Final Thoughts

There is something unique and confessional about folk music—perhaps a function of its lack of audio production. Stories can be shared with ease because the only threshold to performing them is having a guitar. Technically trained voices are not needed, rhythm sections superfluous. All a good folk song calls on is someone willing to share his or her story, with the requisite honesty to not sugarcoat. Here—despite composing some of the most soothing, children lullaby melodies—love songs are not the happily-ever-afters of young-reader fairy-tales, but rather are tinged with regret and thirst and the unsatisfied. Work songs do not extol pleasant bosses and  do not speak of the culmination of lifelong dreams, but rather seek respite in death. Singers need only to tell the truth. The old joke holds if you play a folk song backwards your wife comes back, your boss hires you back, your car starts back up; folk music, forward, seeks simply to tell it as it is.

And yet, despite the honesty and confessional nature of the songs, they, notably, are meant to be sung by anyone. This, perhaps, speaks to the universality of their themes. But more than that, it reveals something about the art form that songs are meant to be shared (the vast number of covers and reworkings we sang in this class speaks to this point). Each tune has its own message, but its performance carries a greater one: our own unique trials can be overcome in unison—no burden is truly solitary.

In a way, this message dictated my own experience in the class. I told stories in voices that required gymnastics to pretend were not mine. They were harsh. They were honest. But they also were not easy to share—where my stories lost focus, and ultimately did not succeed was where I assumed a character, other than me, to tell them with distance. Where I succeeded, the act of camp-circling up and sharing the stories on an equal plane allowed me to tell without fear of judgment, to let off my issues and see them as anything but solitary.

The voices of “I Ride an Old Paint” and “Sweet Home Chicago” are so clearly different. Yet as performances by groups they are made level, and hint at similar truths. This to me was the chief takeaway of “Songs and Stories.” Montana and Louisiana, young and old, prisoner and free—these are all abstractions. The stories we tell may fluctuate by circumstance, but no story is specifically an unnaproachably ours, or mine. They are not ours or mine, nor should they be kept that way. The power in an experience is that it is shared.

Sailors and Cowhands

"I Ride an Old Paint" was another of my favorite songs from the semester. The idea of honoring a dead person's wishes is such an interesting one to me, given that it is both such a heavy, important thing to do but also one with no accountability. One other thing that stood out to me about the song is the interpretive difficulty in understanding certain words: "hoolihan"; "snuffy"; and "Dan." There almost seems to be an unspoken, inside story the song is telling that is not meant for the listener to understand completely. I tried to mimic this, in content, by having the narrator know so little about his Grandfather.

I found Grandpa’s unwashed socks under a lump in his bedspread. He liked to wear them, shoeless, as he meandered around the tipping wire fence of his vegetable garden, embroidered by butterfly weed, in search of which corner he had stuck the tomato patch. His bed was otherwise made taught. I don’t know who did it. Dad’s been sleeping on the love seat in Grandma’s room, watching the Packers with her to pass the time, until the house will swell with visitors, and kind remarks, and comments on cold cut selections, about it being a while.

Other than the socks, he left little behind in the room. He would not have made the bed, so the nuances of which side of the blanket he would have kept tucked under the mattress as he slipped himself in, of how he would have had the pillows arranged, of indents revealing in which curled position he slept—these are lost. There’s an old portrait of him and grandma. A silhouette, vaguely cliché, but his arthritic fingers are pointing West.  Other than this, it could be any old couple.

He also left a glass of water on his bedside table. There is a shallow pool, left unfinished, at its bottom. It’s beside the phone, which he used for his two-bit conversations. “Hello, hope you’re doing well, goodbye.” And next to that there a few packets of seeds. He tore the corners off rather than pulling along the perforated lines. Delicacy was too sentimental, meant for city slickers. Collected dirt always painted the underside of his fingernails, on his calloused hands.

I know enough about him to fill a page in a planner. Lifetime achievements shucked of their narratives and wrapped up put in a corner, like corn on the grill.  He was in the Navy. He was in the Pacific. He had a brother in a wheelchair, suffering from some since vanquished disease. (They talked on birthdays, according to Grandma.) His life remains a connect the dots, backwards looking so neat and tidy, the trembling hand moving from A to B erased and penned over.

The socks have holes. I wonder if he knew this. If some of the hard soil in the garden crept in and swarmed his blistered toes. If this reminded him of walking barefoot, in some memory he did not share, with t-shirts folded up into baskets for his Amarilos. 

