Mark My Words: Music, art, and other distractions

One of the unexpected benefits of learning to play old-time music has been learning about all of these great old songs that I would never have listened to otherwise. The lyrics for many of them are fantastic - haunting, lyrical, emotional and sometimes even controversial.

And despite the language being outdated (I’ve found no mention of “shorties” yet), they still manage to get stuck on endless repeat in your head just as quickly as a modern pop song. 

An example is Wildwood Flower. If you don’t know that one, Reese Witherspoon sang it on the Walk the Line soundtrack. The words are kind of out there to begin with, and over the years, they’ve morphed into a kind of nonsense rhyme.

But today, Julie posted a link to the original lyrics (1860) on Patrick Costello’s blog. 

It turns out that Wildwood is the same story you’ve heard a thousand times in songs from all genres: “He/She left me, but I’m going to party so hard that he/she will never know how bad they hurt me.” But telling it in flowery (pun intended) language from the 1800s is so much cooler than just coming right out and saying it.

For instance, the whole first stanza could have been “I’m gonna stick some flowers in my hair.” But the beauty of the song would have been lost. Here’s the original:

“I’ll Twine ‘Mid the Ringlets” (1860)
No. 57.
Words by Maud Irving
Music Joseph Philbrick Webster, 1819-1875

1.
I’ll twine ‘mid the ringlets
  Of my raven black hair,
The lilies so pale
  And the roses so fair,
The myrtle so bright
  With an emerald hue,
And the pale aronatus
  With eyes of bright blue.

2.
I’ll sing and I’ll dance,
  My laugh shall be gay;
I’ll cease this wild weeping –
  Drive sorrow away,
Tho’ my heart is now breaking,
  He never shall know
That _his_ name made me tremble
  And my pale cheeks to glow.

3.
I’ll think of him never –
  I’ll be wildly gay,
I’ll charm ev’ry heart,
  And the crowd I will sway,
I’ll live yet to see him,
  Regret the dark hour
When he won, then neglected,
  The frail wildwood flower.

4.
He told me he loved me,
  And promis’d to love,
Trough ill and misfortune,
  All others above,
Another has won him;
  Ah, misery to tell;
He left me in silence –
  no word of farewell.

5.
He taught me to love him,
  He call’d me his flower
That blossom’d for him
  All the brighter each hour;
But I woke from my dreaming,
  My idol was clay;
My visions of love
  Have _all_ faded away.

Want to learn more? Marco has published an in-depth study of the song and its mysteries on his blog here.

“I’m so excited!”

I’m squealing like my 3-year-old because in two nights my wife and I will be jumping around to the best live band in the world - New Orleans’ own Cowboy Mouth. 

If you’re like everyone else I’ve told this week, you’re trying to act like you know who I’m talking about while searching for references in the back-left corner of your brain. Here’s the best I can do: They sang “Jenny Says.” If you don’t know that one, I can’t help you.

And if you don’t know them, you need to. They are amazing. At least they were 11 years ago when I was in grad school. They were regulars at Elbow Room in Columbia and the perfect music for Bud Lights, Beam & Cokes and Jaeger shots.

Cowboy Mouth’s ’Are You With Me?’ CD was also one of the (very few) CDs my wife and I each brought into the relationship. That may have sealed the deal for us.

We’ll see if the band still has it. And if they don’t, a head full of Bud-induced memories should do the trick for me.

I’m listening to Gene Wilder’s memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger, and loving it. Partly because his roles in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles made him a childhood hero and partly because in the audio version, Gene himself narrates.

There’s an interesting lesson in there about finding your true calling. Gene always knew he wanted to be an actor, but he thought he should be a serious one, not a comic, despite his teachers and everyone else telling him to do what he was good at - making people laugh. Eventually he met Mel Brooks and the rest was history.

But it makes me think about our tendency to play down our natural talents. How sad for the world if Gene had stayed determined to play serious roles. In hindsight, given what he accomplished, it’s amazing he didn’t see his potential path in comedy laid out before him. But at the time, he thought he was doing what was best for his future and his career.

How many of us miss our true calling because we think we’re doing the ‘right’ thing rather than the thing we’re really good at? And how do you know when you are finally pursuing your true purpose?

Maybe one way to know is that opportunities you would never have dreamed of begin to appear for you when you’re on the trail of your true calling. They certainly did for Gene Wilder. One relationship constantly leads to an opportunity with another in his memoir. Mel Brooks, for instance, was the boyfriend of one of Wilder’s co-stars on Broadway in the early days.

Where can your calling take you if you accept and follow it? Maybe, like Gene, to a world of pure imagination. 

AJBadger is compiling a thorough list of free or low-cost old-time banjo tablature at clawhammerbanjo.wordpress.com.

It’s kind of amazing when you realize just how many songs are out there. You could spend a lifetime trying to learn them all. Because of all of the choices, I find myself learning a little of this one and a little of that one, and I end up with little fragments and pieces. Almost the only song I know all the way through is ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ (though to be fair that also gives me ‘The Alphabet Song’ and ‘Baa, Baa Black Sheep’).

I imagine our great-grandparents had it comparatively easy when it came to choosing which songs to learn. They were mostly limited to what they could learn from the people around them. And those were probably the same songs they grew up with. 

Starting now, I’m going to try to change my learning style. One song at a time.

It’s the curse and the irony of the aspiring writer to want to read every how-to-write book on the market when really you should just be writing. But some of the books actually do take you closer to that place where you feel like maybe you could do it too.

I’m reading one of those now: “Ron Carlson Writes a Story,” by Ron Carlson. I’ve never read a book or short story by Carlson, but this one caught my eye at the library because of the how-to aspect. In it, Carlson goes step-by-step through his thought process as he writes a short story. He writes a sentence or two of the story, then explains how and why he got there.

Carlson writes it in a way that teaches without teaching. There’s not a lot of ‘do this, and then do this’. There aren’t many rules. It really is his thought process, and you learn by his example.

In “On Writing,” Stephen King explained his mysterious process of fiction writing. He wrote about how you go to a special place in your mind and let your imagination begin speaking to you. The stories well up from within and flow out naturally. I was left with lots of motivation, but no real answers after that one. How involved do you get? What about outlines? Do you question your imagination? What if your imagination speaks in run-on sentences?

Carlson takes King’s book to the next level. He explains how the story comes about for him (essentially the same way Stephen King described (and no outline)), but he also explains how he interprets the muse as he writes.

Maybe soon, if I can get up the nerve, I’ll stop reading long enough to interpret my own muse. Carlson definitely has pushed me one step closer.