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

Appalachian folk ballads are alluring to a lot of the people I know and the musicians I listen to, and I hear them often. I've listened to Sam Amidon's haunting versions of 'Pretty Saro' and 'Sugar Baby' over and over again, and I've gone back to hear the 'original' recordings of the same songs to find out what the difference is. I've liked the rhythms of banjo and country music for my entire life. In fact, I'm going to a bluegrass get-together tonight to sing and play some of the very same old songs, along with newer songs by popular groups like Shovels and Rope --- like  in Folk Song America, it's not just the style or antiquity that allows people to treat a song like a folk song, passing it down and playing it in their own individual ways. I'm not sure how my friends and I can feel comfortable appropriating Appalachian music -- It's not ours, culturally, and more than music from the Black South. But I think it's alluring because it's bloody, romantic and yet bizarrely matter-of-fact. In ballads about love and death, it's surprising how straightforward and emotionless the people are:

'Your parents don't like me because I am poor.' (The Wagoner's Lad)
'You can't have Barbary Allen.'
I think I can feel a chilling isolation behind these words, and I wonder where it comes from. If it's true that the songs were passed down and repeated more or less faithfully to preserve their authenticity, then they were only altered accidentally like in a game of telephone, definitely not to make them more emotionally true to each singer along the way.
Drawing flat paper people in my sketchbook....

I also spent a lot of time this week looking at images of the real people and real places behind these mysterious songs.

Clarence Ashley is from Mountain City Tennessee:

Doc Watson is from Deep Gap, North Carolina, which looks like this from the sky:

My watercolor sketch of the maps.








Here is my final watercolor for class (in progress -- soon to be 3D)

 

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.