Every now and then I hear a voice that makes me grateful for embodiment itself, dangerous and disappointing as this mortal vessel can be sometimes. Early September 2019, just a few weeks before embodiment turned treacherous as the pandemic took hold, I heard such a voice.

I was watching Festival, a documentary about the Newport Folk Festival. I’m not often enthusiastic about the folk music revival of the 1960s, but this film was different somehow. Perhaps it was the sheer variety of folk and their musics. Perhaps it was the folksong “clinic” Bob Dylan turned up for, before he had become Bob Dylan. Without a doubt, it was hearing Son House talk about the blues, and hearing Mike Bloomfield talk about Son House. I’d say it was impossible to top those voices. Anytime I hear Son House sing, I hear the music of the spheres.

There was, though, and to my surprise, an equally revelatory moment, when a blind Appalachian singer named Horton Barker stepped up to sing “Pretty Sally.” It was a very brief moment, only an excerpt, but I knew instantly I had heard something bright with meaning. I knew I had been changed.

The next day I started a Wikipedia article on Horton Barker, and began to do some research on his life and art. The article is still a stub–I have not yet incorporated the information I was able to find (more than I had expected to find, in fact)–but the article was born in time to be linked to by the announcement of a University of Virginia folksong archive, newly opened to streaming access. (Perhaps that should be my epitaph: “Here lies Gardner Campbell. He was born in time to be linked to.”)

Months passed, and I kept thinking about Horton Barker. For Christmas 2020, I ordered the original Smithsonian Folkways album from a Discogs seller. It’s in near-mint condition, still in its shrink wrap, its stout jacket and apparently mimeographed typewritten booklet perfectly intact. And for those who don’t have turntables, the album is available as a custom CD and as a digital download from the Folkways site.

Yesterday I put the record on and listened to the first two tracks, “Wayfaring Stranger” and ‘Wondrous Love.”

Then I had to stop. My cheeks were wet with tears and I needed to process what I had just experienced. In his blindness, with a pure tenor voice and an Appalachian accent much like the ones I heard growing up and still hear in my voice today, Horton Barker sings each song as if he wrote it himself, mingling luminous intensity and joyful exuberance, with the precise aim of striking my soul with glory, as this music has evidently struck his.

People speak idly of “technology.” Yesterday I visited the dead. Or was it rather a visitation from a life beyond life, lifting me from the grave, raising me so I, too, can sing on?