The Road Home

Lately I have been returning to music that has deep meaning for me. Over the weekend I had the pleasure to watch the 2019 television production of A Christmas Carol, with Guy Pearce as Ebenezer Scrooge. Although it takes considerable liberties with the Dickens text, I found that it understood the climactic transformation of Scrooge, that it was the fate of Tiny Tim that stirred Scrooge to his very soul and that had caused him to change his heart.

I carried the hopefulness (and the pain) of the story into my evening here where I live on an isolated island in the Philippines. The weather is wet and gloomy, which is typical for January. The sound of rain falling into the night put me in an escapist mood, and inspired a desire to seek out music that has always provided me with a restorative solace.

Then yesterday I encountered a choral piece that was new to me, composed in 2001 by the American composer Stephen Paulus, called “The Road Home.” Upon hearing the words being sung, I felt its direct bearing on my life, like a plaintive threnody. 

The Road Home

Tell me, where is the road

I can call my own,

That I left, that I lost,

So long ago?

All these years I have wandered,

Oh, when will I know 

There's a way, there's a road 

That will lead me home?

After wind, after rain,

When the dark is done.

As I wake from a dream 

In the gold of day,

Through the air there's a calling

From far away,

There's a voice I can hear 

That will lead me home.

Rise up, follow me,

Come away, is the call,

With the love in your heart

As the only song;

There is no such beauty

As where you belong:

Rise up, follow me,

I will lead you home.

Here is a video of a beautiful performance of the song. Paulus wrote the music first and then asked Michael Dennis Browne to supply the words: 

In the Spring of 2001 I received a commission from the Dale Warland Singers to write a short "folk" type choral arrangement. I had discovered a tune in a folk song book called "The Lone Wild Bird." I fell in love with it, made a short recording and asked my good friend and colleague, Michael Dennis Browne to write new words for this tune. The tune is taken from The Southern Harmony Songbook" of 1835. It is pentatonic and that is part of its attraction. Pentatonic scales have been extant for centuries and are prevalent in almost all musical cultures throughout the world. They are universal. Michael crafted three verses and gave it the title "The Road Home." He writes so eloquently about "returning" and "coming home" after being lost or wandering. Again, this is another universal theme and it has resonated well with choirs around the world as this simple little a cappella choral piece has become another "best seller" in our Paulus Publications catalogue and now threatens to catch up with "Pilgrims' Hymn." It is just more evidence that often the most powerful and beautiful message is often a simple one. May 2013

About the composition of the words, Michael Dennis Browne noted:

I did what I needed to do: spent a lot of time with the melody and tried to see what it might be trying to say. I was between visits to England, where my beloved sister Angela had become ill, and I was certainly thinking, on one level, of “the old country” which I left in 1965 to come to the United States. I could also hear in the first three notes the beginning of “Loch Lomond,” a song I had sung and loved since I was a child. What I was looking for was a significant simplicity, something memorable and resonant and patterned, but not as complex as poems can often be, need to be; I wanted something immediate. Little by little, the words came. I thought of the speaker as a persona rather than myself, though of course there needed to be a “personal vibration” to it (to use Robert Lowell’s term). I was also trying to suggest the consolation that can come to someone of faith, in times of great stress, as a result of prayer and an abiding belief in divine mercy. In a short essay called “Words for Music,” I have written of lyrics for music as “boats on sand” when they appear on the page. In writing words for “The Road Home,” I was writing something to be heard as many voices carrying the stirring melody and not as something self-reliant, to stand on its own the way a poem must do. In doing so, I was aware of steering close to the sentimental and, as I said in my essay, I would never present the words as a poem in a poetry reading, though I have spoken them on occasion as an example of the kind of writing I have done for music. September 2010

So here I am. Momentous things have taken place this past year that changed my outlook on the future. Instead of always having to hack my way through an interminable dark forest, I reached a clearing from which I saw a valley extending as far as I could see. There it lies, my new life, away from here – a place in which I felt stranded like a castaway. All I have to do now is keep walking toward it. Home awaits me.