by Peter Berryman
Dream, Drama, and Device
I dreamed the other night that I was at a concert, sitting right in front at a little dark red table. The four piece acoustic band was on a low stage, very close to me but leaving four feet of dance floor between us. They were dressed like Walt Disney's most inspired hallucination of Gypsy troubadours but in extra lacy and beaded detail, fabulously lit by spotlights, footlights, candles, kerosene lanterns, neon tubes. The room was otherwise in bottomless darkness with primary colored accents looming in the gloom, an exterior-enamel theme-park warehouse full of croquet balls and corndog wagons.
I can't remember the music specifically but the effect was of hurdy gurdies and button boxes and hammer dulcimers, tubas, mandolins, all wacky like a Jug Band in the Dali gazebo. Onto the dance floor came three or four cloggers wearing great Carmen Miranda hats in the shape of towering surreal vegetable and mushroom amalgamations. These dancers were really old, like in their late 90s, and danced grimly but with determination. I remember thinking that they were not mindlessly dancing but were pursuing some hot artistic vision. Their huffing and puffing grainy old faces were inches from me, rosy brown and tan. They looked great. My peripheral vision was dazzled by such extras as a toy train chugging toward me from under the stage, large like those glorious German garden railway trains that snake around the poinsettias at Madison's Olbrich Park just before Xmas. Overall it felt like being in the middle of the Moulin Rouge movie with a high fever, or attending the gala opening of an underground fungal funhouse run by Heronymous Bosch and Pee Wee Herman.
I was VERY impressed. I woke up thinking this phantasm was an advisory that there was much more to be done in the area of creativity than I was currently accomplishing in my life. I drove straight to the dollar store and bought supplies to hang beads from a lampshade. This helped but I don't think I'm deeply artified yet. Such things happen bead by bead.
Anyway I think in part this dream was inspired by a recent local project in which my musical partner Lou and I recently participated, involving bringing our songs into a theatrical setting and having them dramatized by four professional actors. This was a thrilling experience for us. Songwriting, like playwrighting, is a very peculiar art, in that the finished product isn't the FINISHED-finished product, and depends upon another layer of art -- performance -- for its ultimate existence.
Our friend Tim White, of the Mt. Horeb Historical Society and points north, suggested on his way out of the theater that I write a few Whithery Zithery words on what it feels like for a songwriting bloke to sit in the audience while someone else sings his stuff.
Lou and I can only speak for ourselves, but usually, and very much in this project, we absolutely love to hear someone else perform our songs. The concept of the "persona" is one of the most interesting aspects of songwriting, and the interpretation of a song by a good dramatic artist can add so much, in so many ways, to this persona. The outline of the character can be reshaped by the performance to such an extent that the meaning of the song is amplified or even fundamentally changed.
As I've mentioned in other Whither Zithers, the persona of a song is the character ostensibly singing it. Sometimes -- and with singer/songwriters these days, quite often -- there is no real persona, or maybe I should say the persona and the singer are the same character. That's fine; that's one way to write. But in many genres of music this style is less common, as the singer assumes a role different from their actual personality when he/she sings a song. In musical theater, this is almost always the case. The performers are playing a part, and the songs are there to contribute to the marvelous gimmick.
But many popular and folk songs are constructed with a distinct persona in mind too. Sometimes the character is not very developed, but is clearly defined, as in the traditional ballad Barbara Allen:
"In Scarlet Town, where I was born
There was a fair maid dwelling..."
Now, this song starts out in the first person: "...where I was born." But for the entire rest of the song, it's written in the third person ("There was a fair maid dwelling..."). The narrator introduces himself then gets on with the story. If you were to sing this song dramatically, maybe you'd pretend you were an old fart leaning up against a fencepost, telling the story to a young lad. The main persona in this song is the narrator, not the protagonists of the story, Barbara Allen and Sweet William.
So it can get complicated. Sometimes a song will contain layers of personae, like the spectacular Officer Krupke song in West Side Story, which turns out to be various actors being various characters imitating consecutively various cops and social workers. Personae within personae. Phew.
Whole books could be written on the uses of this device in songwriting. And as one who has the singing and acting skills of linoleum, I've always loved hearing others drag the persona of a song of ours onto the tarmac and give it the full treatment. Sometimes it does happen that a singer's interpretation of a character is agonizingly wrong in the writer's opinion, but that is very rare.
But here's a recurring problem: When listening to a song you have written and sung yourself, you can NOT listen to someone else singing it without flexing all your vocal muscles along with every syllable. I leave the theater with my neck and throat more worn out than if I had been on stage myself. But I like to think I'm all the while learning new ways of dramatizing our own stuff, from the pros. Some day we'll find a 90 year old dance trio in eggplant fedoras and put on a real drama ourselves there by the poinsettia choo choo.