Jordi Guasch
Barcelona, Spain
Editor’s Introduction – James E Akenson
Jordi Gausch on Reincarnation in Country Music
Jordi Guasch lives in Barcelona, Spain. Yet, he loves Country Music, has traveled to the U.S. to see Country Music artists perform, and has written and blogged about his understanding of Country Music.
All of Country Music interest me. I’ve spent a good bit of time, though, with my colleague Dr. Randal D. Williams dealing with the Sacred and Profane in Country Music. Our approach has focused on the strong impact of Evangelical Protestantism on Country Music.
The ideas of Salvation vs Damnation, Heaven vs. Hell, Good vs Evil, Saturday Sinner and Sunday Saint have been embedded in Country Music in different ways. Of course, the temptations of the flesh….sexual temptation vs restraint and purity…continue to play on people’s behavior and their minds. That, of course, can include alcohol and other temptations.
Even today’s emerging artists like Carter Faith sing that ‘even Jesus thinks that you’re a bitch.’ Mary Kutter sings about “Devil’s Money” in which her grandfather used money from liquor bootlegging to fund building a church.
The Sacred and Profane emphasis…in Evangelical Protestantism and the other branches of Christianity….focuses on a finite life span from birth to death. The Bible mentions ‘Three Score Years and Ten” although life spans are pushing beyond seventy years these days.
Salvation is necessary to reach heaven. There may be a circle that won’t be unbroken that is deeply embedded in Country Music. But that Carter Family inspired circle isn’t a second or third time around in different human bodies. Reincarnation seems odd and distinctly non-Christian to lots of folks.
It isn’t surprising that many Country Music fans couldn’t name a song about reincarnation. I certainly couldn’t until Jordi Guasch shared his work with me.
True. Country Music songs about reincarnation aren’t exactly dominating the charts. But, there have been some Country Music songs that at least flirt with the idea of reincarnation. There have been discussions by Country Music artists that indicate their interest, or belief, in reincarnation.
Jordi Guasch uses the 1979 book Country Music Stars And The Supernatural which I’ve not read. Unfortunately, it is priced at some $70+USD. I shan’t be reading it anytime soon to give an opinion.
My friend Dave Sichak of Hillbilly-Music.com recently shared some songs by Roger Miller and Marty Robbins that Jordi Guasch mentions in his article. Sichak used an Ai search.
If Ai finds reincarnation and Country Music for Dave Sichak we know it’s got to be real. In fact, Dave Sickhak’s Ai search was more successful than my Ai Country Music and reincarnation search.
In this piece, Jordi Guasch shows his interest and knowledge of religious concepts and religious history. Given my strong Conservative Baptist upbringing and my indoctrination into the value of ‘hard science’ I’m a bit doubtful that reincarnation actually takes place.
I’m very much respectful, though, of the validity of reincarnation for those who believe in it as part of their world view. It certainly doesn’t harm or oppress people who are different in some way from the norm. It doesn’t seem to be used to oppress people who aren’t members of a culture’s dominant, powerful group.
You won’t be oppressed as an African American, or other person of color, because of reincarnation. You won’t be oppressed if you’re female because of reincarnation. Your ancestors wouldn’t have experienced the horrors of the Holocaust because of reincarnation.
So… let’s see what Jordi Guasch has to say about the occurrence of reincarnation in Country Music. It’s an intriguing unbroken circle of a different nature.
My interest in reincarnation began during childhood and was almost parallel to my own love for Country Music; and without any influence of either of these topics in my family or sociocultural environment. As a child, I used to tell my family (who were never interested in such matters) that I had lived previous lives.
Over time, through various sources—mostly dream-related and including a couple of regressions—I have gathered fragments of memories from other existences. Specifically in the United States, I had at least one, identifying myself with a certain O’Donnel (or O’Connell), who was born, very probably in Boston and with some relation to New Hampshire.
In that past life, I had a talent for singing, and I saw myself as a child in a room singing, I believe, Irish folk songs.
Not only religions or philosophies like Buddhism and Hinduism, but ancient Greece, the Celts, and other cultures, claimed that reincarnation was real, but it has also been present in very different cultures, and even in Christianity.
While mainstream Christianity has historically rejected reincarnation, belief in the pre-existence of the soul and reincarnation was present in certain early Christian, particularly Gnostic, communities during the first few centuries AD.
