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.