I.
It's not often a piece of art, or an artist, will bring mist to my eyes. Life Is Beautiful did it. Laura Nyro's "New York Tendaberry" does it; so does the Allegro Assai section of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Most of the time, I'm not interested in angels, long goodbyes, disease-of-the-week movies. Cynicism is a premium given away with every baby born after 1970, and I happened to get a few extra boxes of the stuff.

Sandy Denny's voice makes me cry.

II.
On November 21, 1998, I attended a tribute concert for the late Sandy Denny at St. Ann's Church in Brooklyn Heights.

III.
Denny had ended her career twenty years earlier, with a fatal fall down a flight of stairs. Though it was a sad day in the folk-rock community, Denny's music, by 1978, hovered on the outside of consumer consciousness, and like a smaller-scale Elvis, it was hard for most people influenced by disco and punk to use the word "tragedy" in conjunction with the singer's name.

Today, punk's resurgence has ended, disco's revival is passe, and Sandy Denny is a legend.

IV.
"Who is this?" the gentleman next to me said, whispering to his friend.

"It says Marti Jones," replied his companion, poring over the Arts At St. Ann's concert program.

"Who? Marti Jones? This is a woman performing. Maybe there's an error."

I shuffled in my seat, my butt shifting uncomfortably on the hard wood of the pew. Shut up.

Marti Jones was doing "Take Me Away". It's one of the Denny songs that most call to mind The Eagles: high-intensity country-rock waltzes with punctuated strums on the upbeat. Perfect for the short-haired, no-nonsense Ms. Jones, who forsakes vocal frills for power. Hard to tell, though, with the chatter by my side.

V.
It had gone on the entire evening. One of the show's real surprises was an appearance on the bill by Hootie & The Blowfish's deep-throated, perennially baseball-capped frontman, Darius Rucker. He did a souled-up "Blackwaterside", Denny's reworking of a traditional song.

"It's Hootie."

"Hootie?"

"That's the guy."

"The guy from Hootie."

"He's good, no?"

He actually wasn't anything spectacular. It was funny to see a large, African-American male with a voice decidedly geared towards Allman Brothers covers on stage in a Catholic church, tackling an English folk tune. Novel, yes, but not much else.

My pewmates' friend returned from the bathroom. One of the men made a knee-slapping noise.

"Aww...hey, you missed Hootie."

"Hootie?"

Next act took the stage.

"Yeh, Hootie."

Your Faithful Narrator: "Shhhhhh."

Susan McKeown wasn't wasting time. She broke straightaway into "Tam Lin", her voice as brogued and bombastic as her name. The house band for the night, The Continental Drifters, thumped and fiddled behind McKeown as she spat out "Why come you to Carter Hall without command from me?" in full "Macbeth"-witch frenzy.

VI.
How do I brainstorm Sandy Denny?

I start with the Fairport Convention years, and free-associate.

a) teenagers in England, including a long-haired guitarist named Richard Thompson . . . they wished to revive jigs, reels and ballads of the Elizabethan era in an electrified, late-'60s setting.
b) "Who Knows Where The Time Goes", a Denny original, unsentimental, high, tremolo-heavy alto, one for the ages. "I have no fear of time," goes the lyric.

Lest we forget her work with:

a) The Strawbs
b) Fotheringay

Solo:

a) every adjective I can think of makes Denny's music sound like tomato sauce.
*Hearty
*Zesty
*Sturdy
*Rich
*Satisfying
b) songs for a pint of Guiness, or a month without a loved one.

The recently-released album, "Gold Dust (The Final Concert)":

a) her final gig committed to tape on November 27, 1977 and never brought out of the vaults until 1998.
b) quiet, reluctant, a "comeback" into a changed world
c) a voice struggling to conceal years of smoking and a month of the common cold.
d) "Who Knows Where The Time Goes", no longer prey to the time constraints of the "Unhalsbricking" LP, is now 6:38 and a suitcase of memories.

VII.
"Sloan Wainwright?"

"Lemme see?"

"Sloan Wainwright, we're listening to."

I shushed them. She was fantastic, interpreting "Next Time Around" in her low, cello-timbered voice, quieting the hall from all other disturbances. A heavy-set woman, face framed by straw-blonde hair, and an attitude that suggested a combination of engagement and indifference, Wainwright brought me a taste of what I'd grown up imagining Denny's stage persona to be.

VIII.
"Gold Dust (The Final Concert)"'s got photos from the 1977 tour program. I was a year old then, but from all the Bay City Rollers tour booklets I've seen at the 28th Street flea market, I can safely situate these pictures in the late '70s. One has her at a piano, in a gingham dress, light passing through her blonde hair. She's grinning at her microphone. Surrounding the photo are three borders: one, banana yellow, one cantaloupe orange, one carrot orange, and the outermost, largest border, an even deeper orange, a hue that lies in a cultural coma, the sort of orange depicted in sunsets on Latter Day Saints promotional calendars.

Another photo has Denny strutting in tight jeans, with a calligraphed "SD" at the bottom of the LDS-sunset-orange page.

IX.
The Continental Drifters are awesome. Peter Holsapple plays everything. Don Dixon is bald. Deni Bonet lunges and leaps, assaulting an innocent electric fiddle. Mandolins, banjos, piano, guitar, violin, percussion instruments of all stripes.

X.
The event was being broadcast live on WFUV, interspersed with DJ Meg Griffin's commentary, although she was backstage the whole time, and her announcements could only be heard on the radio. All musicians had to be silent between songs. Katell Keineg and Robin Hitchcock talked. There were no set rules about audience members' running commentary. Luckily for me, all was quiet during Keineg's selection.

XI.
I wept openly during Keineg's "Who Knows Where The Time Goes". Of course I did. In a strategic move on the musical director's part, it was chosen as the last, pre-encore number. Of all the performers that night, many of whom aped Denny's phrasing and tone, Katell Keineg was the best candidate to do the old warhorse. She's lived in Brittany, Wales, Dublin, and the Lower East Side of New York, busking on streets, making friends along the way. When you see her, you think, she could be from anywhere; she could have dropped out of the sky. She's from another time, way back, but the most modern person here. She has no thought of leaving, she has no fear of time. I wept openly.

XII.
No doubt, the album's in my Top Ten for 1998. The big guns came out this year: Hole, REM, Son Volt. "Gold Dust (The Final Concert)" has its place at the bottom of the list, distancing itself from the noisemakers, shaking hands with the feather-light Pernice Brothers and The Legendary Jim Ruiz Group. It didn't get as much time on my CD player as "Stadium Blitzer", but it's a record I pulled from the collection when I needed to wipe away the nonsense. It won't go down as an "important" album, as whittled down to its cash-cow essence by the rock press, but it's a fine, emotional work, and I recommend it for those looking to start "Denny" sections in their milk crates.

Check out the "In Memory of Sandy Denny" Website at http://www.xs4all.nl/~golddust/.