The Second Council of Constantinople (553 AD) under Emperor Justinian, condemned Origen’s teachings on the pre-existence of the soul, effectively banning the doctrine, though some historical scholars debate the directness of this condemnation regarding reincarnation itself.
Christianity focused on a single life followed by the resurrection of the body, which was considered incompatible with a cycle of rebirths. The Orthodox church taught that salvation is achieved through Christ in a single life, rendering the idea of perfecting the soul over many lifetimes unnecessary and heretical.
In a way, a theistic religion cannot allow for human beings to be solely responsible for their own lives without the need for any god. There must be a universal and eternal entity—creator, sustainer, and ruler of the world—who is also capable of judging and who is to be worshiped.
Focusing on the context of country music, it is not only Native American tribes who have believed in reincarnation, but also famous Americans. Louisa M. Alcott, believing that in a previous life she must have been a man.
Sevreal North Americans poets believed in reincarnation including Paul Hamilton Hayne, J.G.Whittier, Bayard Taylor, L.E.Landon, T.B. Aldrich, Charles G.Leland, Maurice Thompson, N.P. Willis, J.T. Trowbridge, H.W. Longfellow,, James Russell Lowell, Thomas W. Parsons, and Walt Whitman.
No Doubt I Have Died Myself Ten Thousand Times Before: In Song of Myself, Whitman explicitly claims past lives, viewing life and death as a continuous loop of rebirth. We Should Surely Bring Up Again. Whitman expressed a conviction that souls return and continue their journey further, implying a progressive evolution of the spirit across multiple existences.
Also Americans whose roles and activities were different from each other, such as Benjamin Franklin, General George S.Patton, actors Glenn Ford and Shirley McLayne, Henry Ford or Edgar Cayce (who was a Christian and read the Bible often).
Most interestingly from a Country Music perspective, Henry Ford was a firm believer in reincarnation, a view he adopted at age 26 after reading a book by Orlando J. Smith (likelyA Short View of Great Questions). He felt it brought a sense of peace and a “long view” to life, enabling him to view work not as a futile, short-term task, but as a way to accumulate experience over multiple lifetimes.
Ford became fascinated with Old-Time Music when he attended country dances in the 1880s. While his business was booming in the early 1920s, he purchased the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts. After restoring the property, he hired Benjamin Lovett as a dance instructor and began hosting square dances there.
In 1925 Ford became even more active as a country booster. Ford decided to locate all the old-time musicians he could and announced his intention of crowning “The King of the Fiddlers” to counteract the evils of flappers and the Charleston.
Henry Ford died in 1947, but his company has kept faith with Country Music into the decades since. The Ford Motor Company donated $4 million to help build the new Country Music Hall of Fame.
Pioneering Grand Ole Opry star Uncle Jimmy Thompson’s Model T outfitted with homemade camper was probably country´s first tour bus. Fiddlin´John Carson and his daughter Moonshine Kate as well as The Carter Family, for example, drove a Ford car.
Apart from what has been said, Henry Ford made several contributions to Country Music. Perhaps once dead, he went to Hillbilly Heaven driving a Model T…and waiting there to reincarnate playing a fiddle!
The book Country Music Stars And The Supernatural (Cliff Linedecker), included a chapter dedicated to reincarnation. I will extract some texts from it, such as when it says that Benjamin Franklin was so convinced of the reality of reincarnation that he wrote an epitaph when he was twenty-two in which he compared the body to a raggedly abused, worn book, revised and reissued into a new condition better than the first.
In Country Music, artists such as Loretta Lynn, Elvis Presley, Willie Nelson, Marijohn Wilkin, Merle Kilgore, Steve Young, Johnny Gimble, and Reba McEntire.
A psychic once told Loretta Lynn that she had once been an American Indian woman and an Irish lass. She confirmed both lives through trance. The first time, she saw herself wearing moccasins and a long buckskin dress.
She was next to a man who appeared to be the chief, and Loretta is certain that he was her husband. Probing her second lifetime, she saw herself wearing an ornate costume and prancing to a spirited Irish jig in front of a large white house.
Conway Twitty has been fascinated with the occult. Loretta, his partner in duets, talked frequently about having the feeling that she had met certain individuals in prior incarnations.
