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.
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