This is so cool, it deserves its own post rather than simply an update. I just realized that the Feedblitzed email version of my last post — and I presume all other Via Negativa posts from here on — contained an audio link at the end. Clicking it generated the following creepy yet delightful rendering, via Talkr.
Email subscribers will not see the above player, however. They can click on this link instead.
Geez, I don’t know. That might be too weird even for me. Here’s what it sounded like before I dubbed in the vocals:
Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly come take a walk with me
Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly come take a walk with me
When we get married some pleasure to seeHe led her over hills and valleys so deep
He led her over hills and valleys so deep
At last Pretty Polly, she began to weepOh Willie oh Willie I’m ‘fraid of your way
Willie oh Willie I’m ‘fraid of your way
All minding to ramble and lead me astrayPretty Polly, Pretty Polly you guessin’ about right
Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly you guessin’ about right
I dug on your grave two-thirds of last nightShe threw her arms around him and began for to weep
She threw her arms around him and began for to weep
At last Pretty Polly, she fell asleepHe threw the dirt over her, and turned away to go
Threw the dirt over her, and turned away to go
Down to the river where the deep water flow
(Lyrics from the Dock Boggs version, recorded in 1927 in New York City.)
Has it really been a month since I last posted a song? Here’s my not-too-polished take on the Carter Family’s first big hit, “Single Girl,” recorded by Sara and Maybelle in 1927. The lyrics are a reminder of the bad old days before widely available contraception, and obviously struck a nerve with their rural audience.
It may seem surprising that the “First Family of Country Music” should’ve found fame with a song so contrary to so-called family values. But Sara (on the left in the above photo, which I found here) might’ve been singing from experience; her marriage to bandmate A.P. Carter would founder a few years later, as the text from a PBS documentary makes clear:
A.P. was a natural born rambler, and collecting songs gave him an excuse to spend days and weeks at a time on the road. When he was home, he did precious little to help around the house, and when he went, he seldom left enough money to provide for Sara and the children. “She’d be cutting down wood, pulling mining timbers out of the mountains — and Daddy out somewhere trying to learn a song,” their son Joe recalls. “He never stopped to think what effect it might have on his family.”
Yet A.P. was not totally oblivious to the hardships that Sara endured while he was on the road, and he asked his cousin Coy Bays to help out by driving Sara around while he was away. Sara and Coy became close, and eventually they fell in love with each other. When the affair became known, Coy’s parents, Charlie and Mary Bays, decided that it would be best if they got Coy out of the valley, and the Bays family set out for California.
Crushed by Coy’s departure, Sara left A.P.’s house and moved back to Rich Valley, leaving the children with their father. In September 1936, after three years of trying to reconcile with her husband, she finally sued A.P. for divorce. He did not even show up at court to defend himself. Ralph Peer and his wife, Anita, convinced the estranged couple that while their domestic life might be in shambles, there was no reason they should not continue to play music together on a professional basis, and so the Original Carter Family continued to record new songs.
The Carters defied convention in other ways, as well. A good deal of A.P.’s “rambling” through the rural south was in the company of an African-American musical mentor named Lesley Riddle. Together they collected songs at the height of the Jim Crow era, including blues songs and black church music that the Carters would add to the county music repertoire. At the very same time, of course, street musicians whom we now think of as bluesmen were playing — and sometimes recording — tons of white dance tunes. The audiences might have been rigidly segregated, but the musicians, thank god, were not.
Welcome to the 49th edition of I and the Bird, the carnival for bloggers who love birds. I’m calling this edition — with a nod to my fellow Pennsylvanian Rob Fergus — the Wordchaser. I’m less of a birder than a bird appreciator (for street cred, I can only point to my vice-presidency in the local Audubon chapter), but I chase down poems the way a life-lister chases birds.
Past editions of I and the Bird have showcased the host’s own creativity, with sometimes extraordinary results. But this time I want to turn it around and focus on the linguistic creativity of the contributors themselves. Poems, like birds, are everywhere; it’s just a matter of training ourselves to recognize them — a metaphor here, an alliterative passage there, and something lovely dark and deep lurking just beyond. And with a little bit of editing, the English language naturally resolves into a rough iambic pentameter…
Each line in the “found poem” below is a link to the post I lifted it from. I’ve altered nothing but the punctuation, and I’ve included an audio version for those who may have trouble hearing the poetry at first. I’m hoping the excerpts will read like riddles, enticing you to click through and discover their original contexts.
