The song "Jesus Is On The Wire" came from the pen of a little-known singer-songwriter. In 2001, it lost the only song-contest in which it was entered. But that contest loss became the springboard for a pretty amazing journey.
The song has now been performed by Peter, Paul & Mary at every one of their concerts for the past two years. It has been recorded by the famed folk trio for their first album of new material in nine years, In These Times, due out in February 2004. And it is part of the PBS Peter, Paul & Mary television special to be broadcast nationally, beginning in March 2004.
Although not overtly religious, the song has also been sung by a few church chorus groups, the churches located thousands of miles from where the song's Boston-based composer, Thea Hopkins, regularly performs. And "Jesus Is On The Wire" has also been the avid subject of both adoring and angry Internet chat-group messages. It has evoked tears, and caused consternation. How many modern songs, even popular ones, have a meaningful life like that?
Thea Hopkins wrote "Jesus Is On The Wire" in early 2001, while recording her debut album, Birds of Mystery. The original version of the song, as recorded for her album, combined the stories of two recent and already infamous American hate crimes -- the brutal murder of gay college-student Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, and the dragging-death of James Byrd, a black resident of Jasper, Texas. To help delineate the double-narrative more clearly, the song's third verse, about James Byrd, was sung on the CD by respected Bay State singer-songwriter Greg Greenway, who has long been interested in civil rights and social causes. Greg did a beautiful job.
The song was released in March of 2001, before the various movies and television documentaries about the Shepard and Byrd cases were produced.
Even before the album was released, however, Thea entered a rough mix of the song into a contest run by Noel Paul Stookey's Public Domain Foundation: a contest specifically for topical songs about social causes. (Yes, that's the Paul of Peter, Paul & Mary.) The winner was to sing at the Kerrville Folk Festival.
The contest came and went, and Thea's song did not win. It not only failed to win the grand prize, it didn't even cop a spot as one of the 10 finalists! After the Kerrville Festival was over, however, Thea received, quite out-of-the-blue, a casual sounding, lower-case, e-mail from Noel Paul Stookey.
"I'm the balding guy in the middle of Peter, Paul & Mary," the e-mail began. Noel went on to explain that while his foundation ran the contest, and he was one of the eight contest judges, his most favorite songs did not always win. And "Jesus" was one of his favorites.
That compliment alone would have been a huge thrill and a significant encouragement. But then, after praising the song's rich mood, moving message and "jagged lyric imagery, building an emotional picture out of abstract descriptions," Stookey then wrote something that practically knocked Thea off her computer station:
"The three of us wanted to ask your permission to learn the song and perform it during the upcoming Peter, Paul & Mary summer concert tour."
Stookey went on to reveal how the trio had already worked out an arrangement for the song, based on the recording on Thea's little cassette-tape contest entry.
"Would you allow us to bring it to our audiences this year?" he asked.
As Thea jokes sometimes at her live performances, "I mulled the decision over for a long time. About five seconds."
P, P & M began singing the song in early August, and Thea was able to see a show at the North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, Mass., less than three weeks later. It was quite an emotional experience. The performance itself was artful and very moving. It not only was an emotional high for the audience, but brought lead singer Mary Travers to tears.
The trio hadn't met Thea yet, but they knew she was probably in the audience, and asked her to take a bow from her seat. Later, Thea met P, P & M backstage.
The song has been on a journey across America ever since. Peter, Paul & Mary knew very quickly that "Jesus" was connecting to their audiences on a visceral level. They have included "Jesus" in every concert they have performed since August 2001.
At some shows, P, P & M mentioned Thea's name. At others, the song wasn't credited. But Thea's identity slowly became known to curious P, P & M fans who were emotionally affected by the song. It simply couldn't have happened before the age of Internet search-engines! Just by "Googling" the name of the song, Thea's web-site was eventually discovered by quite a few P, P & M fans. Two Unitarian ministers on the west coast even contacted Thea, asking for sheet-music so their choirs might learn the song. Without the help of radio-airplay, it is becoming one of those relatively rare songs that move people in ways beyond the normal constraints of pop music.
In interpreting the song, Peter, Paul & Mary chose to drop the third verse about James Byrd, because they thought the change in story-line was too abrupt, and diminished the song's focus. Thea agreed with their aesthetic assessment. While her original thought was to draw a comparison between these two hate crimes, and between homophobia and racism, Thea realized that the song would be more powerful if she continued the Shepard story, and brought it to completion with a new third verse. She has been singing a three-verse, revised version of "Jesus" for two years now. That revised version will be included on Thea's next album, to be recorded in 2004.
Soon after Peter, Paul & Mary began singing "Jesus" in concert, the song became a hot topic among the very avid P, P & M fans who participate in the "coffeehouse" chat-list at the "gallery" section of
www.peterpaulandmary.com. Fans quickly spread the word that the song may be one of the most important in the trio's long history. Others debated the song's meaning.
A few Christian conservatives bitterly assailed the song for comparing gay martyr Matthew Shepard to Jesus Christ on the cross… an interpretation which was theirs alone. Thea even received a bit of fundamentalist e-hate-mail, calling the song blasphemous.
For the record, Thea did place the name of Jesus in the context of the story of a gay man's murder on purpose, and the placement was meant to be a bit radical, and certainly provocative. America's hate crimes, which have a long history, occur in a society that often thinks of itself as Christian, and the perpetrators of some of those hate crimes even believe they are following Christian morality.
But Thea does not think of "Jesus Is On The Wire" as a religious or specifically Christian song. (And she is definitely not a Christian song-writer, though spirituality, and politics, occasionally crop up in her repertoire.)
The chorus "Jesus is on the wire/so far away/higher and higher," came to Thea before any of the story-telling verses did. Reading a magazine article about the Matthew Shepard killing led Thea to the song's ultimate subject matter. Seeing the film "Boys Don't Cry" was another influence. The chorus and the verses just seemed to belong together. "One image is that of Jesus as so far away from the world of such a crime, and the hateful thinking behind the killing. But I also was after the feeling that he is still able to be communicated with, that he is on the wire, no matter how high and far away he seems from the world of such low, craven acts."
The song's verses are part poetic description, part conversational story-telling, as if the news of the crime were being talked about by townspeople. In that sense, it is close to a traditional, narrative folk-song. The simple incongruity between the heartless world where Shepard's killing took place and the existence of a loving deity is part of what creates its sense of drama. But "Jesus Is On The Wire" is the sort of song that does not fill in all the spaces and does not dictate a single interpretation. Some mystery remains. It is the story of one despicable crime, but it also reflects on other tales, other times.
Several music critics reviewing P, P & M praised it. The trio themselves began mentioning it in a few interviews. But Peter, Paul & Mary are not reviewed as often as they once were, and the famed trio's concert schedule is hardly extensive in recent years. They only perform about 40 or 50 times per year. And so the song seems to have gathered a life of its own by grassroots means, below the surface, by Internet chat, and person to person, fan to fan. Someday it may be on America's airwaves. But for now, it is "on the wire."