When Sanderson begins plinking out those anemic notes
on his ukulele, it is best if your expectations are lowered.
Doing a kind of banjo claw hammer roll, he’ll sound loosely
like a kid who doesn’t know how to crank a jack-in-the-box,
but after a few neat whiskeys and he’s loosened up a bit,
strummy 1920s Tin Pan Alley comes a’calling. All those
old songs with their lovely chords and predictable patterns.
Their major sevens, the “worried” minor chords in the bridge.
The lyrics are all about the penniless pulling through, what lies
above the clouds, sighing in the face of troubles yet sleeping,
dancing, and dreaming them away. He’s not much of a singer
unless you like the honked-out sounds of muted trumpets
or novice Irish tenor impersonators heard from an adjacent room,
but I say an earnest voice is more interesting than the self-aware,
tricked-out runs screeching from drugstore ceiling tiles.
Put it this way. Sanderson, you see, is a one-man time machine.
Like those old player pianos that make music from spooled paper
with rectangle holes. I saw him once after a messy breakup.
I wanted to drink in a place where no one knew me or my ex,
but there he was, opening another set of Dust Bowl ditties.
I’d heard them all before, but somehow tonight they felt true.
I thought of all the people who wrote, played, sang, and recorded
the songs, the workers who hummed them in the fields and factories
a century ago: now me. At the end of “Paint a Bright Blue Cloud
O’er Yesterday’s Storm,” he held out a hollow note on the final word
of the chorus. I couldn’t quite make it out. No one clapped or spoke.
That’s when he smashed his ukulele against his chair and left the stage.