Dad tells me I should get out of the house. It’s a nice day, there’s some shade in the far corner of the garden where it kisses the woods. I show Dad the seeds on the table. I say I’ll go plant them, but then I never do, and we’re back on Fourth of July eating tomato sandwhiches with tomatoes from Maroney’s Market, and they’re GMO and seedless, and grandma  does not have to worry about choking but she still remarks they’re a bit too sour.

City Blues Chicago

This project was my attempt to capture the intimate connection between alcohol consumption and folk music that lingers in a lot of the songs we sang. I focused, specifically, on "Rollin' and Tumblin'." There was a rawness to the song that made it one of my favorites of the semester. The song stuck out to me for it's incorporation of electric guitar, its wailing bends, and Muddy Waters' almost lazy voice--evocative, but with so little enunciation. My heavy reliance on "s" sound alliteration was meant to capture the way the lyrics in the song blur together.

            It does not start off slow. Of course you know this.

I take a sip of an IPA and I’ve necked it. I crack open another and we’re searching for a glass receptacle but you don’t find one so I stick the bottle on your desk and say it could be a vase. There’re two vases on your desk, two flowers per, and then there’re three, and then there’re four, and each flower tips against the rim. I look for my leftover handle, but then it’s empty, and meanwhile so too are the shots. My vision starts to droop and you shimmer into a smile and I’m laughing, but I can’t remember about what before you stop to water the flowers and they bob and my throat is sore but the chuckles keep churning, drawing forth hiccups and a stale burp. I’m on my knees, siphoning the last drops though the lid. “So am I slurping, so am I lisping” sibilantly slips from my pharynx, sludges through soft palate, simmers incomprehensibly as it settles into the fissure between us—sketched like a scientific diagram of dissymetric lips inches from a kiss, still and steady, still steady—and all sayings are immediately lost to your ears, shortly later to my memory.

“Stop.” “Cease.” You set the vases in a row. “My house is not a barrelhouse.” You grab your keys. “Don’t leave, drinking solo is narcissist” I call after the door is closed, and I look for a stoge. Sleep lurks like an eastward shadow at 1 pm. Alkaseltzer sleep comes. Sweet dreams! You got to your mom’s safe, thanks for asking. That’s what you tell me when you wake me. You’re hitting me with your needlepoint pillow. Your mom lives across town. The 10 to the 79, a left at the stop, southside of the street. The room is sepia through half-closed eyes. You hit me again. “Leave.” I struggle to get on my shoes. “Leave now.” I leave.

I text you. “I’m sorry. [Exclamation point].” It’s a lazy exclamation mark, I’m trying to imbue, to inflect. You leave a read receipt. It does not suffice. “So what” I tell myself. This has happened before, It can happen again. I’ve been superimposed on the cliché: I call. You don’t pick up. Then it happens again, in part. A twelve-rack. A call. A shot. An answer.

            It’s all sliding by and I’m grasping at moments—leaning against a pole supporting an above-ground rail, shadows splitting my face and you looming beyond with a smile; hands screwed together on a pew and floppy sunhats; skinny dips and baptisms; all left behind—and I’m blurring, bloated belly, belches brewing, promises of another city but I’ll stay, I’ll leave for Memphis, I’ll come back and stay, but only after I sleep and try to dream of you. You come and go cyclically, but maybe we’re now spiraling out, and rivers of whiskey suspend my solipsism and I’m trying to get asleep, rollin and tumbling, spinning hums and songs in the mattress springs, but no one’s there to hear, and I know that if you were, you’d fake a snore, you would not listen.

Country Blues

For this project, I focused on Sweet Home Chicago. The song concerns a romantic relationship, but the image of going to the airport holds more meaning as something shared among family members to me, so I changed the relationship to a maternal one. Two related questions dominated the piece for me: Are you home when you land, or when you are at your front door's threshhold? Have you left when the door locks behind you, or when take off?

Back to California, through Chicago. I used to want to go. You tell me, I used to want to go.

You never took me to the airport. Or you did, but you’d stay in the car and hug me goodbye through the rolled-down passenger side window. I’d step back, and you’d roll it back up, and I’d squint through the tint for a face to give a cheap smile to—an ‘it will be better’ smile, only one side of my lips curled up, the other pretending to droop. You would go home and fold the patterned quilt on my bed into a neat square, and I would look through SkyMall, stopping on ads with beds and girls, folding the pages over so they were just ads of girls. You wanted me to call when I landed. I called when I got home. I was always careful to not use the word “home.”

