May 10, 2005 7:30 PM
Saturday Night Meets Sunday Morning Music
Could the “communion through music” that some people experience belting out a rollicking hymn in church be the same spirit others experience dancing in a smoky bar with friends who would never darken a church doorstep?
Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls and Don, her Methodist minister father, address that possibility in a new book and a series of public appearances. “We’ve been quite taken with how people are astonished at the father-daughter thing,” he says. “It seems to them good and rare.”
The two of them make connections between the secular and the sacred – moving from Indigo Girls lyrics, “If I have a care in the world, I have a gift to bring,” right on into “Let Us Break Bread Together on Our Knees.”
As Emily sings, “With all the blood still dried in the desert can we not fertilize the earth with something else?” Emily and Don offered up the “something else” of music committed not to “immediacy of feeling” but to social justice and to “sustaining people in deep affections over time.”