Mary Don't You Weep

To the left are my notes about the song and its many references. I wrote in the form of questions. I did this because initially the song seemed straightforward, so I had to step back and figure out what I didn't know about it. Some of my questions are unanswered, and that's alright.

My favorite line in Mary Don't You Weep has got to be the 'three links of chain / every one was freedom's name' . It doesn't literally make much sense but it's such a satisfying, clear, powerful image. A lot of the other lyrics in the song have that same satisfying, thirst-quenching quality, relating to water in both Red Sea and the flood.

There are so many ways to sing this song, from the Andrewettes' performance to Leadbelly's scratchy, fast-paced, informal recording, but they all speak powerfully of liberation and share an upbeat, energetic, pulsing sound. They are all exciting to listen to.

I created something new with my ripped cloth from last week -- this time focusing on something mysterious and vast beyond. I chose dark blue because of the references to water as a powerful divine force in the song: God parting the Red Sea for the Jews and drowning Pharaoh's army, Noah's ark floating on the flood, even Mary's torrent of tears. If I may, I would like to claim that the element of this song is water.

I did some experiments last week to try to start understanding how to make something based on the spirituals we're listening to and reading about.

I wasn't originally going to do any drawing, because I didn't feel equipped to make a comment on slavery and oppression in the south in that way. Instead, I looked for an object that said something about it. Reading Blues People reminded me of the cultural (and musical) differences between the African people who were initially captured and the African Americans who were enslaved a few generations later. I hadn't realized how distant these generations were from each other. Apparently there was no continuity, except for in very secret ways. I was stunned by the idea of a gap created when families were separated and children sold away from their mothers. What a stunted culture that would be. I wanted to make something physical with a void in it. I found a place mat and ripped a space in the middle. Now that I see it scanned, it reminds me of a birds-eye view of a field where slaves would have worked, not just a rift in a fabric.

Later on, I did a sketch too. It's based on the video of the men working at a Texas prison, and I tried ignoring distance and perspective so that the horses and dogs are directly on the prisoners, crushing them, but not really, because the prisoners have practically no weight or volume.

Land and Home

I imagined and constructed a sequence of landscapes. The places are stitched together from my own associations between myth landscapes, real places in the United States, and the lines of the song Down in the Valley.

Down in the Valley is a song made up of verses so disparate that they seem to be there by chance, but each verse situates itself in the land in a new way.

The first and verse is set in a valley and the direction is down: Down in the valley, the valley so low; hang your head over, hear the wind blow. For me the image of wind elongates this valley into more of a steep canyon. It could just as easily be a wide, muddy, fertile agricultural valley with wind that whips through because there is so little standing in its way.

The second verse is a series of clichés that anybody could say, but the words that grow up out of the earth and head toward the sky, toward people's dreams and fantasies. The third verse happens between two people, but what caught my attention is that the story it is telling doesn't make sense, except as a daydreamy association. The singer is letting somebody leave and love whomever they want, then immediately afterward asking for an embrace to ease his/her heart. The words feel like part of the same world, but the connotations don't match. So the landscape of the song has to be a dream landscape.

The castle verse is what made me choose to do the drawing in the end. It doesn't fit into the mix at all, but it introduces a bit of European fantasy and privilege that would have been as distant as the moon to early Appalachian singers of this song. Suddenly the singer wants to be 40 feet high. And suddenly 'he' is riding by. So now anybody listening to the song is being pulled in two entirely new directions.

The drawing takes a journey from a mountain valley with a rickety wooden stair across an endless trainless sky railroad over the marsh and the forest all the way to a solid stone castle, but the view from the castle parapet is a bland, everyday view. It's a small gridded town against a lonely backdrop of low hills, something seen from an airplane anywhere in America, so perhaps the journey ends back in the mundane world where it probably started.

First Song: All the Pretty Horses

I had no trouble remembering what the first song I heard was. It was a lullaby that my mom sang to me, called "All the Pretty Horses." She's pretty materialistic, so it suited her.

This is the basic gist of the song:

Hush-a-bye, don't you cry
Go to sleep you little baby
When you wake, you shall have cake
And all the pretty little horses
Blacks and bays, dapple and greys
All the pretty little horses
Hmm, and mama loves, daddy loves
Oh they love their little baby
When you wake, you shall have cake
And all the pretty little horses

That was a long time ago and I needed to help my memory out. When I  listened to different versions of it on YouTube and looked at lyrics online, nothing really looked much like my mom's version. They were sort of dark and creepy. My mom sang it in a more or less cheerful tune, maybe because she wasn't a good singer and couldn't pick up on the real tune, or maybe just to not scare me. I think she also sang less of the words and kept looping back to the part about the physical appearance of the horses: 'black and bay, dapple and gray' over and over. There was a really dark verse that she never sang:

Way down yonder, down in the meadow
Lies a poor little child
The bees and the flies are pickin' out its eyes
The poor little child crying for its mother


Anyway, I started to probe my memory of what she sang, and figure out what she knew and what she didn't know, just by covering and cutting out some unfamiliar words that I don't think she sang.

I'm planning to frame something like this inside a dark box, and change how I block words. The yellow trace paper isn't doing it for me, but it's a start.