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I Don't Think Elvis Did That

July 7, 2008 | 2 Comments

Dear Garrison,
My wife and I had the pleasure of attending your Tanglewood show this past weekend. Among the evening's many highlights was the hourlong set of music after the show, featuring popular hymns, ballads, and standards. Talk about giving an audience a bang for its buck! Do you regularly perform this much after a show? And do you ever feel like a musician trapped in a writer's body?

Elvis would be proud!

Rob

It's become a habit at Tanglewood for the lawn dwellers to come down into the shed after the show and clap until we come back onstage and it seems to me that what they want to do is sing songs together, not necessarily hear me perform, and so we lean around and sing all the songs we think everybody knows—Home on The Range, Can't Help Falling In Love, Bye Bye Love, Old Man River, America the Beautiful, I've Been Working On The Railroad, Abilene, Down In The Valley, Amazing Grace—until people have had enough. In most cities, people have had enough at the end of the show and they clap and go home, but at Tanglewood for some reason a good share of the crowd wants to hang around. Maybe there's not that much to do in the Berkshires. Maybe people are handing out their business cards. Maybe pickpockets are working the crowd. I don't know. But it's always fun. I don't think Elvis did that, though. He left the building rather promptly after his last song. But people knew his songs and would've been thrilled to sing with him. Ah well, some things you never learn if you die young.

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