But now you’re here, with a hand on one strap of my duffel, reading me the record locator. “Your ticket says its 65 there?” It says that beside a half-penciled in Sudoku board, half scratched out. I don’t know who started the game. I do not envision myself getting bored enough to finish it. You repeat, “65 degrees.” I have room in my bag for my coat, but I keep it on. The strap of the duffel pulls on your arm, and your back starts to bend over, like the flat brim on the hat I forgot to pack. 

“You must be so excited to go.” This is the third iteration. You’re convincing yourself of that now. You know that, and I know that, but it’s more comfortable if we pretend to be mutually ignorant so I nod and you scan the tickets for absent ETAs and seat numbers and other uninteresting facts good for prodding silence off, like a slinky that keeps stopping one step below. My baggage tag prints and I fix it around the vacant strap loosely. You and Dad met on a plane. He vacations without you.

“Junior year was fun.” You think of the non-secret things you haven’t told anyone in the family—a crooked elm by a stop sign you peed behind, a boy who never kissed—and settle on one you will share, but then we’ve backed away from “junior year” and you just lay a hand on my shoulder, by my collar. Your fingers are swollen. You withdraw your hand, or I shirk it off. Either way it tickled.

I’ll text when I’m in Chicago. Text when I’m in San Fran. Call when I’m in Berkeley. I may wash my hands first. I will forget I stuffed a bag of m and m’s in my backpacks water-bottle holder.

Love you is much easier to say than miss you, so I say the former and hear the latter. I do think about what I’ll miss: free Excedrin, my towel-rack, the excuse for not meeting people of having to stay-in. It’s implicit you’re in there somewhere. I’ll maintain not being able to say so explicitly is hereditary. If I have kids, I hope there will be other junior year stories I don’t tell them and ma.

Through Chicago, back to California.

Woody Guthrie And Leadbelly

We talked a lot in this class about the experience of travelling across country. The repetitive gas stations, the monochrome highway markers, Main Streets with pedestrian crossings. So much of what we sang about is in those trips, somewhere between the monotony and the vague sense of direction and the cycling back.

The project below, based off of Roll on Columbia attempted to capture this experience. 

For Leadbelly, I focused on Goodnight Irene, and the idea of interaction being confined to dream. The idea of loss permeates the song, the unapproachability of those we've known and now miss haunting the narrator. For this project, I tried to capture this sense of incompleteness.

Guthrie:

We’re pushing west to Uncle Kevin’s and night is settling in. Shimmering shadows run along the car, roadsigns get caught in our headlights, and Dad’s foot hugs the break as illusory dear dart in front of the hood. Mom was reading, but now she’s asleep. The road slips by. Dad doesn’t know I’m awake. I offer an occasional fake snore to indicate I’m following orders. “Sleep on the way there,” as impossible a dictation as “have fun when we’re there.”

                Kevin broke ground along a creek. His house is hyrdro-electric powered. He does not own a TV. Dad says this is a good thing, but Dad watches Bloomberg every morning. Kevin’s kids are spending Christmas with their Mom. She lets them watch Saturday morning cartoons; Ken can sing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme these days.

                Kevin has started cooking. That’s what Dad says. I think about the burger we had at a roadside place with signed college football Jerseys and the wearniness about not being able to sleep sets in.

                Earlier we were playing trivia. “What’s the capitol of Oregon?” “Name five states that get tornados.” “Name three rivers.” “Which two people did Thomas Jefferson send west?” I could answer most of them. We stopped at a farmhouse where some settler did something on account of some ordinance, but all I got was that his wife made butter in a rotting churn and days must have been, for her, as long as the sky. There was a reenactment of his life, but they left out that he was killed by a Cheyenne chief. Time to “push on” Dad said and we pulled off at a gravel road with a wilting chain link fence and saw a mass grave from a massacre, a trench in the ground like at unrenovated men’s room. One car pulled in behind us as we got out, but they stayed in the car and just asked directions.

                It’s been five or six hours since and I’ve run through the States song at least five times completely since the last fake snore.

                “Dad,” I say and he takes a second to respond.

                “What Benny?”

                “When are we stopping next?”

                “Do you have to go to the bathroom?”

                “No, I just want to know.”

                “Not until we get there. Now get some sleep.”

                “Dad?”

                “Benny what’d I say?”

                “When will Ken and Sarah get our presents?”

                “Go to sleep.”

                The road keeps coming like toilet paper on a roll, and Wyoming burns by on top of the reflection of my nose which only goes away if I pull back from the window. Someone had to carve this road, I’m thinking, but it’s so endlessly boring. The seat is sticking to my legs and Sophie’s head digs into my shoulder. 

Rolling on west in pursuit of a setting sun, waiting to wake up, lapped.



