out the boring bits, and keep the stuff that might be of interest to fans, or to anyone with more adept powers of detection, who might glean a clue as to DD’s whereabouts.

I miss her very much. That is all.

Yours,

Geoff Berner