It Just Made Him Whole

There is a vulnerability that never goes away if you are a writer, or I suspect a singer, painter, sculptor, or anyone else who creates. We hope you like it. Actually, we hope you love it–and us. And if you don’t, well, sometimes we listen to that inner voice that told us all along that we are frauds and need to hang up our dream, as painful as that may be.

For many years, I’ve cited master storyteller Harry Chapin’s song “Mr. Tanner,” the fact-inspired saga of a Midwestern dry cleaner who loved to sing, when I speak to writers. Mr. Tanner gambled big and put on a recital in New York… to bad reviews. In Chapin’s story, Mr. Tanner from then on only sang late at night, alone, at his shop. The song’s chorus resonates with any creative: “He sang from his heart and he sang from his soul/And he did not know how well he sang, it just made him whole.” Just write, I counsel those fearful of making a mistake in grammar or story structure. Just write because you have to. Just write because you can’t imagine not writing. Don’t give up the way Mr. Tanner did, regardless of what people say.

Earlier this year, I was giving the opening address at a writers’ conference, and decided to see if I could find out anything about the real Mr. Tanner. It didn’t take a lot of effort; his name is Martin Tubridy, and he lives in the Northeast. His recitals in March 1971 and February 1972 were scorched in The New York Times, which used phrases such as “lacking tonal steadiness and adequate phrasing”  and “not up to generally accepted levels of professional accomplishment.” My heart ached anew for this man, who was in his 30s at the time. It’s one thing to get a bad review at Yelp or Amazon. It’s entirely another thing to be told to call it quits in one of the nation’s leading newspapers (especially in the days long before Yelp or Amazon).

But lo and behold, unlike Mr. Tanner, Mr. Tubridy did not hang it up. In fact, you can find him on YouTube, singing “This Is My Song,” based on Sibelius’ “Finlandia.” Mr. Tubridy’s Juilliard-trained daughter created the video in 2012 when he was in his early 70s. It is perhaps the perfect song choice, as the first verse speaks of hopes and dream.

Martin Tubridy’s YouTube video has been viewed fewer than 1,200 times, and I probably represent close to a dozen of those views. Is he any good? I don’t know. What I do know is that I am inspired by the persistence, ego, confidence, whatever you want to call it, of a person who stuck to his passion regardless of what others thought, who kept creating because, as Chapin sang, “It just made him whole.”