Jordan Smith – Liberty

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing February 2026.

Liberty by Jordan Smith.

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Liberty

Dave calls “Cold Frosty Morning,” and starts it off on his mandolin at a nice comfortable pace. It isn’t morning, and it is only late October, but already we’d had that dawn chill, a light lace of frost on the lawns, an intimation. The rest of us join in—a trio of fiddles, more mandolins, a couple of guitars, a button box, a tin whistle. We are mostly teachers, in one way or another, some retired, one who doubled as a soccer coach and fishing guide, a librarian. We have two guests: a writer winding down a book tour with a residency in my classes who brought along his guitar, and a professional fiddler who plays for contradances around the northeast. We run “Cold Frosty Morning” five times through, and Dave holds up his foot, the usual signal to stop. Joe, sitting next to him, playing the lovely F-style mandolin he made for himself, slides right into “Kitchen Girl,” one of the first tunes we all learned when we started this weekly lunchtime session more than twenty years ago. It’s a good one. We kick the tempo up a little. I stop thinking about all the arrangements and complications and irritations and anxieties of the last month. I’m aware of the dance of my right wrist, of the woody rasp of the fiddle’s low strings under my ear, the sound somehow disconnected from anything I am doing or anyone I am. There’s not much in the world that I like better.

It is a grand session. Our writer guest sings John Prine’s “Please Don’t Bury Me.” The dance fiddler pulls out his twelve-string (another home-built instrument) and leads Lead Belly’s “Go Down, Old Hannah;” later he grabs a banjo for Uncle Dave Macon’s “We’re Up Against It Now,” as close to a political statement as we get. The writer grins. A few faculty and students wander in to listen. Someone calls “Coleman’s March,” a lovely tune, supposedly played by a fiddler on his way to the gallows. Tunes from New England, Quebec, the American south, Ireland. The banjo player has brought along her not-yet-toddler and placed him in his carrier seat in the center of the musicians. He’s smiling.

Of course, there’s a subtext under the shuffle rhythms, the syncopation, the danceable melodies, the group-mind that gets the musicians out of their own heads for the half-dozen choruses. “Coleman’s” is a death march. “Go Down, Old Hannah” is rooted in forced labor and the migrant, relentless, backbreaking conditions that followed reconstruction. “We’re Up Against It Now,” however folksy the singer makes it sound, is an inventory of the havoc modernity caused rural lives and livelihoods and pleasures. The reels and jigs, from Ireland and Scotland and Quebec, carry a legacy of displacement, of exile for all sorts of reasons and the contempt that exiles face. Some well-known fiddle tunes owe their first popularity to the minstrel shows, white musicians in blackface, caricaturing the people whose music they’re playing. Once in a while, one of the players might mention something about a tune’s history. I like that. It’s part of the occasion, but it’s not the whole point.

And except for a few sidebar conversations, neither is the history of any of us. I’ve known some of these people for thirty years or more; some not so much. When I look around the circle, it’s easy to catalogue the losses that people carry: partners or marriages, children, parents, abilities, jobs. And what they have to face up to: a recent stroke, a mother’s house to be sorted after her passing, a spouse’s illness, diagnosed or seemingly undiagnosable, the familiar hassles of familial care treading on job demands. And, of course, the omnipresent political grief of America in 2025. It’s a wonder, I think, that some of us can find the time or the presence of mind to pick up an instrument, get it in tune, learn another jig or reel or song well enough that we can leave the sheet music home (if we ever had it to begin with). It’s not an evasion, not really. The tunes themselves, and the old songs with their stories of violence or with the verses that nobody wants to sing anymore because of the truths they tell about history and suffering and the cruelty of what once seemed like humor, are too much of a presence for that.

But start playing, and the tunes are just notes in our fingers, no matter what the titles might recall, if we even recall the titles when someone has played the first few bars and we join in. Not everyone in the circle has much interest in the history of the tunes, accurate or imagined in a cloud of nostalgia for a country before the past became so contested that we can hardly see it. It’s social music, not, as my fiddle teacher said once, a spectator sport. And not a history lesson, or not just one; saying something about the lineage of the tunes is another contribution to the moment of losing yourself in their music.

Still, going back to Uncle Dave’s “We’re Up Against It Now” reminds me of Peter Matthiesson’s Shadow Country, where Lucius Watson, the son of the sometimes charming and thoroughly murderous Edgar “Bloody” Watson, spends his life like a drunkard spends his bucks at a bar, trying to write a biography that will transform his father from killer to rough-and-ready pioneer of Florida’s cane syrup industry. Lucius has no direction home. The world he grew up in, hunting and fishing, learning and loving the glades and keys and avoiding the truths of his family and the bloodiness of making a living there, is going, going, gone to real estate scams and political connivance, and it was never an idyll to begin with. The Edgar Watson who killed his field hands instead of paying them embodied the violence of that first world, just as much as he prefigures the scheming and profiteering that drive the modernity that shouldered it aside. There’s irony in Lucius’ ramblings through this place that’s both his and not, here and gone, and empathy in Matthiessen’s treatment of his loss-riven life, but not much humor, certainly none of Uncle Dave’s wry tone as he catalogues what the automobile has done to the farmers and 1920s fashions have done to their wives and daughters. But there’s a common recognition of shared witness, implicit in Shadow Country and perfectly clear in Uncle Dave’s slapstick use of the collective “we’re” as he invites us to sing along on the chorus. “We’re up against it now.”

We’re poised, all of us, between our private attritions and the destructions of a common world, which we know is a hard, often vicious place and always was except when we acted as if it wasn’t. Outside, afternoon darkening, the temperature falling; we’ll have another frosty morning coming. Inside this college common room, a baby is smiling at the center of a circle playing, of all things, “Coleman’s March,” that sweet tune marking an approaching tragedy. We know our history and we know the costs, memorialized in the music we play, just as we know all that’s waiting for us when we leave, but that’s not the first thing on anybody’s mind right now. “Liberty,” calls the next person in the circle, and we start that one off, another good tune as long as it lasts.

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In the Pines

He listened to all the versions he could find,
From field recordings to MTV, country bands
And Cajun, and of course Huddy Ledbetter’s,
And if anyone who sang it wasn’t doomed,
Still they sounded like they were, and his steps
As if he’d actually been there, grew quieter
As the mix of needles and duff deepened,
Each turn of the trail marked with some
Ambiguous sign—jay’s feather, broken
Finger of a branch, a whisper or snatch
Of song in the boughs, tell me where
Did you sleep last night–and he put
One foot in front of the other as he’d always done,
Which is what we do, because deception is
Never where we mean to find ourselves, just
These woods we walk through.

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Threadbare

His friend said, “I saw how threadbare
My hold on life was,” and he thought
Of the Donegal tweed, second-hand, rewoven
Where the lichen and russet herringbone
Snagged on a bramble when he bent
To deadhead the roses, and the moth hole
Hidden below one lapel, and the streak
Of rust where he draped it on the iron fence,
And how it would find its way soon
Enough to another thrift store or braided,
Like his father’s wedding suit, into a rug
Lying for years on the same pine floor
Of the room where they said the vows.

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© Jordan Smith

Jordan Smith is the author of eight full-length books of poems, most recently Little Black Train, winner of the Three Mile Harbor Press Prize and Clare’s Empire, a fantasia on the life and work of John Clare from The Hydroelectric Press, as well as several chapbooks, including Cold Night, Long Dog from Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press. The recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill foundations, he is the Edward Everett Hale Jr., Professor of English at Union College.