The Blackest Crow — Sailing Vessel Beauty, Venice, Florida
Starting at the Venice Jetty, where the Gulf meets the shore and the waters of Venice, Florida open toward the sea. From there, we pass the boats gathered around the Venice Yacht Club before continuing into Roberts Bay.
These are familiar waters to me, but places become more meaningful when they are viewed through the memories and history we carry with us.
I am a Southerner from South Carolina, and Confederate Memorial Day is a day that causes me to pause and remember. For me, it is not simply a date on a calendar or an argument about politics. It is a day of remembrance for the men and women of the South who lived through the War of Southern Independence and for those who never came home.
Remembering history does not require us to pretend that the past was simple. It was not. The people who lived through those years carried hopes, fears, loyalties, hardships, and losses that are difficult for us to fully understand more than a century and a half later. But remembering the dead is not the same thing as celebrating war. There is sadness in remembering any generation that was consumed by it.
Music has always been one of the ways people carry their memories across generations.
As Sailing Vessel Beauty leaves Venice behind and sails toward the open sea, I have chosen to accompany the passage with “The Blackest Crow,” a traditional ballad with deep roots in Scots-Irish Appalachian folk and Irish traditional music.
The Scots-Irish brought a rich musical tradition with them to the American South and Appalachian mountains. After the War of Southern Independence, that tradition continued to evolve among Southern families and communities, carrying with it the melancholy of separation, loss, migration, and remembrance. Songs of this kind were not written simply to entertain. They were ways of expressing things that were sometimes too difficult to say.
“The Blackest Crow” is especially fitting for this journey. Its themes of separation and sorrow seem almost to belong to the sea itself—the feeling of leaving someone or something behind and wondering what lies beyond the horizon.
And so Beauty sails on.
The Venice waterfront slowly disappears astern. The familiar boats become smaller, the shoreline fades, and eventually there is only open water ahead.
Perhaps that is what sailing has always represented to me: leaving the familiar behind while carrying its memories with you.
The wind fills the sails, the music fades into the distance, and Beauty continues toward the open sea.
Some journeys take us away from home.
Others remind us what home means.
