lifeblood: songs: backgrounds: a mighty thing

2022-11-07: amy ray teaches us a little something about counting our blessings, queer forty:

there are a couple of songs [on the new album] that jumped out at me. [one is] "a mighty thing." i kind of took it to be about growing up christian in the south and also growing up queer - but maybe i'm wrong.

amy: you're totally right.

that's foreign to me. i mean, i grew up jewish and straight in connecticut - which had its own issues. (she laughs) but what was that like? for example, my friends who identify as christian despise donald trump. yet i know that a large part of his base is made up of people that think of themselves of christian. and i don't get it. to me, he's the antithesis of what a christian should be.

amy: yeah. i mean, most people feel that way about him. i think there's two [types of christians] that support donald trump. the christians that are one-issue voters. it's pro-life; it's not about anything else that he does. it's like, "we can achieve our goal with this guy so we have to take the bad with the good." and then there's the christians that are blind to everything else he is. you know, they have this weird, evangelical attachment to him that is so bizarre.

i was raised in the methodist church - which is more progressive than a lot of churches, but not totally. and when i [was growing] up, i went to church a lot! youth group, bible school, friday night skating - it was a big part of my life. i had a lot of great things that happened there. but i also absorbed a lot of shame around being queer. it basically became part of me and i didn't even know it. and that song - i wrote it after going to a funeral. the preacher was very charismatic, evangelical [and] kind of an amazing person to hear. but his perspective was very different from mine! (laughs) he kept [talking] about how if you accept jesus as your savior, you'll have everlasting salvation, you can't beat that deal. i was like, "well, that's a good line!" that kind of sums up [how] we were taught in the church when we were young. like, this is a good deal; don't pass it up. you have to follow all these rules, but you'll have this in the end. and you kind of sacrifice yourself to that in a way without even knowing it.

the church is still important to me - the progressive church, you know? i think it can be a good community space to do a lot of great activism. but the parts of church that are damaging to us - i'm talking about that [in the song]. i'm talking about the fear of "the other." and the fear of yourself that it creates; like you're scared of your true self. and i'm also talking about fear generally. we're taught to fear things. and when i say, "a teacher is a mighty thing," that sort of sums it up. it can be really good or it can be really bad. [so] just generally know that being a teacher is a mighty thing - and teach good, you know? look at all the things that teaching fear has done to wreck people as individuals and keep them tangled up and not know what end is up. or you can teach all the good things, about loving yourself.

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2022-11-14: amy ray on new album "if it all goes south" with the amy ray band, guitar girl magazine:

could you tell our readers about the songwriting process of "a mighty thing"? it's a very powerful song.

well, it started out from just hearing a preacher talking about salvation, and he just kept saying, "jesus died for your sins, and you have eternal life in heaven." he had a very graphic narrative about what heaven was, it was gold streets and all the things that you've heard. he just kept saying you can't beat that deal. so i started at that point, and then i started thinking about my life growing up in the church in georgia, and going to church a lot. i really loved it, but i also took in all this shame about being queer. but i also had a lot of great things i learned from the church that i still carry with me, and i still have quite a relationship with my church. i also drew from dealing with high school, and how powerful your teachers and mentors are. they are the people that influenced you, for better or for worse. it's really about taking that kind of self-hate and all the ways that you will untangle all that. how do you untangle that when the things that you've learned when you're so young are so powerful? you know, and, and i think i'm just talking about how screwed up i feel sometimes, you know, and it's really about fear. fear when you're scared of yourself, because you feel ashamed of who you are. or you're scared of somebody else, when you don't even really know who they are. i think we misplace fear often. i think we're taught to be scared of the wrong things a lot of the time. that's just kind of what i'm trying to untangle. it covers a lot of territory.

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2022-11-24: amy ray gives thanks, salvation south:

rr-k: in the intro to this interview, i wrote about a couple of the songs on the album that are critical of the south. your love for your region is clear, but you also pretty clearly have a sharp axe to grind on some topics. could you talk about that a little bit? i'm thinking specifically of the song that addresses your relationship with religion called "a mighty thing."

ar: yeah. i mean, it's axe-grinding, for sure. it's a recognition of my travels through fate and getting on the other side of things and going, yeah, i love all this stuff, and now i've got to wrestle with all the crap that i took in that made me hate myself at church. because i ultimately took in the good stuff, but also took in all the bad stuff that made me hate myself for being gay and hate myself for my body and not being comfortable with myself, my views and everything, my tomboyishness. i got the good stuff, but then i ended up realizing that i had the bad stuff, too. and that made me turn in on myself.

basically, the song is casting aspersions at organized religion for doing this to people. i made a deal with it - basically took all the good stuff and wrestled with the bad. still, to this day. i'm basically asking how can we in the face of that - {sings} "this little light of mine, i'm gonna let it shine" - how do you let your light shine, when everything you've learned in church as a young, gay person is that you're bad? how do you let your light shine?

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2022-11-28: the beauty of promise: amy ray on 'if it all goes south' - the creek 100.9 fm

you frequently write about christianity, as well. "a mighty thing" from this record comes to mind. i'm not sure of your beliefs, but religious or not, you're from what flannery called the "christ-haunted" south, so it's inescapable. how do you reconcile the beautiful parts of christianity with the hypocrisy and prejudice?

i love the church. i was raised in the methodist church, and i loved it. and i loved church camp and church choir and bible school. i loved every part of it. i went to church all the time, on sunday, wednesday, and friday. then sometimes i would to church retreats and to camp. i went to camp glisson, which is in dahlonega, for four years when i was a kid. it was hard for me when realized i was gay and felt in opposition to the church i went to. that was hard for me because i was like, "oh, okay." in the south, that construct is part of our lives unless you're jewish or hindu or buddhist, or even catholic. the protestant sort of southerner gets into anybody, even if they don't go to church, because it's part of our vocabulary, it's part of everything. it's part of every parade and every school. in every football game, there's a prayer. you can't escape it, and for some people, that's very hard for them, but for me, it's what i'm used to, so i just kind of filter it all.

but i think what i did is one day i said, "i want to untangle all the bad things that church did to me as a gay tomboy and i want to keep the good things," and i guess the good things are easier to hang on to than the untangling of the bad things sometimes. so i just keep trying to remember the good stuff because there's a lot of good that came out of what i learned. but there's a lot of damage that was done to myself and my image of myself. i hated myself for so long for being gay, and i was pro-life for a long time and then became pro-choice because i realized what it meant as a woman. it's just taken me a long time to wrestle with it all.

have you ever been tempted to leave the south? i mean, you've been all over the world...

never. not one moment in my life have i ever said that i don't want to live here. it's kind of weird, but it's true. i have places that i love, like berlin. i love berlin, germany. i love seattle, washington.

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2023-03-22: shine's catchup with amy ray: the south, her new album, and brandi carlile - louisville public media

sarah jarosz came into the studio on our last night, she came directly from the airport and recorded "a mighty thing" on mandolin live with us. banjo genius, alison brown was there as well, so those two made some magic together. sarah sang her harmony to tape after we got the take. and then we threw another reel on the tape machine and played her "they won't have me" and she grabbed her mandolin and went back into the big room at the studio and she did a track in one take to a song she had only heard once...ha...she is a bad ass.