Moira Smiley

By Jean Ritchie

In an interview while receiving the 2002 National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship, Jean Ritchie said: ‘I've written some healing songs too. One is called Now is the Cool of the Day, which is my favorite of my written songs right now.’ She profoundly affected what we know of Appalachian traditional music as living, growing music, and has been deeply missed since her death in 2015.

I met her when I was a blushing, flustered, grateful 20-year old telling her how this song gave teenage me compass like no other song. Its four elemental verses (...keep grasses green...water clean...feed my lambs...my people free...) taught me the idea of stewardship as a way to make sense of our being here on this planet full of creatures and contradictions. Her elemental words feel like more of a guide now than ever, so I set them into as much stillness as I could in this string arrangement.

I believe that Jean Ritchie would’ve been sanguine about my adapting her words to speak to Love herself, to the divine mother, divine feminine and our accountability to each other and to our home, earth. Instead of ‘my Lord, he said unto me’...and ‘His garden’, I chose ‘my love, she said unto me’...and ‘this garden’. I’m thankful for the pronouns she chose in writing and recording her song, and I love recording a new version to add to the many carrying this song into new generations.