Leadbelly:

Secret Spot

You sat, picking at your unplucked unibrow, hair knotted in a bun. The first days of summer were starting to occupy Jon and my secret spot, and we watched the shadow of the setting sun creeping away from the stone wall behind us that grandpa had built with his dad. You nestled against the granite shingles and placed an arm around me, forcing my head onto your shoulder. Then you threw the blanket over both of us, pinning it beneath your outstretched feet and draping the other end over your taller head. Submerged, I pulled on a few stems of the few stems of grass that remained amidst the rocky ground. "Hold me, hold me" you mourned. I wanted to say something, anything sweet, but words seemed idol to what I wanted to express. Your hand began to stroke my head. I squinted to see if doing so would permit me to see better in our dark cave. I could see the silhouette of your nose, but, after a few seconds of staring, it saturated with the dark behind it, and it felt like I was alone. The perking dew smelled like cheap cologne, but I did not even know what that even was yet. Jimmy had told me, when he shared my room at the funeral, and had started to tremble beneath my quilt you had put on my bed, which he was borrowing.

I thought of Jonas you carried me back to the old house, finally to be sold, and I always guessed you did too. I couldn't block him from my memories. He hadn't been gone long enough.

 I still see him in my dreams.

Week 7: Mississippi John Hurt

For this week, I focused on Louis Collins. My return to writing inspired by murder ballads went better than my initial attempt. Instead of trying to capture theme, I tried to capture mood. I found the relation of the blame placed on Louis Collins in the first and last verse to be an interesting inclusion in a song mourning his death, and I tried to capture the relationship between such blame and sadness.

                                        *                                    *                                   *

What sticks are the diptychs. The truism that life mirrors death, two panels, familiar, belonging, an imposed line revealing which way to look, which is which, that a lot rests on differences, that all change requires an unchanging part and some ordered pair of opposites, pivoting like a compass, making spiral circles on parallel lines and square grids.

Right: Phantom backpacks and suspenders digging into shoulders, a nudge and a pale finger in the face with a briefcase, “don’t disappoint” traversed to “you’re a disappointment.” A flinch, an apologetic hand on the back, tapping.

Left: Patted caskets, an accessed wrinkled expression, don’t cry, he was old, don’t cry, he was old enough.

Right: Stargazing under blankets, split-finger grips, staying in my room when the doorbell rings.

Left: Knocking knees on sludged about-faces, trods up aisles, uncles’ heavy colognes.

Right: Sucking it up and staying put under the quilt when one-eyed monsters scratch beneath the mattress, springs played, sonorous.

Left: A short drive to a plot in a checkerboard of plots, sprinkling shoveled clay, brusque breaths, lowering it down , mind stuck to the flight out, peeling like the loosened edge of a bed-side poster.

Right: A dropped can-of-corn fly ball, a ballpoint pen-signed failed test, weight gaining programs, forks feathering over lentil mounds and burgers eaten clean of the bun.

Left: Catering checks, and served condolences. He was good. He was great. He lived for a while. I knew him before you did.  

Right: Transplanting tomatoes, brewing bacterial fertilizer, feet poxed in Pete’s Moss, him admonishing me for running them under the hose, like a sissy.

Left: Sliding out of socks. Who will do the laundry? Cupped hands, hand splashed-faces, drying skin plucked at, like tickle-times.

It’s inevitable. Incessant. The flipping of stapled pages in a breeze. Right to left, left to right. Two steps forward, always the chance of a shove back. 

Take this. I’m in a car, three months later, alone on a run for eggs, rearview-mirror adjusted, and I reach for a CD on his seat, and he’s there with me. Set the side-views right, blink your turns, let the wheel run between your fingers as the car straightens. Speed up. Slow down. Brake.

His hair is parted, and mine is parted, I’m rolled forward in the seat, he’s hunched over. His hand plays drums on the partition cupholder, and he’s out of synch. Sulfuric smell and soil adhere to the underside of his fingernails and we breeze by auburn no trespassing signs, staked on street corners, in dead and bare oak trees, eye-level. He tilts in on my left turn, and I scoot over abruptly, hoping to avoid a shifted coffee spill. Scalding hot above my knee, where he used to spider-bite. “Come on.” There’s no response. “Come on.”

“Come on, you shit, come on.”

I dart my eyes from the road to the passenger seat and it’s empty, but I swear the headrest is still impressed, like tomato-stake holes, like corduroy patterns in heads pulled up from laps. 

The eggs shift in the back seat, and I hope they don’t fall. He never told me where to get the car serviced and cleaned.

