Before these experiences fade into the mists of the road behind me, I want to recount a couple of moments on the camino which have been extraordinary. They have been moments where music was the medium of fellowship.
“Where to start?
With attitude, I suppose, and how it can, and must, be shifted.Dreariness, monotony, trudging ensue and fills all the interstices of this pilgrim walk.
Feeling surly, on a most dreary pre-dawn morning in the monstrous municipal albergue at Viana, as I was packing to leave, I heard the rousing sound of a mens’ chorus of voices singing in full, wonderful harmony from what sounds like vigorous wake-up revelry song, or hymn, their voices rising from somewhere in the building! I thought, Wow! What energetic pilgrims to sing like that in this pre-dawn gloom! But I soon realized that these men, probably a contingent of a church choir on their way to Mass that Sunday, were outside our cold, stone refugio standing on the street singing a rallying pilgrim anthem for us, simply to cheer us on our way! It was magical—such a gift!Each time we enter a town or hamlet, Stuart makes a beeline to the first church he sees and tries the doors to enter. We have had the most luck with the smaller town churches, and in a couple of them, I have managed to offer up some chants and hymns into the empty stone naves with their fabulous acoustic. In the tiny hamlet of Puenta de la Reina in a Templar built church called Our Lady of the Street, I was singing away in the cool interior of its acoustically rich nave when I sensed another person entering at the back of the church. I fell silent but did not turn around at the end of the chant, and in a few moments a sweet soprano voice began to sing a hymn in Latin. She sang for only a short time and I, without turning around to look at her, entreated her to continue. She sang another delicate hymn verse in what I think was French. For a few more minutes, she and I traded off singing chants and hymns, and then she sang a lovely descant over my rendition of Dona Nobis Pacem, (which I sang in every church as my back-pocket hymn. ) Then she left, an anonymous pilgrim, and I only saw her back pack as she made her way up the street out of the village. Stuart said she came out of the church beaming!”
Alice’s Camino Journal 2012
Seven years later, on my solo walk on the Camino Frances, I found myself reentering this same Templar chapel with the desire once again to sing. I took up a position with my recording device to capture a rendition of the wonderful French pilgrim song written by a contemporary with the refrain “Ultreia, et Suseia! Deus adjuva nos!” “Onward, and Upward! God is with us!”
As I was winding down and preparing to leave the church, I became aware that there was a small knot of Korean pilgrims who had been listening in the quiet gloom behind me. They began to make a circle and started singing a sweet little hymn in their own tongue, a bit out of tune, but still beautiful in that holy acoustic. They were still singing as I left, my heart well-pleased to bursting as I hauled my pack back on and crept out the door to the street.
Music is interwoven into my camino experiences: singing the Ultreia! song with a group of pilgrims and nuns in a monastic albergue, chanting the psalms at Vespers or Matins with the numerous orders who hold services daily for pilgrims, singing ancient pilgrim songs with my headset to keep my feet moving in time up a mountain. My favorite is a 13th century pilgrim song “Stella Splendens” recorded by Jordi Savall filled with drums marshaling a rhythm for the pilgrims’ feet, various pipes and flutes, and a large group of men and women trading the singing over something like thirteen verses! This singing goes on and on and I can imagine pilgrims of old marching up a steep path, with the drummer in the rear keeping time, voices steadily reciting the refrain and whoever knows the verses piping in here and there…
Today’s pilgrims are more hermetically sealed up with their headphones on, listening to their own playlists, and few sing together as they walk, but I often found myself breaking out loud into verses of the Ultreia! song as I walked, sometimes with other pilgrims within earshot.
Stuart and I found ourselves writing funny songs together just to keep our sense of humor:
(sung to the tune of “Green Acres”):
“Manure deep!
screaming sheep!”
And the classic one we composed after walking behind cows which were drinking each others’ urine like a water fountain. I’ll never forget the disgusted expression on Stuart’s face as he turned to see if I was witnessing this bizarre scene.
So, we began to sing like a drawling cowboy:
“Don’t let my urine go to waste
Step right up and have a taste.”
Soon we’ll all be lead to slaughter
And the day can’t get much hotter…
Pass me some of that fine
bovine turpentine...”
The rest of the day we would come up with additional verses as the memory of cows haunted us…
Another ditty was born when we heard hunters firing shots nearby in the woods; as I was putting my hi-visibilty vest on, and thoughts of being picked off by shotgun from afar was jittering through our minds, we began to sing (with an American cowboy drawl):
“Put one less chicken on the brine,
There’ll be one less pilgrim at dinner time
We lost one back the road apiece,
heard shots and beat a fast retreat…“
(The brine part came from our pilgrim dinner the night before:
a miserably tough chicken cutlet, salted to the point of being inedible…)
I have to say, these little ditties went a long way to soothing our anxieties on the Way.