Lots of good things happen unbidden. Sure they do:
A Golden-winged singing in the far field;
A chance encounter with a small flock of Cockatoos,
Little cotton balls above their legs;
Fallouts of migrants at coastal “fire-escapes;”
Antshrikes, antwrens and antbirds churring and flitting.
A Bobolink flew up out of the field and circled me,
The super nova of the forest, the gaudy Prothonotary.
I knew instantly what it was! There was no mistaking
An immature Bald Eagle in January with a broken wing.
They make the most amazing murbling noises
(Audubon would have said something like that).
The afternoon lull had set in, but we pressed on.
We spotted the lapwings again, out in the glasswort–
How high above the water the white flashes!
Who knows how they knew they were there,
Bird with bird, birds with the very air.
Red Knot, that salmon sensation, doesn’t persist;
I can’t pry them from their hidden nest.
Tomorrow perhaps. Perhaps the day after,
I will spot snipe both close and in good light,
Hundreds of ruddy turnstones, a least sandpiper,
Dendroica cerulea by sound as well as sight.
In their minds, they’re following the food,
Catching arthropods as they attempt to flee
In dewy grass, or ground on the sole of my boot.
I wanted to see the Gray-crowned Yellowthroat;
How it arrived on the window sill I know not.
It was dusk by that time and no hope of a decent photo.
The bird stretches its wings and simply lets go.
Sources: Julie Zickefoose, Thomasburg Walks, Trevor’s Birding, Living the Scientific Life, Gulf Coast Bird Observatory, Drawing the Motmot, The Birdchaser, Bell Tower Birding, Richard Guthrie, Bird Treatment and Learning Center, The Egret’s Nest, Birds Etcetera, The Hawk Owl’s Nest, Ben Cruachan Blog, The Nemesis Bird, The Flatbush Gardener, Fragments from Floyd, 10,000 Birds, Marcia Bonta, The House and other Arctic musings, lovely dark and deep, A DC Birding Blog, Cup O’ Books, Gavan Central, Tick Magnet, Antshrike’s Bird Blog, Bird Ecology Study Group, Wrenaissance Reflections, Dzonoqua’s Whistle.
The next edition of I and the Bird will appear in two weeks at A Blog Around the Clock. Send submissions to Bora: Coturnix AT gmail DOT com.
Spring is back! And they tell me that Sunday is the Earth’s birthday, too. So here’s a song for that.
It ain’t true, none of it. The yellow cat, the buck-toothed mule, the sixteen stories — all whoppers. When a man gets too big in the world, everybody tries to bring him down, that’s all. Success ain’t a crime.
Sure, I like a card game, and women, and no shame in that, unless you listen to my pa. Bastard son of a circuit preacher, that’s me. And I got the law on my side, too, because I went and bought a license for my distillery, and I sell corn cheap and in broad daylight. A lot of them moonshine boys don’t like that. My next-door neighbor’s missing an arm, and you can ask him why if you want to sing about something that’s true and packs a lesson. But if you sing about the ladies you’d best be careful, or I’ll shoot off something you’ll miss more’n an arm.
I ain’t no different than anybody else, except when I go for something, I aim to get it. Every man has a shadow as long as the sun shines. And 46 ain’t old.
There are several stories surrounding his death. J.B. Weaver gave this account, as told to him by Joe’s son. Clark was living with a woman named Chris Leger and they split up. He then began living with a McKenney woman in his store, renting his house to Chris and her new friend, the brother of Old Jim Howard. Leger and Howard then devised a plan whereby they would kill Joe and she would claim he had left the farm to her. Howard shot and killed Clark on April 22, 1886, near the back porch of the store. Howard then fled to Beattyville, where a few days later while crossing a bridge, he was stabbed to death by two men from Clay County.
Clark is buried in the family cemetery on a hill overlooking the farm at Sextons Creek.
–Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives
Old Joe Clark Ballad
Mountain ballad, about 90 stanzas, sung during World War I, and later wars by soldiers from eastern Kentucky. Early version, as sung in Virginia, printed in 1918. Joe Clark, born 1839, lived here; shiftless and rough mountaineer of that day. His enemies were legion; he was murdered in 1885. In the moonshining days of 1870s, he ran government-supervised still.
