“I had tried to visit Woody (Guthrie) regularly … Woody had been confined to Greystone Hospital in Morristown, New Jersey, and I would usually take the bus there from the Port Authority terminal, make the hour-and-a-half ride and then walk the rest of the half mile up the hill to the hospital, a gloomy and threatening granite building …. Usually I’d play him his songs during the afternoon. Sometimes he’d ask for specific ones — “Rangers Command,” “Do Re Me,” “Dust Bowl Blues,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “Tom Joad,” the song he’d written after seeing the movie “The Grapes of Wrath.” I knew all those songs and many more.”
Bob Dylan, Chronicles, vol. 1     The image of a young, pre-celebrity Bob Dylan traveling 90 minutes one way to trudge up a hill and play a few songs for his dying hero, in an asylum, is worthy of consideration. Dylan is held by many to be an archetype of the modern, unBiblical model of the artist as a recluse, a lone rebel, in need of no one, understood by no one. The truth is that not only does Dylan feel an extreme debt and amount of gratitude toward his musical forebears and mentors, but he constantly surrounded himself with others in his set, trading notes, swapping tales, helping with gigs.

     After establishing the Biblical basis for creative community, stemming from the eternal trinity and existing throughout both testaments, Michael Card writes, in “Scribbling In The Sand”:

“Historically, the greatest periods of creativity have been the result of community. The Renaissance, that great flowering of creativity, faith, and imagination, was largely the result of the coming together of communities or schools of artists. Da Vinci, Michelangelo and practically every other artist of name was a product of a creative community or “school.” In the context of such a “school,” which usually centered around a single “master,” the young artist would be apprenticed for a period of months or years.
In such early schools creative input was given within the context of community, that is, within a context of respect and trust. The community encouraged excellence and an aesthetic accountability. The freedom to experiment and even to fail was a vital part of the experience of every young apprentice. The image of the lonely, tormented artist came largely with the modern era.”

    Enough can’t be said about the importance of apprenticeship and teamwork.  Again from Card:

“Apprenticeship reminds us once again that creativity does not occur in a vacuum; it requires a community. From apprenticeship the community acquires new artists, artists who have been spared innumerable dead ends because a “master” has taken them in hand and passed on a wealth of experience…
Apprenticeship is discouraged in the industrial world for two reasons. First, the commercial system is based on individualism (celebrityism). Second, production schedules rarely afford the time required for someone to be nurtured in his or her craft. In the absence of community, the artist experiences a sense of aloneness and defeat.”

     The music artists at Sojourn are a diverse crew — folkies, rockers. Theologians, poets. Hymnologists and Beatles fanatics. Everyone brings something different to the table.  We also have varying degrees of experience — “Masters” and “pupils,” you might say, but I’d argue that many of us act in both capacities on occasion. We have writers and musicians who have been at this for years, and some who have recently started, but there is a good level of respect across the board.

     “No man is an island,” they say, and that’s why we record albums with a great number of singers, musicians and songwriters, and why even solo ventures at Sojourn are not really solo — why singer-songwriters like Chad Lewis and Jeremy Quillo create music in community, enhanced by members of the Sojourn band, reviewed by pastors and fellow songwriters, friends, spouses — brothers and sisters in Christ who are not out to rob them of individuality but to affirm and encourage the development of the gifts and lyrical insights that are uniquely theirs.

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