Brother Joshua - The Big Trail (2024)

It is the brisk fall of 2023. I attend a Sunday service at the replicated Schoenbrunn village church. We sit on simple wooden benches, the room lit only by candles and a fire in the hearth. There is a picture of Thomas on the wall, eyes wide, tracing the wound in the side of Christ. A word from James. A word from Isaiah.

“Let your heart be broken”.

For the past ten or so years, I have been writing and recording a batch of songs that are in the finalization process, and center around the very grounds and history that I, appropriately, find myself basking in on this cold morning. I have been visiting with David Zeisberger and his mission train, watching the shape of this county take shape, placing myself in the camps and trails and burgeoning towns growing along the Tuscarawas River.

These ballads, this record, tells the story of Tuscarawas County. It tells the story of the Moravian missionaries—and eventually the Zoar separatists—who came to give and to receive salvation. It tells the story of the canal, the railroad, and the great flood that wiped them out. It tells of our triumphs and our failures.

The story, as told here, is incomplete. There is still much to say and much to sing about. There is the Delaware, the Lenape, the first peoples. There are the heroes who rose up, who carried our story along, and the scoundrels who emerged from our ranks. For the time being we will call this, “The Big Trail”, volume one of the story.

Suddenly, there is the roar of a truck, speeding by on the road just outside of Schoenbrunn, and I am whipped back to the present day, New Philadelphia, the gulf between the present and that distant path.

I will take a breath. I will pause. And I will hopefully return and listen for more voices speaking out in the misty fog that rolls off the Tuscarawas River.