- FOREWORD by Fergus M. Bordewich -

Before Native American warriors went into battle they composed deeply private songs to inspirit themselves and to prepare, if necessary, for death. But they were also songs of affirmation that incorporated clear-eyed recognition of fate with an embrace of each man’s personal truth and experience. Jack Barschi was not a warrior, in any conventional sense. (He was never conventional.) Indeed, at least in his later life, he avoided open confrontation, not from lack of conviction, but from the belief that life was too fragile and too short to be wasted on conflict, when it could be turned instead to the embrace of what was true, precious, and perishable. Still, there was much that he battled in his ample life. His childhood was difficult, his family ruptured, his search for love and purpose often thwarted.
   In these songs, all written near the end of his life, we hear echoes of all this, of his quiet warfare: sometimes loudly, but more often like the chanting refrains that punctuate his streetwise and tender stanzas. In them, too, we can hear his unflagging disdain for hypocrisy, his self-effacing irony, his salty wisdom, his muscular tolerance of others’ shortcomings, and his unsentimental skepticism about almost everything except those few who against formidable odds penetrated the well-patrolled perimeter of his self-containment. In the multitude of voices and cadences in which he speaks to us, we hear alike the swagger of a much younger Jack—Walked like I was dancing on water/ A buccaneer before the mast— and the always (but never ostentatiously) daring man who adventured across the world, wrestled down inner demons, and finally—most daring of all—eventually surrendered himself to those he loved.

Need to fly and fall and even fail
I live to find
And die when I fear to sail.

   But Jack did sail, far and long, in his own way, encumbered (like all of us) by the weight of the past and of mortality, defying both, strong-limbed and supple, and determined to fill his eyes and heart with as much of the world as they could compass in the years allotted to him. These songs are his farewell to us.

Fergus M. Bordewich is a historian who has published numerous books and articles on American history and other subjects. He lives in San Francisco. He was a close friend to Jack Barschi for almost thirty years.