Very Blue

This is an essay I wrote for an MFA course I took in 2021 and edited over the course of 2 years. It's an autobiographical essay about the work of the songwriter Nanci Griffith, who passed away in 2021. This is one of my favorite things I've ever written, but it's sat in the drafts for several years during which I found it impossible to pitch (how do you pitch... your life?). Now I'm giving it the opportunity to live again.

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I was supposed to be born in September, but the doctors thought I would come in June—on the 28th, which was the day of a blue moon. A blue moon is the second of two full moons falling in the same month, and it happens every 2.7 years, rare enough to have its own name, common enough that we’ve all seen one. For most of my childhood I thought that blue referred to the moon’s appearance, but of course this isn’t true; its blueness is all about time, not color.

As it turned out, I wasn’t born at the end of a month but at the beginning of one, in July. I was about two pounds, my lungs were under-developed, and for the first few weeks of my life I was unable to breathe without assistance. My eyes were purple, and would remain so for several months, because my irises had not yet grown in. Most importantly, my nasal passages were unformed, a condition called choanal atresia, and I couldn’t do the most important task babies have to do, which is a self-explanatory process called “suck, swallow, breathe”. If I had been born on that blue moon, it is likely, though not certain, that I would have died.

The story about the moon stuck, though, one of those associations that hangs around even though it isn’t quite right. Like any origin story, it was based on a grain of truth; and like a pearl forms itself around a piece of sand, I formed around it, unconsciously, blue through and through.

“Once in a Very Blue Moon” appeared first on Nanci Griffith’s 1984 album of the same title. Despite being the name of her third album, “Blue Moon” isn’t her song; it’s a cover of a song by the country musician Patrick Alger. It’s about the aftermath of a breakup, and begins with the singer receiving a letter in the mail from a mysterious someone. Soon, though, the singer’s ambivalence towards the sender becomes clear, if in a characteristically understated way:

No need to tell me you’d like to be friends

Help me get back on my feet again

And if I miss you, well, it’s just now and then

Just once, in a very blue moon

My parents listened to Nanci Griffith all the time when I was growing up. She was on during road trips, when they cooked while I drew at the kitchen table and did other only-child things: Other Voices, Other Rooms, her album of covers, or From a Distance, or sometimes Last of the True Believers.

It was always clear that “Blue Moon” was my song—it was about blue moons, after all. For a while I was irritated by it. There’s something distasteful about identifying with a song that tries as hard as that one does to project strength while still being wholly consumed by its own sadness. It was over the top, too much. Ultimately my feelings about it were irrelevant, though; it was so much a part of my life that it became impossible to separate what I think about it from how it makes me feel.

Nanci Griffith was on the periphery of cult status for most of her career. She was friends with more famous songwriters, including John Prine and Julie Gold, and her covers of their songs are more well-known than most of her own. She had depression, which musical outlets blamed for her low output in her later life as well as her tendency towards sentimentality in her music.

“Once in a Very Blue Moon”—which, again, is a cover—is as sentimental as they come. It relies on the metaphorical resonances of its parts—blue (sad), and moon (also, in a way, meaning sad, or distant and mysterious)—as well as what they signify together: a rare event, something that only comes every so often. It relies on “blue moon” as a measurement of time; the singer equates “now and then” with “once in a blue moon”. And it relies on the listener not getting tired of the refrain “just once in a very blue moon”, which is repeated a total of ten times.

It’s not just about measurement, though; it’s about memory. The singer is angry that her former lover doesn’t share her pain and wants to know why. The song is desperate for an answer at the same time as it refuses to beg for one:

You act as if it never hurts you at all,

Like I’m the only one who’s getting up from a fall

Don’t you remember? Can’t you recall?

Griffith’s desperation is endearing at the same time as it’s a little off-putting. She is directing the audience to something that is no longer there, that none of us will be able to see. Indeed, it’s unclear whether the sender’s problem is an inability to remember, or an unwillingness to.

Her discography is full of blueness: Blue Roses from the Moons, “Bluer than Blue”, the chorus from “Gulf Coast Highway” that talks about escaping to Heaven “some sweet blue bonnet spring.” The blueness of “Blue Moon” is about looking for an origin where there isn’t one anymore. Griffith’s pronunciation underlines this sense of surprise at a loss: the pause just after every other “just once” is the sonic version of thin air where there should be a step.

