Bomb survivor’s songs of gratitude

In 1986, Sam Baker was on a train in Peru that was blown up by terrorists. The blast killed the people sitting with him and he had a cut artery, blown-in eardrums and brain damage. This prompted the Texan to write, and to become a singer-songwriter.

Baker releases his fourth album, Say Grace, this month. “Even with the tragedy and the terrible things that happened, the world is a pretty amazing place to be alive in,” he says. “Say Grace is a deep-south phrase for saying ‘thank you’ or being grateful. The overall concept is to be grateful.”

Growing up in the small prairie town of Itasca, Baker first heard music in church. A number of tracks on the new album, such as ‘Feast’ and ‘Sweet House of Prayer’, have a strong, old-time gospel influence.

“In the town I grew up in, there were a lot of churches — no bars, no theatres. So the songs of the church were the artistic life of the community. We all have relational sounds, relational poetry and relational music. From the time I was a boy, I heard hymns,” he says.

Say Grace’s specific, gospel-sounding tracks feature a stunning female voice combined with Baker’s more rasping and gritty vocal. “That’s my little sister singing,” he says, proudly. “She has a beautiful voice, such an honest voice.

“That’s an old voice,” he says. “Really, we’re losing those accents. Accents are more universal now. The old kind of phrases — the old accents are going away. I’m not against it, the world changes, but I do think that it’s lovely, sometimes, to hear the old inflections. It’s as if the earth began to speak — as if the rocks and the trees once again found their voice. My sister, Chris Baker Davies, is in that lineage of people who stay in what I would call the old voice.”

Another track, though definitely not in a gospel mould, is ‘Migrants’, a sad tale of the death of 14 men. “While working in the mid-west, I saw this little-bitty newspaper article that told of 14 guys who were crossing the border in Arizona. Going through a place called the Devil’s Footsteps, they ran out of water and they all died. It was in the pages with the ads for shoes and stuff, and the last line was ‘they were migrants’.

“It reminded me of when Woody Guthrie wrote ‘Deportees’ after listening to the radio. The radio guy said ‘there’s a plane down at Los Gatos and everybody died, but don’t worry, they were all deportees’. So, with ‘Migrants’, I was wondering if we had come any further since then and I don’t know.”

Baker says that he would never have become a songwriter but for that fateful day, Jun 25 1986, on a train ride to Machu Picchu.

“It would have been impossible for me to do what I’m doing now, if I wasn’t on that train. I read a fair amount and from sufferance comes understanding,” he says. “To be in hospital so much, and to be in so much pain... but all the time I was surrounded by people trying to help me and others.

“To go through all that and then have a day like today — it’s a day in Eden — it’s a day when the world is exquisitely beautiful,” he says.

*Sam Baker’s Say Grace is out now. Tour dates include, Sept 12, The Errigal Inn, Belfast, Sept 14. Flowerfield Arts Centre, Portstewart, Sept 14, Séamus Ennis Cultural Centre, Naul, Co. Dublin.