A family of about eight Thai people sat at a table in the seafood restaurant Suttangrak where I had been a serenade singer for a few years. They were attentive to my songs which they requested and generously tipped me; nothing seemed unusual.
A few minutes later my first set was finished and as I went to take my break one of that family’s number, an attractive young woman, approached me and asked, in perfect English, if they could buy me a drink and they wanted to have a chat with me. I rarely accept drink invitations when I’m working but I did this time.
Soon I joined them at their table and the young woman began to speak to me as the others sat silent. I noticed instantly that no one smiled which is strange when I encounter people in my line of work. The young lady I’ll call Nang began.
“My mother loved you.” She said.
“Oh that’s very nice to say. Thank you.” I replied.
“And she died” she continued. I was a little floored. Yikes!
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” I said, mystified and a little horrified at such a frank and oddly intimate revelation to me, a complete stranger. Why are you telling me?, I thought.
“Before she died she gave me this,” she said, suddenly producing my business card.
“And she asked me to come and find you, and have you come and sing for her funeral.”
I was struck dumb for a moment. Huh? “I would be happy to do that”, I said not quite knowing what it meant to say yes. Everybody smiled. “When?”
She said, “ in about week’s time.”
“Where?”
“Kohn Kaen”; (A province in the distant North of Thailand.)
“I’m sorry” I said, “but I work here every night and it is so far away. I don’t think my boss would approve.”
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I named a substantial price, adding “ I would need a driver to take me there and back.”
Nang said that‘s all good and gave me her telephone number. They would be in touch.
“What was your mother’s name?”
“Noy”.
Not long afterward they left the restaurant very happy.
Over the next week we exchanged text messages detailing and confirming the transportation arrangements etc. And quite a few songs they wanted, which I learned later came from her mother’s friends.
The day for the trip to Kohn Kaen came. The taxi driver picked me up at my place right on time and ahead was a grueling nine or ten hour road-trip which I absolutely dreaded. Bouy, the taxi driver, was excellent company. He spoke very poor English, which along with my equally inept Thai made for an eighteen-hour mutual language lesson.
I was surprised to be delivered after the long drive into a Buddhist wat, or temple complex, which consisted of several large beautiful ornate buildings as well as a mausoleum in which Noy’s body presumably lay in state. It was a sweltering day. I thought this is going to be interesting. What kind of gig is this? Where am I going to play? How? I thought I was going to play at a party, Irish wake style.
As I swung my taxi door open there was Nang waiting to greet me and she put my salary right into my hand and thanked me for coming; again in perfect English. It was about noon and a very hot sunny day. There were 250 or so village folk plus 50 or more Buddhist monks. None of them spoke English.
Nang soon introduced and seated me next to Harry who was the only other farang (white) person there. Harry, an Aussie, was Noy’s widower and Nang’s stepfather. I spent the next 2 hour or so chatting with him and he told me something of the family’s history, how he had married Noy twenty-seven years earlier in Bangkok and brought her and her baby daughters, Nang and her sister, to Australia where they’d had great success in business. This explained Nang’s perfect command of English as it was her first language. Her mother Noy had returned to Thailand in recent years and had actually built this fantastic temple complex we were in, and a house on the ocean, where “her and her mates used to come and see you at the restaurant”. So that was how the deceased woman came to know me. Shown photos I didn’t recognize her nor do I recall that I met her friends at the funeral which always puzzled me.
Eventually my time came to play mid-afternoon and in the height of the heat. I still couldn’t imagine what the arrangements were for singing at a Buddhist funeral in a sacred temple. I was brought, acoustic guitar in hand, to a spot in front of the mausoleum, above and half an acre from the people. It was simply impossible to do this without a microphone, two in fact as I needed one for my guitar as well. I asked if they had mics (The Thai word for microphone is microphone.) The monks who live in the wat possessed several wireless microphones which they used for chanting and proudly fetched them. But lo-and-behold not one microphone stand. So there it was. This was not going to work.
Offered no other solution one orange-robed Buddhist monk stood to my side and held a microphone to my mouth and another held a microphone to my guitar. A third monk held a large sun-umbrella over all of us and I sang up there for well over an hour, Beatles, Elvis. The monks never moved. I added a few Thai songs since 95% of those attending knew no English songs or spoke the language. I think I’d been told that Noy’s favorite song was Only You.
I finished the gig and was showered with many looks of approval, smiles and wies (Thai greeting). The family was very happy with it all. Ten minutes later I was gone in the airconditioned taxi and never saw or heard from any of them again. Ten hours after that I was home. I thought it was perhaps the only time anyone ever played a gig quite like it.