The phrase “once in a blue moon” is so ubiquitous you’d be forgiven for not stopping to think about it, but it has a divisive history. It was used in early modern England to refer to something that couldn’t possibly happen, or something that only foolish people would believe.

“Blue moon” as it refers to a phase of the moon was originally attributed to the early nineteenth century practice of farmers marking times when there were four full moons in a single season, instead of three. According to the Smithsonian, however, this usage is actually based on a misunderstanding:

Amateur astronomer James High Pruett incorrectly interpreted the term in an article he wrote in Sky & Telescope using the meaning we know today. The mistake was repeated several times—notably, in 1980 on the NPR show Star Date—and eventually the new definition stuck, along with a common misattribution to traditional folklore, which “appeals to our modern sensibilities, including our desire to have plausible origins”.

Despite its current apocryphal usage, the phrase’s original meaning has stuck around, though with a difference: a “blue moon” is no longer an impossibility, but a rarity.

Maybe this is why I’m so attached to it; nearly an impossibility, I’m a rarity instead. In 1996, the technology for treating severely premature babies was less sophisticated than it is today, but their treatment still looks the same. Preemies need to be taken from their parents immediately and put into a little transparent box, where their heart rate, oxygen levels, and body temperature are under constant surveillance. Most of my hospital pictures are of me in my box, wrapped in a patterned blanket from the NICU, sometimes with someone’s hand next to me for scale.

The technology that kept me alive was developed by a French physician, Dr. Stéphane Tarnier, who was inspired to create incubators for human use after seeing baby chicks in one at a Paris zoo. An American doctor named Martin Couney saw Tarnier’s incubators at an exposition in Berlin and decided to import them to the US. He set up a sideshow exhibit at New York’s Coney Island, where paying customers could come and see premature babies in their glass boxes, including, at one point, his own daughter. Couney took care of the incubator babies from 1903 until 1940, when he retired. He died in the 50s in obscurity. It would take years after his death for incubators to become widely used in hospitals, and decades before they became as reliable as they are today.

Now I live about an hour from Coney Island. When I went to see the exhibit space, there was no plaque or statue: the incubators are gone now. Maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t know how I’d feel if I could see the rows and rows of translucent boxes where babies about my size would have lived for months, some of whom made it out alive, others who did not.

I found out Nanci Griffith died two years after the fact, and two years and a bit after I started writing this essay. It feels tempting to say I must have intimated something, but obviously that’s not true. I listened to her music and thought about her again, and looked, for the first time, at the album cover of Once in a Very Blue Moon, the first place she ever recorded its titular song. On it she sits at a space-age table with a glass of wine. On the table sits a pack of cigarettes and an astronaut’s helmet. She looks very young, more so than any other picture I’ve found of her. At the time the album released she would have been about 30, but the dress and the blue ballet flats with socks she’s wearing make her look childlike.

The whole cover looks almost like the cover of a sci-fi novel. It captures what I think is the reason I come back to Griffith’s music outside of nostalgia: while she’s writing about Texas and the American South/West, she brings in an element that escapes that geographical boundary with the mysticism of her lyrics. In “More than a Whisper”, another one of her early songs about falling in love with the wrong person, she says “It’s snowing up in the northlands, I read your warm words from the plains / While the poets say that I should never be thinking of you this way” an argument immediately followed by its thesis: “And they say that I misread your lines, cause I’ve been lonely all my life.” It’s a stunning picture of someone making a decision in the face of reason, caution, or public opinion; making a decision just because of how it makes them feel. The juxtaposition of warmth and cold weaves through the problem of the song– like “Blue Moon”, a noncommittal man who won’t call back. It’s pathetically sad. It also forces us to witness that sadness without looking away.

Nanci Griffith channeled the lyric power of epic poems about men doomed to die at war into songs about 20th century Texas. She wrote about many of the messy and bitter parts of being alive, including but not limited to depression (mental and The Great), generational anger, natural disasters, and of course heartbreak. Through her music, she told stories about what it was like to attempt difficult tasks like falling in love and fail at them. What she succeeded in was composing a body of music that expresses mythic feelings, that can be listened to wherever you are on the track of life, after a breakup or before the birth of your child or randomly, on a fall day, because you remember it exists. In all these moments witnessing someone else’s yearning creates something beautiful, a pearl ground out of silt that you can save for whenever in your life you need it.

There’s nothing new about being consumed by your own sadness. It might be the oldest thing there is. But justifying that sadness, presenting it proudly and without shame, is rare.