essay
Dean Unger
English 134-11
10-21-05
Rita Hosking
“You can hear the rivers crying for the
blood that washed through their beds,…,” Rita Hosking’s
words resonate in the ears of her captured audience. Standing before
the microphone, she assumes the role of a guide, leading her listeners
through the golden meadows and pristine forests of a serene mountain
wilderness. Her audience visualizes the detail in the nature surrounding
them, noticing subtle differences that make each rock and tree unique.
They can almost feel the pain and loss that the history of those mountains
beholds. Rita, currently a resident of Davis, California, sings about
California’s forgotten culture. She sings about the way people
lived before cities and industry. She sings of the way life once was,
and the way life still is for some people. Rita is a folk singer/songwriter
who uses the strong and precise medium of her unwavering voice to
inform her audience about the “mountain culture” from
which she descends.
Rita wants Californians to recognize the history
of their land and keep the past alive. She was raised in the mountains
of Shasta County in Northern California, in an area that would make
anyone who has seen the movie Deliverance think twice before venturing
off alone. However, the people she grew up around were not inbred
rednecks as one might expect; instead they were simply hardworking,
land loving individuals who had strong ethics and revere for the past.
Rita’s family owned five acres of woodland, nestled in a “pristine
ocean”, as she says, of more woodland. It was in this setting
of natural beauty that Rita developed a respect for the land and a
respect for life. She croons, “In these mountains sometimes
it’s hard not to live your life in the past.” Rita felt
the history of the mountains and through singing she helps others
to feel it. “You can see the scars left by the desperate mining
men,” she cries out that the past cannot be forgotten. Her forceful
projection and vocal variety combine with her vivid descriptions to
get her message across.
Rita’s songs reveal the values of the
culture from which she was raised, as well as the dangers and hardships
that her family faced. In one of her songs, entitled “Kitchen
Table and Chairs,” Rita paints an image in the audience’s
mind of a glowing red firestorm that swept through the mountains,
eventually taking the house and land that her family had “worked
so hard on” for over thirty years. This story is based on an
actual event that occurred when Rita was twenty-three. Rita’s
voice is easy to listen to as she informs, “it’s where
they gathered at the end of the day, it’s where they were when
Grandpa past away, it’s a chair that was broken in a terrible
fight, gently repaired by the same hands the next night.” Through
this captivating narrative, Rita makes the audience feel empathy for
her family. As the “cedars waved their branches, goodbye,”
her father asked her mother what she wanted to take along. Her mother
said she wanted the kitchen table and chairs, and without question,
her father loaded it up. Heavy oak furniture may seem like an odd
choice of items to a Californian living in the suburbs, but it was
not to Rita’s parents. They demonstrated their value for things
of substance -- objects that have a past or a story to tell. Their
kitchen table and chairs represented the bond between their family
members, so it was an obvious choice for Rita’s mother. This
song also shows the role that the male plays in the “mountain
culture.” The husband, in this case Rita’s father, respects
his wife, and therefore respects her wishes, no matter how odd they
may seem. In other songs, Rita tells why the mountain people continue
to face the dangers and hardships of living in the mountains.
In the song, “Mill for Mountain,”
Rita sings from the depths of her soul, and the audience is left with
the bitter taste of sawdust on their tongues. This song enlightened
me that people do not necessarily work in the mountain mills because
it is their only option for survival. “It’s a sacrifice
that some have made to stay, in the mountains,” Rita proclaims.
The people who choose to dwell in rural mountain areas, love the beauty
and simplicity of the mountains so much that they are willing to work
at a mill in order to keep it. “A dark figure waits, shivers
against the snow, from the window his children stand and watch him
go. Well, saw mill dust is running in his veins, he works like a fool
and then he comes home late,” Rita sings of her experience when
her father worked at a mill. She uses this song to demonstrate the
strength of the mountain people, and the daily punishment they take
in order to keep what they want. Just like her father and other mountain
men, Rita feels a love for the mountains, and that is a driving force
of her work.
Rita feels a need, verging on obligation, to
share her culture with other people. She shyly admitted that, “I
am, not always consciously, but purposely doing that to show other
people what life can be like.” Since she has been away from
her home in the mountains, Rita has felt a need to tell people how
wonderful life in the mountains can be. She wants to tell the story
of the mountains, the “tiger lilies and water falls, no where
so clean nor trees so tall, hard to imagine the wars that went on
and the beauty of it all.” Rita’s powerful voice harmonizes
with the banjo to make her words feel authentic and soothing. She
entrances her listeners’ minds, putting them in the warm heart
of mother nature. She makes her audience empathize with people they
never knew as she sings, “You can feel the mountains mourning
for the loss of the Indian way. In the hearts of the survivors there’s
exhaustion and there’s pain, Momma I’m telling you, I
love my home in a heart wrenching way.”
Although she has been away from her mountains
for a long time, her culture is still present in her soul, and that
is evolved though her music. She may look like an average American
woman on the exterior, but she descends from a beautiful culture that
many people are ignorant of, and when she sings, she gives her listeners
a short glimpse of that life, and hopefully, a new appreciation for
the past. She sings, “At the summit I stretch out my wings,
the wind whips up and oh, how she sings, I can feel it all coming
on, cause I’m going home.” This line describes the unearthly
freedom Rita feels when she goes home, and her listeners question
why they, too, can’t feel the same. The answer to this question
lies in the roots of each person. Hopefully, the sweet taste of freedom
they perceive through Rita’s music will prompt them to discover
more of it for themselves.