When Marty Robbins was looking down on the Little Bighorn River valley, he had a strange feeling that he had been there before. Could it have been Custer, one of his men, or Crazy Horse?
Steve Young always has been fascinated by the Civil War. Sometimes he imagined himself in a Confederate uniform and believed he was Confederate officer.
Merle Kilgore insists that he was the famous American composer Stephen Foster in a prior lifetime. Marijohn Wilkin has told friends she once rode with Attila the Hun.
Harlan Howard, who once attended séances with Kilgore, believed reincarnation applies to only very special souls, such as possible Jesus or a Buddha, or a couple of very spiritual people he been met. The vast majority of people who recall past lives, though, have not been famous people.
Willie Nelson believes so strongly in reincarnation that he knows if he hadn’t become a singer in this life, he would have in the next. He says he considers reincarnation a positive approach to existence because one is either progressing or repressing, never staying in one place.
Like Don Gibson, he is an ardent student of the trance-medium Edgar Cayce and a member of Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment. He is also interest in the Rosicrucians, a mysterious fellowship that reaches a blend of alchemy, astrology, and life after death.
Turk Pipkin’s introduction to The Tao of Willie suggests that many of Willie´s thoughts are more Baptist than Buddhist, some more cowboy than Indian.
Nelson said that Tao is NOT a religion. It has no gods, and could be as helpful to a Christian or a Jew as to a Druid who worships trees, a narcissist who worships himself, or a record executive who worships money.
He also says to read Kahlil Gibran´s The Prophet , the Tao Te Ching, and Edgar Cayce´s books about reincarnation. Nelson wrote that when karma kicks in, you get rewards for the good, you pay for the bad.
Life is like school, you get tests all the time. Some you pass, some you fail. Willie also said that the most thing about belief in reincarnation is that it gives you a very strong attitude in your approach to death.
In fact, karma and reincarnation are not only part of religions but also of philosophies; such as Samkhya, an ancient atheistic philosophical school from India.
In 1981, Nelson´s left lung collapsed while he was swimming in the ocean off Hawaii following a run. Recuperating in the hospital for the next month, with not much to do except contemplate his own mortality. Nelson wrote most of the Tougher Than Leather concept album about reincarnation.
Willie has believed in reincarnation since he was about twenty years old, when he read a lot of Gibran and Cayce. I particularly like Little Old Fashioned Karma, the only up-tempo tune. That’s a difficult storyline on this album, but he sang about an Old West Gunslinger who kills a young man.
Early Country Music included songs that dealt with reincarnation. I Was Born About Thousand Years Ago was first time recorded by Kelly Harrel in 1925. Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers also recorded it in 1925 under the title I´m The Man Who Rode The Mule Around The World.
Dock/Doc Walsh titled it Educated Man. Fiddlin’ John Carson recorded it in 1924 under the name When Abraham And Isaac Rushed The Can. Elvis Presley also recorded I Was Born About Ten Thousand Years Ago.
Country Music also includes more contemporary songs about reincarnation such as Do You Believe (In Reincarnation)? from The Cornell Hurd Band album Cool Punishment. It was on a 45 rpm record performed by Lalo Guerrero, “the grandfather of modern Chicano music”. Lalo wrote “Do You Believe (In Reincarnation)” in response to the Bridey Murphy craze of the 1950’.
Other reincarnation songs include Reincarnation (Roger Miller), We´ve Been Together On This Earth Before (Steve Young), Free Born Rambling Man (David Allan Coe), The Coyote & The Cowboy (Ian Tyson), and Where Do Cowboys Go When They Die/Reincarnation (Michael Martin Murphy, Wallace McCrae). The Highwaymen sung by Cash, Kris, Waylon and Willie and, of course, Highwomen of The Highwomen.
Interestingly, I haven’t received any information, that in a past life I was a Country Music singer. However, I do feel a strong connection to related matters as folk music from British Isles or the Blackface Minstrelsy.
It seems that in other lives I was musician-singer and a wandering minstrel. I identified as a skald (a Viking musician, poet, and storyteller) and I played a flute.
It’s incredible, unusual, that a child, born in Barcelona,1965, felt such a deep connection towards Country Music and American history. The love of country music has motivated me enough to speak and write about it in books such as my novel Black Lily and in Country Music Stars with Josep Julia as well as in articles and podcasts.
Reincarnation has had an impact on my Country Music lives!
