(from “The Third Man”)
During a recent morning commute, a small-time public radio station played “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel” by the obscure Selah Jubilee Quartet. Sounding like an intensely cool, rhythmic barbershop quartet, they sang about how the prophet Ezekiel saw a wheel “way in the middle of the air.” I’d heard such songs before.
But suddenly, they changed direction and broke into “the hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone’s connected to the knee bone …” The station then played two other Ezekiel songs from the quartet tradition, and they all sang about dry bones in the valley and how they’re connected.
Maybe you’re way ahead of me here, but …
It turns out all those Ezekiel songs (with their wheel in the middle of air), and “Dry Bones” by Bascom Lamar Lunsford (it’s on the Harry Smith Anthology), and “Dem Bones,” which I grew up thinking of as a secular children’s song (shin bone connected to the knee-bone, etc.) are all part of the same song complex, held together by the Book of Ezekiel.
You know, maybe I should read that Bible thingy someday … NAH!