Women's voices: Tears of hope

As I noted earlier today, women have set examples of courage and integrity; in many cases, armed with nothing more deadly than a chant, they have faced down some of the greatest tyrannies in history. Even during war.

So, of course The Voices will have sung about it.

Very often the songs are about the pain and loss—yeah, usually of one’s husband, lover, brother or son—in conflict. After all, women’s role in warfare has traditionally been ancillary to the actual, you know, fighting.

A classic example of this genre is “My Youngest Son Came Home Today,” here sung by Mary Black. It’s also a classic example of G.K. Chesterton’s dictum about all Irish songs being sad. Precisely, as I’ve noted previously, because so many of them are about the bitterness of war.

Yeah, the Irish have a lot of experience at this sort of thing.

My second Voice today is Alison Krauss, a singer-songwriter, primarily in the bluegrass-country genre; she plays a wicked-good fiddle.

Krauss sang “Jubilee” on the soundtrack of Paper Clips, the 2006 documentary about a project by Tennessee middle-schoolchildren to understand the magnitude of the Holocaust by collecting six million paper clips. The project expands to include one of the boxcars actually used to transport Jews to death camps. It’s an extraordinary film of an amazing process, and Krauss’s almost insubstantial voice on this song is a fitting descant as the boxcar is transported from the port in Baltimore to Whitwell, Tenn.

As it happened, this occurred in September, 2001.

We are moving to a time when women are joining combat arms, and they’re leading governments and framing policy. The hope is that the need for this type of song will recede when leaders view world affairs as less of a geopolitical pissing match and more of an opportunity to build collaborative harmonies.

Well, that’s the hope, anyhow.