Some reflections on the life of John Solomon Otto
and the sermon for his funeral -- January 21, 2006

The Rev. Dr. Judith A. Davis, Rector, Christ Church + Washington Parish on Historic Capitol Hill©

+May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, our Rock and our Redeemer.

In the “Cross Road Blues,” Robert Johnson sings these words: “I went down to the crossroads and fell down on my knees, asked the Lord up above for mercy, save poor Bob if you please."  

LeDell Johnson (no known relation to Robert) said this about blues guitar:

"If you want to learn to play anything you want to play and learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where a crossroads is. A big black man will walk up there at the stroke of midnight and take your guitar, and he'll tune it..."

These two quotes are from blues singers in the last century.  And the fourth stanza of the gradual hymn we just sang works thematically like the Blues: “The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod. Yet let us pray for but one thing—the marvelous peace of God.” (Hymn 661, “They cast their nets in Galilee” from The Hymnal 1982)  These words were written in the early part of the 20^th century the same time the Blues singers were writing and singing.  We long, especially this day, for the peace of God—that peace which the world cannot give us, in our grief.  Peace comes with a price, and that price is loving those we might lose one day.  The Blues songs are like that too.  John Solomon Otto loved the Blues and the old gospel hymns of the Southland.  

I don’t know much about the Blues even though I grew up in the great part of North Carolina that nurtured the Piedmont Blues.  I don’t know much about archaeology or anthropology of the antebellum plantations in the South, although I grew up there.  I know just a little about guitar music and played ‘60s folk music in coffee houses in college but I know nothing about blues guitar or 12 bar music.  I know a little about the University of Florida where John and I did our PhD’s a few years apart.

John Solomon Otto knew about those things and more and many of us didn’t know about all John’s interests because John Otto was a quiet, contemplative man, a gentle southern man, whom you could engage one-on-one. He was an introvert and didn’t share all his interests with the world the way we extroverts sometimes blather on.  So this is an introvert’s funeral!  And what we extraverts (including this one) need to know is how important spending time getting to know our friends and engaging them in deep conversation is, because, much to our surprise, by being quiet and listening, we might learn so much about life, and also because one day, unexpectedly, our introvert friend may be longer with us.   I wish today I’d spent more time getting to know John, getting to learn about the Blues and even playing guitar together.

John Otto was one of those quiet, serious types that you had to engage to get that schoolboy smile and that quick wit.  He was bright and educated and knew so much; he published many articles and three books. He played guitar and loved Southern gospel hymns and the archaeological history of the antebellum South.  He loved Jesus and Nain and Rob.  He loved teaching school and he loved seeing history come alive. He loved his students in McLean and now at the Washington Lab School. He loved listening to the Blues on his steel turntable and on his Bose CD player and he loved blues guitar from legends like Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and others.

John grew up in the culture that nurtured the Blues. Here is a quote from the preface of his book, The Final Frontiers, 1880-1930: Settling the Southern Bottomlands, published in 1999:

Drawing on a variety of sources, this book explores the settlement history of the Southern bottomlands -- an area that has fascinated me since childhood when I lived only two miles from the Arkansas River bottoms. During the 1950s, my family resided in a large Arkansas county that was a microcosm of the American South. One portion of the county was mountainous terrain that resembled Appalachia, another section was dissected upland that recalled the southeastern piedmont, and the third portion was a tract of Arkansas River bottomlands that was an outlier of the lower Mississippi River Valley.

I quote this preface to ground the cultural place of his upbringing in a spirit that also nurtured the Blues and John’s spirituality.  A reviewer of his book, The Southern Frontiers, 1607-1860: The Agricultural Evolution of the Colonial and Antebellum South, published in 1989, said that this book

provided a synthesis of studies from a variety of disciplines on agriculture in the American South from colonial times to the Civil War. Otto describes succinctly and well the syncretistic agricultural techniques of the colonial period, that is, the contributions of Native Americans, Africans, and West Indians as well as of Europeans. 

And this point is well-taken because the diversity of farmers, white renters, sharecroppers and others is that place of nurturing the people who made the Blues the spiritual rock bed of the American South in the same way that the gospel hymns were developed.

So John knew the world that formed him on the farm in Arkansas, and the world that had African slaves who, themselves, and their children, became the founders of the Southern blues.  So John knew as well his love for the care of these blues heroes and thereby designated that memorials go to this incredible organization, “Music Maker Relief Foundation” in Durham, North Carolina.  The mission of the organization is this:

Music Maker Relief Foundation strives to help the true pioneers and forgotten heroes of Southern music gain recognition and meet their day to day needs. We support the health and well-being of these legendary musicians.  Our organization provides the ways and means to expand their professional careers and share their unique musical gifts with the world. Music Maker does this for the betterment of their lives and for the preservation of our culture.”

This quote is taken from their newsletter, Music Maker Rag.

The Blues and those who follow the Blues and sing the Blues is a whole subculture I missed somehow growing up in the South, where I learned the southern gospel hymns and sixties coffeehouse justice songs.  John was taking guitar lessons and had gotten a great Martin guitar to play the Blues.  The Blues nourished him and fed the spiritual culture of his roots in the Deep South.  The Blues grew out of hymnody as well as I mentioned.

The Bluesmen who taught themselves to play their own instruments were the most musically innovative. They brought new music and new techniques to old instruments like the guitar. Many of these early bluesmen started out on homemade, one-stringed instruments that were made by attaching a taut wire to a house or barn. The player then plucked out a rhythmic pattern with one hand while sliding a glass bottle along the wire to control tone. This slider technique was easily transferred to the guitar.

