Final Post: Mississippi John Hurt and Barbary Allen

This class did me a lot of good. It challenged to think less logically and more intuitively about music and art, and to just go ahead and make things I felt should be made. The music provided just enough direction.

My collage for Mississippi John Hurt is a good snapshot of what (and how) I learned from the amazing body of music we listened to. While I can feel the strength and humanity and beauty of folk songs, I can feel just as strongly the judgments and perceptions of people who take over ownership of this music - especially the crowd applauding stiffly at John Hurt's concerts.

I'm happy with this collage because it was the result of me trying to capture the texture of that applause and what it meant. I hope to do more work based on processes like that in the future.

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The song that stays with me the most from the semester is Barbary Allen. It's so neat and logical, but also so true - maybe because the story is incredibly detailed, down to what each person says to each other. I'm also enthralled by the fact that the words have hardly changed over many, many years. I love how it doesn't take a single instrument to perform it. Jean Ritchie's a capella version is incredible - I can listen to it all the way through without getting restless. It's strange and familiar at the same time.

A belated scan of my artwork based on Barbary Allen:

Sailor songs

In his article 'Envoi,' Griel Marcus describes folk songs and cowboy songs as seeming like they've been "sung forever" -- many cowhand and sailor songs sound this way to me, but not the one I chose for my art piece this week.

I made a comic strip based directly on the song 'The Flying Cloud' precisely because of what is sung and how dated it is. The song is about a man's who starts out as a young innocent sailor and ends up locked in prison for piracy. In between, he works on a slave ship, which he describes in sad detail. In the final verse he regrets becoming a pirate and warns other young men, but there's no warning about getting involved in the slave trade, even though it seems like that started the whole thing. It's just overlooked as a place where he might have went wrong. I doubt that this song is sung much today. It's a sad song because wherever the man turns, he fails to find any satisfaction, or stay out of trouble. But to me, hearing the song today with little connection to that time, it's also a bit funny and ironic.

I'm content for this piece to be humorous and detached, not personal and deeply emotional. It's not a song I feel much personal attachment to, I just want to bring out this contradiction in the drawing. However, I've been thinking about ways to do a better job of telling the story in my drawing. I've added a pirate flag to one of the ships, hoping that might help, but it's still missing some elements that would make the story funnier. I think if I really wanted to do this justice I would make it 4 or 5 pages longer.

It's a strange note to end the semester on, but no work is ever really done, so I think it's appropriate.

Blues

Reading about some of the major blues characters, in particular Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, I was struck by how much writers seem to think of them as legends, not ordinary historical people. The Wikipedia contributor who wrote about Muddy Waters' early life spent a paragraph pondering whether he was born in 1913 or 1915 or some other unknown year. Griel Marcus wrote an article titled 'Top 10 Untrue Facts About Robert Johnson," just to revel in the mystery of a man who supposedly sold his soul to the devil. The article made practically no sense  but it struck the same nerve. What I think white people love most about blues musicians are the murky legends that surround them.

I know Robert Johnson wasn't on the Chicago blues scene, but I couldn't help exploring his story, and his music and the mythology of his life did become extremely well-known and commercialized, even long after his early and murky death.

Supposedly, Robert Johnson's song 'Crossroads' tells the story of how he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for inhuman musical talent. The story is very unlikely to have any truth to it, but it makes the man behind the song seem more distant from reality. The spooky coincidence of Johnson's death, possibly by murder, gives the story more weight. I think the blues belong in a world where it is both true and a lie.

For some popular material on the subject, I read a vanity fair article about unearthing photographs of Robert Johnson, and I learned that there are thought to be only two or three photos of him, one of which he took of himself in a photo booth. That got me started on this week's project.

* http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/10/a-disputed-robert-johnson-photo-gets-the-csi-treatment

I mixed the setting of a photo booth with that of a dim-lit city juke joint, playing with colored gels to filter the light. I made a tiny 'photo booth' that is meant to be held, moved around and looked at from all angles, but especially through the pinhole in the front. Obviously it's hard to photograph a small object with many facets, but I gave it a try:

Delta Blues

Death Letter Blues is Son House's signature song. It's a detailed saga of grief and reflection. I listened to it three times in a row, captivated by the slow, sticky process the singer goes through after his lover dies.

The first time I listened to it, the line 'I didn't have no soul to throw my arms around' really struck me because I thought it meant that the singer had literally lost his soul - knelt down to pray and noticed his soul was gone. Soon I realized what it actually meant: he had no other person to love. My initial reaction stuck with me anyway. I started to see the entire song as the process of the singer losing his soul and dealing with the numb space left behind. That's what it would be like to lose the most important person in one's life. It's even more tragic that he only realizes he loves her when she dies. So he spends his entire life up to that point in uncertainty and the entire time afterward in sorrow.

I thought about the actions of the man in the song. Standing, crossing his arms, taking his suitcase down the road, looking, praying, having no one to throw his arms around. In my sketchbook, I tried to follow this process in a series of figure drawings.

The blues, according to William Ferris, are defined by pain and suffering. But just these words don't carry the true color of the music, so instead I am writing with the shapes and the movements of the human body to express my experience of this song, hoping to capture a little more of what the blues are about.

Woody Guthrie

When reading about Woody Guthrie last week, I was fascinated by the interesting, awkward character he was and his relationship with Alan Lomax and others. He is characterized in John Szwed's book as stubborn and proud, put off by city people, and trying to put them off in return, for example when he performed for 'electrified' crowds and then denied he knew what folk music was. However, he's absolutely genuine and straight in his songs and in his autobiography, if a little bit too strident or jaunty for my taste. But what does my taste matter when it's Woody Guthrie? He was doing something unique and I'm grateful to him... just a little puzzled.

