Juni Fisher sang for us last Wednesday night at the Lindsay Community theater. I was there because I had to be, though I didn't know why other than that I love her music so much it hurts. I love her songs, I love the way she sings them, the way she plays her guitar. But mostly I love seeing her stand up on the stage all by herself and tell us, through songs and stories, why she does what she does. Why these things are important.
Partly I went to hear her new song, "Listen," which just won the Western Music Association 2013 Song of the Year award. On stage there was a life-size photo of Juni in the saddle on the back of a beautiful bay horse with a white blaze down his face and nostrils flaring. She is patting his neck with her left hand and holding the reins in her right, smiling approvingly. After all these years of hearing about horses through her songs, it was really wonderful to see her actually astride one, confident. It is the cover photo for her new album, Listen ... to the horse. (Visit www.JuniFisher.com to learn more, see photos or order CDs.)
As the concert progressed, I noticed something slightly different. She was more herself, more relaxed and a little softer, more matured, perhaps, by these many years of performing solo onstage. When something fell to the floor in the audience, clattering loudly during "I Will Miss Ireland," one of her most hauntingly beautiful ballads about Irish immigrants to America, she actually giggled with the rest of us who were laughing from embarrassment. She broke into laughter several more times between singing the somber, serious phrases. What balance.
Early on she mentioned that she has a new horse named Silk, and that Silk has 7,000 friends on Facebook, while she herself has only 5,000, one of the charming jokes she likely has used in many concerts. Later I noticed she had on jeans underneath her long coat and scarf, tucked into her custom cowboy boots, more authentic somehow, nearer to the Western heroes she was singing about. And then the real reason I had to be there became clear.
She's gone back to riding. I didn't really know she'd left, or why, or how much being a horsewoman had been her lifelong goal and passion. From the stories in previous concerts, I'd heard traces of it amidst the stories of how music had always been there. In 2006, when I wrote a long review of her three CDs, I titled it after one of the songs that pierced me most, "Silver Music," (on Cowgirlography,) which is about the vaquero horse training process and the relationship that develops from it between horse and rider. I wrote that the song describes "a working partnership as real as any marriage and suggests that in these partnerships are where we become whole," ignorantly prophetic.
And I think that's what's happened to Juni: she's become whole. She has the missing part of her life back. We can pray that she won't give up music or get killed on the highway driving between music gigs and rodeo arenas. We can praise God that music got her back to the life she loves, and that we have this model of a triumphant career to give us all encouragement and joy. But at this moment I'm just grateful for every song she's ever written and every horse she's ever known. I'll never again listen to "Who They Are," the song she wrote with cowboy poet Waddie Mitchell, and wonder what writing a poem and riding a horse have in common.
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Trudy Wischemann is a lifelong horse lover who writes. You can send her your thoughts on Juni or horsewomen in general % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment here.
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