5/5/26: “Yonder in the Great Beyond,” by Gordon Wright

Gordon Wright is a Chicago-area musician who will be sharing music on the 5th day of the month all year long. Long ago, he fronted an East Coast pop/rock band called Fooled By April. These days you can find him singing jazz in the Chicago Jazz Dads.

Today’s song is “Yonder in the Great Beyond.” I warn you: it is short and it is a demo. There aren’t even instruments on most of it. But actually that part is intentional. The tune was written to be in the style of Church of Christ hymns, which are traditionally sung a capella.

Some of you may recall the episode of this podcast from March 5, when I explained that a lot of the tunes I’m working on these days are for the musical, “Mr. Texas,” which I’m writing with my dad, Lawrence Wright, and piano blues legend, Marcia Ball.

As we’ve worked on the musical, we’ve looked for opportunities to write songs across styles—country, blues, rock, two-step, Tejano. So why not an old-style church tune? Early in the story, our narrator, the lobbyist LD Sparks, heads out to Marfa Texas to attend the funeral of his old friend, Walter Dunne, the state rep for that area. The sound of a cappella voices sets an appropriately somber and austere tone as LD enters the scene. Of course we quickly learn that LD doesn’t do anything out of the goodness of his heart. As the tune fades into the background, we hear LD slyly asking around for new blood. It turns out he’s really only there to find someone he can get elected to replace the barely deceased Walter. As an ever-powerful lobbyist for Texas oil & gas, he’s just looking for another politician to have in his pocket.

So, now, as I play the hymn for you one more time, close your eyes and picture a barren West Texas landscape, with high mesas in the distance, and dust blowing into the faces of mourners as they stand, partially covered by the shade of a feeble tarp, and watch poor Walter Dunne’s casket lowered into the hard ground while the rag-tag church choir sings…\