This piece is a response partly to the song This Land is Your Land, and partly to the relationship between Alan Lomax and Woody Guthrie as I read in John Szwed's book.

The landscape images come from This Land is Your Land, and they're meant to be very simple, recognizable stock images of something supposedly awesome.

I intentionally took out Woody's head from the picture, but there he is playing the guitar, the force behind all the rest, but maybe denying his own importance.

Alan Lomax is looking on approvingly but perhaps missing the point. Or maybe, as Szwed said in his book on pg 161, 'He sensed that Guthrie was still developing, working out his own creative destiny, and tried to leave him alone to do so.'

I wanted the lamp shining, hands playing, and a symmetry in the storytelling, even if it's not quite telling a story that makes sense. I had hoped to create another layer of dust and fog, but didn't get the chance. Maybe I'll revise this one later.

The Midnight Special

This week I focused on a few versions of 'The Midnight Special' and read the lyrics carefully. I was expecting to find sadness and oppression, since after all it's a prison song, but the energy of the song is lively and optimistic - especially the lines about the apron and dress, and of course the idea of the midnight special. The 'Midnight Special' itself is a Southern Pacific train that inmates hoped to ride when they were free. I couldn't find any reason why they called it that, but it fits.

The idea of a freedom train reminds me of slave songs and also of Elizabeth Cotten's Freight Train song, so it's a bit otherworldly, but Leadbelly sang about it in a faster-paced world that feels more familiar to me.

I also found optimism in the chapters about Leadbelly and Alan Lomax. Alan discovering over and over again what he wanted to do with his life, Leadbelly believing that recording with Alan got him out of jail. And the telling of it makes everything seem as simple as magic.

So I painted a magic train coming out of the dimness.

The Midnight Special (acetone transfer and watercolor)

Ballads

This week, I was curious about "Down by the Sally Gardens," what it is saying and where it comes from. Very little happens in the song, but there are a powerful ideas inside it.

It was down by the Sally Gardens, my love and I did meet.
She crossed the Sally Gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree,
But I was young and foolish, and with her did not agree.

In a field down by the river, my love and I did stand
And on my leaning shoulder, she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

I love the beautiful images of the leaves and grass growing so easily.

I think it's tragic that we don't know exactly what happened to make him 'full of tears' at the end - we only know that he refused to 'take love easy' like his lover wanted him to, and it led to tragedy. Parts of the story are missing, and that's haunting.

The song is taken straight from a Yeats poem written in 1889. That poem is based on an older song that Yeats heard from a peasant woman in his native Ireland. Yeats wrote the poem by trying to reconstruct the lyrics from his memory and filling in the gaps. His poem then became a song. Back and forth.

There is debate (on MudCat and Wikipedia) about which song Yeats rewrote. It may have been one of the following.

This un-named song from Dublin:
Down by the Salley Gardens my own true love and I did meet;
She passed the Salley Gardens a-tripping with her snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, just as the leaves fall from each tree;
But I being young and foolish, with my true love would not agree.

In a field by the river my lovely girl and I did stand,
And leaning on her shoulder I pressed her burning hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the stream flows o'er the weirs;
But I being young and foolish, I parted her that day in tears.

I wish I was in Banagher and my fine girl upon my knee.
And I with money plenty to keep her in good company.
I'd call for liquor of the best with flowing bowls on every side.
Kind fortune ne'er shall daunt me, I am young and the world's wide.

The Rambling Boys of Pleasure
You rambling boys of pleasure, give ear to those few lines I write,
Although I'm a rover, and in roving I take great delight.
I set my mind on a handsome girl who ofttimes did me slight,
But my mind was never easy till my darling were in my sight.

It was down by Sally's Garden one evening late I took my way.
'Twas there I spied this pretty little girl, and those words to me sure she did say
She advised me to take love easy, as the leaves grew on the tree.
But I was young and foolish, with my darling could not agree.

The very next time I met my love, sure I thought her heart was mine,
But as the weather changes, my true love she changed her mind.
Cursed gold is the root of evil, oh it shines with a glittering hue,
Causes many the lad and lass to part, let their hearts be ever so true.

Sure I wish I was in Dublin town, and my true love along with me.
With money to support us and keep us in good company.
With lots of liquor plentiful, flowing bowls on every side,
Let fortune never daunt you, my love, we're both young and the world is wide.

But there's one thing more that grieves me sore is to be called a runaway
And to leave the spot I was born in, oh Cupid cannot set me free,
And to leave that darling girl I love, oh alas, what will I do?
Will I become a rover, sleep with the girl I never knew ?
From Penguin Book of Canada Folk Songs, (ed Edith Fowke)

Or it may have been a different variation. Either way, the part that they all have in common is the message about love: She bid me take love easy / as the leaves grow on the tree.

What does it mean to take love easy? Joanna Newsom, a contemporary musician, sings a haunting love song called Easy, in which love does not come easily at all. Ease in love is just out of reach both in her song and in Down by the Sally Gardens.

I also wondered what 'Sally' meant, so I looked it up and it may be a variation of a word for willow tree. A willow garden makes sense as an appropriate setting for romance and sorrow, and also as a reason for the weirs the song mentions. Weirs are for water, which willows love. There is a beautiful, resonant connection between trees, water, youth, and love.

But after all that searching, I still don't understand why the romance does not work out. There's no good reason.



My piece for this week is actually based more on "Barbara Allen," but most of the unanswered questions are the same. Why is the man dying from love with no explanation? Why does Barbara Allen still refuse him after he explains that he didn't mean to slight her? Why can't anybody communicate? What is love to these people? It seems so dangerous, so difficult, that I feel sorry for them all. I believe that the link between love and tragedy was a lot stronger in those days than it is today, perhaps because social expectations were different.









Hilarious Illustration by Henry Brock, 1934