Emily Wilson’s invocation in her translation of Homer’s “Odyssey” ends: “Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning.” Musician Joe Goodkin’s recent visit to Connecticut College to perform his “Iliad”-inspired album “The Blues of Achilles,” is, I believe, an immaculately modern manifestation of the Muses’ response.
In CLA 112:Tales of Troy, students read from various Classical epic poems, dialogues, and texts surrounding the Trojan War, and learn about the oral tradition that helped keep the Homeric poems alive throughout the Greek ‘dark age’ of illiteracy. Even with the music preservation platforms of today (and what he calls his ‘Homeric QR codes’), Goodkin uses modern folk music to (much like the rhapsodes of old) carry these ancient tales of heroes, love, loss, war, and tragedy into our modern tongue.
This semester, the Chicago-based singer, songwriter, and guitarist came to Conn to speak with Classics students and perform his album–one of two he’s written on the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” respectively–on Monday, Nov 18 in Oliva Hall. In conversation with my class of students and some other Classics majors, he described for us his journey as an ‘accidental Classicist’ as he discovered his interest in Ancient Greek literature throughout college, and the ways he’s now found to connect that passion with the love of music–and guitars–that he was raised on.
Goodkin released his “Odyssey” album directly out of college in 2002 before eventually releasing “The Blues of Achilles” in 2022, and has combined played the albums over 400 times, in all 50 states, as well as abroad in Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, and many other countries. His performance is distinct with his silver Mule Resonator guitar–a metal, heavy instrument he compares to a war weapon–citing Son House, a Delta blues musician, as an inspiration for his use of the guitar’s sound on this album.
In the months leading up to this performance, I found myself revisiting “Blues of Achilles” as a regular part of my playlists, drawn to its storytelling, where he speaks through the principal (and sidelined) characters of the “Iliad” to map out the core beliefs of the poem through their individual perspectives–the tragedies of war and being a soldier, and the hesitantly optimistic thread of love. While speaking to us about his process, Goodkin cited the extensive readings and interviews he conducted on war to begin to understand what war sounds like, as well as the relationships between soldiers, between the parent of a soldier and their son, between the soldier and the land he left behind, and the soldier and the land he’s in now. “Hands of Grief,” the song sung from Priam, the Trojan king, to the warrior soldier Achilles, who has killed Priam’s son Hector, was the first Goodkin ever wrote for the project in a sudden understanding of Priam’s ability to reconcile his grief with Achilles’, and, through prevailing humanity, connect with the person who has wronged him the most.
The album above all else situates itself to be understood by our modern world and minds, and succeeds miraculously in transmitting a three-thousand-year-old story for our realities. Goodkin described, for one, his “godless edit” of the “Iliad”, which he created by cutting out any mentions of the Greek gods from the text. This creates a secularly grounded and human story–whereas the Ancient Greeks would have recognized the presence of the gods as familiar and typical, our mythologization of Greek religion leads us to discredit and disconnect from that world that we perceive as old, distant, and weird, even when it’s often no different from our own.
In an even stronger modern parallel, Goodkin utilizes repeating melodies and refrains across the album–some melodies evoke certain emotions, some are situational, some are reprises and inverts of previous moments. I asked about these patterns, and he enthusiastically explained that the repetitive beats and riffs of pop music today, which many of us have almost certainly internalized, are very Homerically-inspired practices. The use of patterns in “Blues of Achilles” is intended to point this out, and encourage us to connect our modern musical traditions to the repetitive lyrics of Homer and the music of rhapsodes—Goodkin, for example, uses the lyrical repetition of “Sweet Home Chicago” to demonstrate how we still use refrains to help us remember the words to songs, and to use the structures of repetitive choruses to help musicians improvise.
At the nighttime performance in Oliva Hall, Professor Brett Evans gave an introduction to Goodkin’s work as well as an overview of the story of the “Iliad,” where it picks up ten years into the Trojan War. His songs follow the story chronologically, from the first invocation of the Muses and forewarning of what’s to come, all the way to the return of the now-dead Hector’s body to his family at the very end–in between, the songs cover the heroes and tragic victims, the major slaughters and moments of revelation and declaration–though, they also pause to take us into the minds of characters with little or no lines. Briseis and Chryseis–two women taken by the Greek soldiers–form the most consequential arguments and conflicts of the “Iliad,” both the reasons that Achilles withdraws from battle and incites the tragic incidents that end the Trojan War. Briseis has only a handful of lines in which she mourns the death of Patroclus, the kindest of her captors, and Chryseis says nothing at all: in Goodkin’s version, we hear their direct stories and voices prominently amidst the critical yet patriarchal voices of the Greek leaders.
He pauses, sometimes, to lead us through the didactic placements of the songs, and move us through the stories with the voices of the characters, sometimes transitioning through the songs with no pauses, only a slow moment to let the slides behind him catch up and display the text and title of the songs, displaying character names: (Achilles to Patroclus), (Thetis to Achilles), (The death of Patroclus), (Andromache learning of Hector’s death), etc. For one song, he quizzes us during discussion afterward– “In the Mud,” the song that details the death of Patroclus, was not in fact sung by Patroclus, or Achilles, or even Hector–instead, the silent witnesses of the bloodiest moments of the Iliad do: Achilles’ horses.In an article titled “Singing in the Shadow of Homer” for the journal Antigone, Goodkin elaborates on the process of choosing the album title “The Blues of Achilles” : “Maybe it was that the name Achilles in fact has the Blues in it, since it compounds achos (“grief”) and laos (“people”), which could easily become “the blues of the people” in idiomatic translation.” The album cover bears a drawing of Achilles himself, in reference to Book 9 of the “Iliad”, where he plays the lyre with Patroclus and sits out the war. The lyre he’s playing is one that he won by sacking a city, and the story he sings is that of the deeds of glorious heroes–much like himself.
