More Appalachia + Songster

With this project, I aimed to illustrate the essence of murder ballads (but didn’t necessarily mean for it to look like a murder scene – shouldn’t have used so much red!). Barbry Allen was my main influence, with its Romeo and Juliet-like storyline. The song stands out initially due to its length, but is compelling and provocative in its classic tale of unrequited love culminating in death. The way Jean Ritchie sings it is quite eerie and effective, similar to her treatment of The Cuckoo. To quote Cecil Sharp:

“how far from that gentle tune was this - so strange, so remote, so thrilling.”

One passage of the Cecil Sharp article in particular caught my attention…

“Folk music is the product of an unselfconscious peasantry; a peasantry which refuses to transmit the eccentricities of any individual; which simply omits and forgets what does not belong to the spirit of the people...  But this is a doleful theory to propound to Americans who feel the urge of nationality.  How can we have any folk music?  We are in the clutches of compulsory education.”

What does Sharp mean by this? What is “unselfconscious peasantry”? Does this mean a peasantry in which one’s societal rank is not questioned, in which no attempt is made to improve one’s condition? Culture is not monolithic, and I contest his claim that folk music stems from such a culture… and what exactly is the role of compulsory education in discounting folk music? Does education not contribute to the “spirit of the people”? Is an educated population unable to produce songs of a quality comparable to those created by the peasantry?

So many questions, very little answers…

On a brighter note, this week also included one of my favorite S&P songs to sing: Down by the Sally Gardens. J

Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor is my favorite Mississippi John Hurt song. Funnily, I always imagine a wooden pallet on the floor even though I know he is singing of a bed… MJH is described to have a gentle, guileless voice - the word guileless describes his ingenuity perfectly, and I would characterize Ollie Gilbert in the same way, though her voice is raw rather than gentle. It’s interesting that John Hurt adopted the nickname Mississippi, given that his musical roots and style are distinguished as “un-Mississippi”. The fact that his greatest influence was himself and his own musical insights reveals his innate musicality.

Candy Man is unembellished in the way that it can be taken at face value just as a fun song to sing and listen to. Realistically, its myriad of versions with drastically different lyrics suggests some sort of meaning within the song. As for me, I love the way it takes me back to New Orleans, with its imagery of jolliness, beer, and salty alligator hot dogs.

P.S. San Francisco Bay Blues is also one of my favorites. So many great songs!

The Cuckoo sings of murder

I agree with Lida that the songs assigned for this week all sounded very similar (they are indistinct, so to say) but I think the similiarity in sound is a hallmark of any song within the same genre. And that leads to the reason I chose The Cuckoo as my project - the instant I heard Jean Ritchie sing the first words "Oh, the cuckoo-" I felt something that none of the other songs were able to evoke. The Cuckoo made me feel particularly uneasy, not necessarily due to the lyrics, but in the way that it is sung so beautifully by Jean Ritchie.. she evokes a sense of despondency disguised in words of hope, intermixed with a sense of poignancy.  I'm having trouble finding the right words... maybe there aren't any. I'm posting the lyrics here because they are so starkly different than Doc Watson & Clarence Ashley's version of the song - not only because it is a woman's perspective but more so in the general meaning of the song. Jean Ritchie's cuckoo bird symbolizes femininity and empowerment (the cuckoo only "sings" during spring, a season characterized by beauty and warm weather) while Doc Watson & Clarence Ashleys' cuckoo bird only "hollers" on the 4th of July, a date which I think was only chosen because July rhymes with flies, though I may be wrong and the date may be significant in symbolizing independence or freedom.

O the cuckoo she's a pretty bird, she sings as she flies;

She brings us glad tidings and she tells us no lies.

She sucks all the pretty flowers to make her voice clear

And she never sings “cuckoo” till the spring of the year.

Come all you young women, take warning by me,

Never place your affection on the love of a man.

For the roots they will wither, the branches decay,

He'll turn his back on you and he'll walk square away.

If you do forsake me I'll not be forsworn

And they'll all be mistaken if they think that I'll mourn;

For I'll get myself up in some higher degree

And I'll walk as light by him as he can by me.

During class I had a lot of thoughts running through my head pertaining to the discussion of Banks of the Ohio - of how it's such a dark song that is sung so lightly, even playfully, and how could they sing of murder so lightheartedly?

Maybe it stems from the foundation of Appalachian music, from Appalachian life.

The Appalachias were initially settled by poorer people -

"It is generally perceived that this 'lower' class of immigrant resulted in the 'poor white trash' or 'hillbillies' of Deliverance fame, although the truth is that to survive in the Southern Mountains you needed to be resourceful, healthy, and knowledgeable." (source)

Mountain life was undoubtedly difficult, and I would imagine the Appalachian communities were largely isolated from greater American culture. After doing a lot of online research on Appalachian culture and history to try to understand the darkness of Appalachian folk songs like Banks of the Ohio and Barbara Allen, I was led to examine murder ballads, a subgenre of traditional ballads. I didn't understand why murder ballads are so prevalent other than the fact that they are narrative songs in which the narrative is particularly provocative. Then I came across this article -

"The cultural insulation of the Scots and Scots-Irish denizens of the [Appalachian] hills and hollers, often coupled with an outsize concept of personal honor, preserved an age-old reliance on violence as an acceptable means of resolving problems. Isolated by geography from the world of electricity and internal combustion engines—and often of literacy—this tradition carried well into the 20th century..."

With a quote from Lomax's Folks Songs of America:

“Willful and cold-blooded murders…came naturally to people whose ancestors were…moonshiners and feudists. The old [Scottish] Border ballad tradition, which linked love and death, fitted the code of the backwoods.”

So I guess the simple answer is that these songs are so dark is essentially because it alludes to the cultural origins of the people of Appalachia, while also being a thriller (equivalent to a tabloid story, interestingly, according to the article above). I'm looking forward to examining each narrative further...

Oh Mary, don't you weep!

My personal interpretation of Mary Don't You Weep was that Mary was being told not to weep, because you are strong and God will protect you, just as God protected Moses and the Israelites by drowning Pharaoh's army.

It was mentioned during class that Mary was a strong woman who did very courageous things, such as wash Jesus's feet in the referenced bible verse.

But even the strongest people have their own moments of weakness, and I wanted to depict in my illustration the strong Mary weeping in privacy - but with the big wave behind her representing and reminding her of God's power and her own strength to overcome her hardships.

John 20:11-15
11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb. 12 And she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. 13 They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” 14 Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15 Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”

Out of all the versions posted on the class blog, Inez Andrews' take is by far the one that resonated the most with me. Undoubtedly she is a great performer and the song is a great performance in itself, but the sincerity in her voice gives her version of the song a quality that the other versions posted lack (in my opinion, of course...).