–roadside historical marker, Jct. KY 577 & 1350
Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, a district attorney blogs his cases, a schlocky Christian painter marks his territory like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and the overheard cellphone conversation of an animated mannequin makes the news.
Helena Christensen was in a state at the Chateau Marmont party. “I’m sitting here by my [bleeping] self in the lobby,” blared the tired and emotional supermodel into her cellphone. “Where are you? I had a bag with $500,000 worth of jewelry and someone took it!” Christensen’s rep says she later discovered that the bag — which actually contained a computer but no jewels — was in her car.
She must’ve been tired if she could confuse a computer with $500,000 worth of jewelry. Gosh!
This is a test of the Audio Player plugin for WordPress. (Feed and email subscribers will need to click through to the site to see the player, I think.) I’m reading a simple little poem I wrote last April, In a Nutshell.
I don’t necessarily plan to abandon Odeo just yet, but it’s been a little buggy lately and I wanted another option in case it deteriorates further. Like the wren in the poem, I don’t want to leave anything to chance.
True glove often comes to a bad end.
I have it from a reliable source — actually, several sources — that today is (or was) Valentine’s Day. How sweet. I thought I’d record a couple of love songs as a little tribute to this very special day. First, here’s an old Irish song, which I learned off Cordelia’s Dad’s first album. That’s the name of the band, Cordelia’s Dad. This is called “Poor Man’s Labor.”
Then for the women’s side of things, here’s the old Carter Family song, “Wildwood Flower,” touchingly rendered, I thought, on the Philippine mouth harp. The recording has been electronically enhanced just a little. Sing along!
My post on difficult poetry and poetry readings spawned an interesting discussion. Both Laura and Bev felt there was a strong connection between hearing a poem and understanding it, which is interesting considering how difficult it can be to grasp the meaning of a poem on first listen. Bev wrote,
The speaking is what makes it come alive for me. If I don’t understand a poem, I read it aloud two or three times. Btw, when I was working on my graduate degree in Eng. lit, I was assigned to the university’s writing tutorial services. I used to work with students who were having problems with their essays. I frequently had students bring in a poem they were supposed to write about. They wouldn’t know what to say because they didn’t understand the poem. I think they thought I’d explain it to them. Instead, I’d make them read it to me at least a couple of times — sometimes more. The first time was usually quite pathetic. Subsequent attempts were usually much better. After a couple of readings, we’d sit and discuss the poem – and most times, they’d already be starting to get the meaning. I liken the process to talking to your dog about your problems. You already know the answer, but you just have to hear it.
Ivy Alvarez stressed the importance of warming up before giving a public performance.
I think if poets are going to read their work aloud, they should practise being heard, otherwise what’s the point?
I know there’s plenty to think about while a person’s up on stage [nerves, do I gotta go pee, is my time up, why are they looking at me funny, have I got all my poems, hey, he's cute, random thoughts like that] but that’s why one has to warm-up beforehand.
I can’t help thinking that poets who give lackluster readings are just being lazy — unless, as Marly suggested, they are deliberately affecting “a toneless, mechanical sort of reading,” stemming from a “desire for the inaccessible.” Just because I’ve written a poem doesn’t mean I automatically know the best way to read it right off the bat. I thought it might be fun to record myself in three different stages of comprehension of a given poem, using the most recent thing I’ve written. If I’d saved a recording of every take, this would’ve been close to an hour long and about as exciting as listening to a guitarist practice the same riff over and over.
Probably no one will ever accuse me of a lack of enthusiasm for poetry. But you can have too much of a good thing, creating a sort of enthusiasma that makes normal breathing difficult. That’s a line I hope never to cross. But I think I may have gone a little too far with this particular recording adventure, mixing in a harmonica (my very inadequate rendering of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Eyesight for the Blind”). You can listen to the results on the poem’s new page at shadow cabinet.
By the way, in case anyone was wondering, the poem was not autobiographical. (You’ll notice I included it in the Masque section of shadow cabinet.) I chose it for this reading exercise mainly because it was short, without thinking that I’ll probably want to revise it at some point. Well, if I do, I’ll simply erase these recordings and make new ones, I guess.
__________
Speaking of evolution, Happy Darwin Day, y’all.
