How Joe Buchanan Found a Home in Judaism

Once, when I was a kid, I was with a group of Jewish friends when one of the non-Jewish kids asked, “Do y’all believe in heaven?”

“I don’t know,” my friend said. “Let me call my mom.”

I remember thinking how strange that was. How could someone else tell you what you believed?

Years later, while talking with Texas country singer-songwriter Joe Buchanan, I found myself thinking about that moment again. Joe will perform with his band at The Weber School on Dec. 3, presented by Neranenah, the concert and culture series I lead. His story is one I’m excited for our community to hear.

Joe grew up believing deeply in G-d but almost entirely outside organized religion. His grandfather offered a simple philosophy: “Live a good life. That’s all G-d can ask of you.”

As he got older, Joe visited churches with friends, asking what he calls “a million and five questions.” Too often, questions were treated as doubt, and doubt as weakness. Eventually, he stopped looking and figured he and G-d would “settle up at some point.”

But music was always there.

On his family’s ranch in South Texas sat a Wurlitzer jukebox filled with George Jones, George Strait, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn and, somehow, Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” For a lonely kid, those records were company. Music was, he told me, “the place I could go to feel welcomed.”

The first song he remembers being unable to stop listening to was Marty Robbins’ “El Paso.”

“The music fit the story,” he told me. “The kavanah was in the music itself.”

Kavanah is the Hebrew word for intention. Joe didn’t know it as a kid listening to Marty Robbins. Decades later, Judaism gave him a word for something he already understood.

Getting there took a surprising turn. Joe had been married to his wife, April, for 13 years before realizing she was Jewish.

While visiting Washington, D.C., they went to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Afterward, April told him she wanted to reconnect with her people’s faith.

“What?” Joe asked. “Who are your people?”

“I’m Jewish.”

“Wait. When did you get Jewish?”

Then she explained that their son, Nathan, was Jewish, too.

“Does he know that?”

Joe tells this with wonderful comedic timing, but the confusion was real. He knew April’s mother was Jewish; he simply hadn’t understood what that meant. April had grown up without much Jewish practice, and Judaism hadn’t become part of their family’s life.

Eventually, they walked into a small synagogue in Houston and met Rabbi Stuart Federow.

“There is one G-d and there is nothing wrong with you,” Federow told him.

Joe describes what followed as “30 years of therapy all at the same time.” The rabbi explained that goodness puts more good into this world, rather than purchasing a reward in another.

“This life is the gift,” he told Joe. “You have to take care of it.”

Joe had found something he recognized.

“This was what I had been looking for and believed in since I was very, very young.”

Listening, I thought about my own experience. I grew up being told Judaism welcomed questioning, but too often it felt as though the questions came with the answers already attached.

Then I found jazz: a tradition that honored the people who came before me while expecting me to figure out what I had to say.

Our paths had been almost the opposite. Joe grew up outside Judaism, looking for a tradition with room for his questions. I grew up inside it and went somewhere else looking for the questioning I thought Judaism had promised me. Hearing what he found helped me recognize those possibilities in my own tradition.

And Joe began writing songs.

Torah, he discovered, was full of the same kinds of people who populated his favorite country songs: people who made mistakes, fell in love, doubted and tried again.

“We’re a people with incredible stories,” he told me. “Country music is all about that.”

He wrote a country love song around Ani l’dodi v’dodi li — “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” — and a setting of Hashkiveinu, the evening prayer for shelter and peace. The Jewish stories belonged in the musical language he’d spoken all his life.

“If you take away the words,” he told me, “it’s just country music.”

Call it Jewish country, he added. “Just don’t call it Jewgrass.”

When Joe works on a prayer melody, he asks whether the music carries the intention of the words. It’s what he loved about Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” as a child: the music fit the story. Joe had come to Judaism and found a home for them. Along the way, he discovered that the music he’d loved all his life had a place there too.

Joe Buchanan and his band perform at 7 p.m., Dec. 3, at The Weber School, presented by Neranenah. Tickets and information: neranenaharts.org/tickets.