Durham, North Carolina, the place of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, was one of the focal points of the tobacco industry and became a focal point of the Piedmont blues.  The large blues tradition is also the reason for the name of the Duke University "Blue Devils," for those of you who need some ACC trivia before basketball season. The Blues arose both as a form of social protest and as a means of expression. The music is very personal both to the artists and the listeners.  And it was personal to John.

The Blues is one of the few forms of American music that has stayed with us since its inception a century ago. The Blues began in the south and moved to the cities of the north, and today, the Blues still come to mind when people speak of Chicago and St. Louis. Every year, thousands of people attend blues festivals all over the country. The Blues is still alive and well in America and the Music Maker Foundation helps the Blues survive.

This is a time to give thanks for John and to cherish his gifts to us, his family and friends.  It’s a time to see a model of a fine man, and a great husband and father, a community citizen, a great teacher as well as student, a would-be blues musician and one who cared for the old gals and guys who sang the Blues and received little praise for doing so, for those who are old and needy but who still, like Etta Baker, born in 1913 in Western North Carolina, play the Blues. She learned to play guitar at age four at the feet of her relatives and remains the premier female blues guitar instrumentalist in the country.  John’s care for these blues singers warms my heart as he gave thanks for the South that nurtured them and even their slave parents and grandparents.  His care for us, for you, warms my heart the same way.   His great love of teaching and students and history matters greatly to many of you, the Blues notwithstanding.

His untimely death shocks all of us and reminds us of the present moment, which is all we have.  It reminds us that the God of love and mercy and justice has not promised to deliver us from suffering and grief and mourning.  God knows all the Blues that matter came out of that suffering and grief and mourning.  But Jesus the Christ who promised Martha that her brother Lazarus would live eternally in God’s presence (see John 11) because Jesus himself was the Resurrection and the Life, is the same God who said to his disciples in their own grief at losing him from them at such a young age, “And remember, I am with you always to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). Jesus promised to go with us on this journey of life and to be with us through all the suffering and grief and sorrow we experience as well as through all the joy of our lives.  We pray to God for all those, with John, whom we love but see no longer, will live forever, praising God in the life to come. 

I believe that as much as I believe my mother is singing the old Fanny Crosby hymns of her Southern childhood in heaven, that John is gathering with all his blues heroes, where that one he met at the crossroads has tuned his guitar and he is picking and singing in that style he could never even attain in this life, and that he will spend eternity praising God for all his blessings here, especially for the blessing of Nain and Rob.  We believe in the power of the Resurrection.  We believe in it with every fiber of our being. We believe that God has prepared a place for each of us in that place where there is no death or sorrow or sighing, but life everlasting.  We believe that we will sing and praise God always and that if we, like John, believe in the power of the Resurrection and give our lives to the God of love and joy and great music (as the psalmists always said), that we, too, in our time will be reunited with all those we love, and this day, especially our brother John. John is playing his guitar perfectly with all his blues heroes this day, and one day, we, too, will sing and play around God’s throne forever.

May God go with us into the faith the next step requires: the step that says that God has created each of us in God’s image and has given us a heart to long for God and to be restless until we find our rest in God in the life to come. We commend our dear brother to God and we mourn like crazy his untimely departure from us.  Because of our unfailing belief in the power of the Resurrection, even at the grave, we make our song, “Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia” or some great Southern Blues version of it.  One of my favorite hymns is “My Shepherd Will Supply my need”, paired with a great southern tune, Resignation.  The last line is one that sustains me in my grief and promises that with John and all the great blues musicians, historians, archaeologists and teachers, we, too, will be welcomed home to be with God forever. “The sure provisions of my God attend me all my days; oh, may thy house be mine abode and all my work be praise. There would I find a settled rest, while others go and come; no more a stranger or a guest, but like a child at home.” (Hymn 664, “My Shepherd will supply my need,” The Hymnal 1982).

Whatever the particulars of each of our own journeys of coming to believe in the power of eternal life, we know we have a home in the life to come where we are not a guest but become like a child who’s always been there in that place where we are promised new life, and new creation in the Resurrection.  The risen Christ comes to meet us as we make our way, even haltingly towards him. Every service of death and resurrection is just that, death, but also resurrection. So that’s where we are this day, in that moment of incredible light, the light that lights up all the difficult places of our lives, all the pain, all the grief, all our unbelief.  We sing our songs this day, our old familiar hymns of faith and comfort to the Risen Lord.  We declare this day, like we do on Easter Sunday, that death has no power over life and that the light of God’s love in the risen Christ gives us eternal life.

If you come this day with your heart filled with grief and pain, know that the blinding, healing, loving light of Christ has come into the world this season after the Epiphany, as our Moravian star shows, to shine with never-dimming light into our lives.  The love of Christ belongs to each of us this day in the power of his resurrection in our lives.  Let us open ourselves to this incredible gift of light and may it empower us to go out into the pain and division of our world and offer ourselves as incarnations of that light in our day to those whose need some light in their lives.  Our trust in God’s faithfulness as Christians offers us hope that we shall be so transformed that when Christ is revealed, we, too, will be revealed with him, shining with his glory and brightening up our world with the incredible gift of God’s love, that incredible light that we cannot really imagine.

As we sing our closing hymn today, “Shall we gather at the River,” give thanks that we too, one day will gather with Jesus and John and all those we love and even if we can’t sing the Blues, John will help us.  May God bless us this day in our grief and may God bless John and welcome him home. “Yes, we’ll gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river. Gather with the saints at the river that flows by the throne of God.” (Hymn 141, Lift Every Voice and Sing II). Amen.