Once again, I am on the verge of tears after listening to an album that spooks me in a sort of inarticulable way. I am reminded this Lord’s Day of just how religious I am, if that’s the word— just how ritually obsessed I am with touching God or some god-substance. I don’t think of this touch as a linear closure or fulfilling, and I don’t think I believe in heaven. But chasing after a connection with spirit, (admittedly in my case via a frenetic number of desperate methods) and the sharing of the light that comes with the chase, is the central preoccupation of my life. It isn’t moving toward anything, more like training myself to be in something. And though heavenly splendor isn’t my personal aim, I am certain that God exists in some form, likely inconceivable to me and yet acutely felt by me. I am certain.
Johnnie Frierson’s Have you been good to yourself? asks a pretty groundbreaking question, particularly as many brands of Christianity foreground doing good unto others as the primary vehicle through which we can be good to ourselves. But Frierson proposes a different directionality— you cannot be good to others unless you have been good to yourself. It’s always an interpretive game, a delicate negotiation between what God truly meant/means and what our senses tell us They meant. But of these convictions we are sure: I’m going to treat everybody right, ‘til I die. Or simply, Thank you, Lord. Frierson takes it further: Have you been getting your proper rest? Have you been sleeping at least eight hours? These observations of the turmoil of the world and ourselves and our bodies as an interruption to our devotion feels strangely novel and revolutionary to me.
7 tracks, Frierson’s singular vocal and bare electric guitar. Recorded by him alone with a tape recorder, Have you been good to yourself? puts the attainment of salvation in our hands. “Human beings do miracles,” Frierson sings. Certainty about something that resists empirical evidence is a kind of mortal miracle itself.
“Heavenly Father, You’ve Been Good” is what truly knocked me out. There is little that shakes me up more than an earnest pleading and pure edification. Nothing that moves me more thoroughly than to say thank you to God for keeping me alive— no small feat. To express gratitude for Their goodness and leave it at that.
That these cassettes were discovered by chance in a Memphis thrift shop puts a catch in my throat. The near-miss ephemera of the voice telling me I was sent to this world and there’s a reason for my birth is a depressing irony, and yet Frierson is insistent that he is out here on God’s word, singing what God wants him to sing. These tapes could have never been reissued, and much of the information about Frierson suggests he struggled with PTSD after returning from war. Unfortunate that sometimes conduits sacrifice the most, but I hope Frierson’s resting knowing he was sent too, had a purpose, made a mark.