 The voice-fading outro of a song: “You’ll be fine, you’ll be fine, you’ll be.”

Project 6: British Ballads

For my project this week I tried to incorporate both stories contained in "Down by the Sally Garden." I felt the two verses did not fully cohere, laced together by mood, repetition of form, and in recorded versions by musical accompaniment, rather than by meaning. In an attempt to mirror this, I decided to bifurcate the two halves in my story. My weaving together of the two halves was more thematic than intended, but in tying a larger narrative about life to one about first attempts at love I noticed some implicit connections between the two. I hope those translated.

One late May, before I was old enough for Sleep-aways and summer school, Grandma and I camped on her cement patio and poached the caps from the second wave of blossoms on her Magnolia, hours prematurely. She could tell when one was ready to bloom, recognizing the ripples and white stretch marks in browning caps. With more gentle fingers, she demonstrated how to properly cap-pluck—a quick screwing of pinched thumbs and pointers and a gentle tug up, like unravelling a curled hose—and her flower popped open, like the spray in slow motion stills of pipette dropped, disturbed water. My first attempts were brusque. “Take it slow,” Grandma urged.  Still, the buds tugged with the shell, and severed from their bases, or from the branch entirely. Grandma assured this would all be redeemed; eventually I’d coax a cap gently enough for the pink flowers to unfurl, still attached. I did not get there that afternoon. She strung the husked, clamped flowers from the failed attempts with old dental floss and made a necklace with a day long life-span, never seen by me again. Necklaces and flowers demanded girls, so she wore it. In the afternoon, the strung flowers crippled, and Grandma needed to refresh her false-teeth. She led me inside. Her house smelled of potpourri. We ate deli-bought mashed potatoes, on her couch.

The first first-date I ever went on, I remembered the delicate moments when Grandma guided me with her hands, and suggested this activity. The girl was over first-kisses at RomComs, a veteran of sunset smooching, an apostate of wineless pasta dinners and symmetric end-bitten ciabatta rolls. This was sweet and unique. It had been a dry April, but the Swayze Park Bradford Pear buds were plump, ripe. At the first group of trees, I pointed out appropriate buds. Her strokes were terse, and the first few ripped from the tree. I had lots of success. The flowers did not spring open like those on Magnolias, but they smudged out with the push of a thumb. I was too afraid to broach our distance and teach her the proper method, with my fingers piloting hers. She grew restless and laid a hand on my shoulder. She told me some people joked the buds smelled inappropriate, and her lips peeled into a slight smile. I pretended to agree. I pecked her cheek at her door. She giggled, and I blushed.  We made out the next Sunday when I was prepared with Listerine. She told me to reign in my tongue.

We held pasty hands in public and trite secrets spilled from my sore lips during on-top-of-the-blankets cuddling, my upper back perched on my futon armrest, my hands locked-in and fingers revived. Certain secrets that betrayed callowness were off-limits: that she was my first kiss went unspoken, voice-recordings pre-voice-drop were sheathed, the source of my first date unrevealed. Most everything else was unguarded and escaped. “I have scars on my upper right thigh from play sword-fighting with a fireplace poker.” “I always hung up without reciprocating Grandma’s love yous.” “Sometimes, when you dig your head into the crease between my shoulder and chest, and tickle me with your breath, I think I may grow to love you someday.” She would exhale to alert me she was listening, spiraling a sympathetic finger, from below, on my scapula. Usually I slipped into her hairline crease, wondering at her roots, anticipating a verbal response. After a few breaths, she would find words. “How old were you?” “She knew you loved her—some things are implicit.” Sometimes she was more pointed. “Take it slow.”  She repeated herself my first time. The semester sped to an end.

We were together seven weeks; summer came, she was respectful but bored, friends had me know relationships were unwieldy to carry on Saturdays at beaches across the country…we centrifuged away from each other, and did not care to stop spinning. I spent my summer weekends loading pickups of kitsch lingering in Grandma’s basement, like pear skins stuck on blender-blades. We gutted the place in a few weeks.

I had my first driving lesson on her gravel driveway. The car wobbled in a ditch, by some transplanted magnolias, and boxes shifted in the back of a pickup. I floored the break and one box titled forward, its contents oozing out in waves. Dad told me to leave it be, and he shifted into the driver’s seat and led us on the highway fast-lane to the dump. It was my job to throw things out. Thirty-gallon bags, boxes brimming with desk-lamps and tissue boxes and brochures. The contents of the empty box, disappointing unfounded expectations: packets of tree-shaped air-freshener, a flattened wreath, an alphabet-bead necklace spelling “love” from my sister, dental floss.