Are You Running With Me, Jesus - Malcolm Boyd & Charlie Byrd

 

Are You Running With Me, Jesus!

Are You Running With Me, Jesus?

Prayers by Malcolm Boyd (Read by The Author)

Guitar Accompaniment by Charlie Byrd (Original background music by Charlie Byrd)

Produced by Ted Macero

Cover Photo: Robert L. Frank

Columbia CL 2548

1965

From the back cover: I first met Charlie Byrd at the Showboat Lounge in Washington, D.C. He was playing there. I had written a couple of short "readings," one a kind of freedom song about inner freedom, the other an expression on the theme of "cool." He liked them. So, one night, before the crowd of people in the club, we performed them together.

I didn't see Charlie again for a while. I was talking to him one day recently, and told him about my book "Are You Running With Me, Jesus?" He expressed real interest and took galley proofs of it with him on tour. After he got back, we worked together one afternoon in a Washington studio. I read several of the prayers in the book and Charlie improvised on his guitar, interpreting what I was saying in his own idiom.

Charlie told Leroy F. Aarons of the Washington Post how he approached the task of interpreting the prayers: "The idea of attempting a kind of semi-planned mood-response to what the words say is the really challenging part of it for me. I'm not working from any score melody or pattern of any kind. It's all improvisation; none of it will be exactly the same. These prayers seem very dramatic to me, and music can illuminate any dramatic situation because it speaks to a different sense in a way."

Our first public appearance with the prayers was at a concert in Washington's National Cathedral. Some six thousand people came out for it, packing every inch of space in the great Gothic structure. I could see hundreds standing at the doors, unable to get inside. This public response was exciting and heartening, particularly as more than half the people were young students.

Reviewing the concert, the Washington Evening Star commented: "The two forms were perfectly suited to each other: the prayers seemed as far out as the music. ...Boyd read in a resonant baritone voice with urgent, staccato phrasing, while Byrd, a guitarist noted in both jazz and classical forms, took it easy and responded to the changing moods. He used a wide range of rhythms, runs, minor chords and special effects to recreate the prayers in music."

Not long afterward, Charlie and I appeared together in a New York City church on Good Friday for a three-hour service, divided into seven twenty-minute portions (a parallel of the traditional Christian observance of Good Friday with seven sections, each devoted to preaching about one of Jesus' words from the cross).

Writing in the next day's New York Times, Edward B. Fisk reported: "The liturgical gave way to the colloquial yesterday at the Broadway United Church of Christ as more than 1,000 observed Good Friday with a gentle blend of Bach, the blues and prayer in the contemporary vein." He described how, as I read the prayers, Charlie "leaned over his guitar and began to interpret the words in the controlled style that has made him famous both as a jazz artist and master of the classics."

I guess the book itself started several years ago when I found that, as a contemporary man, and as the man I am, I couldn't pray anymore in old forms, unless I intended to play games with God. Religion is a sort of ghettoized area in America and we have to bring prayer into our real lives. I actually started writing the book one night three years ago, in a hotel room in Nicosia, Cyprus. The Greeks and Turks were shooting at each other several blocks away.

Some people ask why the prayers are not entitled "Am I Running With You, Jesus?" The query overlooks the fact that my prayer life, as the state of my spirituality, is neither very respectable nor quite correct. Needless to say, I am a self-centered man, sinfully immersed in my own welfare and concerns, attempting to manipulate God, and often lost in my own self-love and self-pity. "Are You Running With Me, Jesus?" more accurately reflects the grounding, motivation, and style of my prayer life and spirituality as I grapple with imperfections and ambiguities in myself and my society.

I have not attempted to root out the person of Malcolm Boyd from these prayers, for it was Malcolm Boyd who prayed them. Prayer must be personal, imbedded in the ground of one's own being as a person meeting God. These prayers are not intended as impersonal exhibits in a vacuum. They are the prayers of one man.

It is hoped that they may be useful, as signposts to other meme and women.

Also from the back cover: Life named Malcolm Boyd as one of "the One Hundred Most Important Young Men and Women in the U.S.  – a member of the Breakthrough Generation." Mademoiselle named him (along with Federico Fellini, James Baldwin, Paul Goodman, Jules Feiffer and Norman Mailer) as a "Disturber of the Peace." The New York Times called him "chaplain-at-large to U.S. college students."

Who is Malcolm Boyd?

Once a television producer and advertising man in Hollywood, he was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1955. Father Boyd was a Freedom Rider in 1961, and has long and consistently been involved in the civil rights movement. He is a playwright (his five short plays have been produced throughout the U.S. and Canada) and also a film critic for four national periodicals. Since 1964, he has served on the interracial team ministry at the Church of the Atonement in Washington, D. C. and as national field representative of the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity.

The author of seven books, he has served as a chaplain at Colorado State University and Wayne State University, been rector of the intercity parish on Indianapolis, and addressed many thousands of people in all sections of North American. As a guest on The Today Show, the Art Linkletter and Mike Douglas shows, and many others, he has reached millions with his modern point-of-view and strong convictions about human freedom. The Washington Post wrote about Father Boyd's slim, best-selling book of prayers: "They are very personal, very modern, sometimes poetic. They talk about sex and the bomb and civil rights and movies and all the things that bug Malcolm Boyd and the alienated generation that has adopted him as its spokesman." The New York Times said: "The prayers are deeply personal, though their subjects range from civil rights to unwanted pregnancy to poverty – sometimes slangy, always eloquent. – Malcolm Boyd

It's Morning Jesus It Morning, And Here's That Light And Sound All Over Again

I'm Crying And Shouting Inside Tonight, Lord, And I'm Feeling Completely Alone 

Its Bumper To Bumper, And The Traffic Is Stalled

Look Up At That Window, Lord, Where The Old Guy Is Sitting

It's A Jazz Spot, Jesus

Blacks And Whites Make Me Angry, Lord

David Says He Prays

What Was Hiroshima Like, Jesus, When The Bomb Fell?

I Want To Be Alone And Not To Be Alone, Both At The Same Time

They're In A Golden World, Jesus

This Young Girl Got Pregnant, Lord, And She Isn't Married

It Take Away My Guilt When I Blame Your Murder On The Jews, Jesus

The Old House Is Nearly All Torn Down, Lord

A Meditation On "Zorba The Greek"

I See White And Black, Lord

How May The Heart Be Taught, Jesus?

I'm Having A Ball, And I Just Want To Thank You, Jesus

Here I Am In Church Again, Jesus