Oh Susannah Susie Sue
In Whither Zither for September, 2005, I talked about the Stephen Foster song "Oh Susannah," giving my own long convoluted interpretation of what I thought Foster may have meant by his lyrics. In WZ for November, I passed along a showstopping interpretation of the song by Michigan songwriter Joel Mabus, which included the possibility that "Susannah also suffers from painful gut-wrenching celiac disease, hence the gluten-free all-buckwheat cake and the tear in her eye."
As of the end of February 2006, I'm still receiving emails about "Oh Susannah," some funny, some serious, all interesting. In a marvelously painted picture of a transformation of her interpretation of "Oh Susannah," Bellingham Washington songwriter Fl!p Breskin wrote the following:
Chord choices and accompaniment can transform the meaning of words. "Susannah" is my icon for that...
When I was a kid I loved the song - a bouncy and exciting as a ride in the back seat of an old Plymouth in a hurry on a gravel road with potholes. I had a clear image of Susannah. She was a chubby white girl with freckles, maybe 8 years old, with her hair tied back in pigtails so tightly that it pulled the skin at the corners of her eyes. She was running down the hill with those braids flapping in the wind, with crumbs (and even some chunks) of buckwheat cake flying in all directions. The nonsense was just nonsense. The song was just fun.
When I was about 19, I heard James Taylor sing Susannah on his first album. The world just stopped. I wanted to burst into tears. I want to now, just remembering. He had something NEW to say about that song, at least for me. All those major 7ths and plaintive suspensions. The tenderness.
Suddenly, I got it! Susannah was black, and BEAUTIFUL. Slender and sad and worried, REAL, going about her daily life but thinking always of the singer (lover? husband? father? sister? mother? child?) sold away, lost, and longing for her too. She's coming down that hill, and they both know where every bush and tree on that hill is, just where the little flowers poke their heads up in the
springtime. It's home. And she has the taste of home on her lips, and on her breath. Did they grow that buckwheat?"It rained all night the day I left,
The weather it was dry."A break in the summer drought; everything washed clean.
"The sun so hot, I froze to death."
No matter what the weather does, I can't shake the cold terror at the bone about what might have happened to you while I've been gone all this time. And of what might happen to me as I try again today to find my way home past all these strangers."Susannah, don't you cry."
All I can offer is that I'm coming as fast as I can. I'm sneaking my way across the land, hiding behind this banjo, pretending just to be a harmless musician. Amusing the white people, looking cute. With a subtext for my own people to hear. Maybe someone has news of her. And, I want to imagine her smiling, not with those helpless tears trickling down her cheeks, as they do down mine...
It's almost unbelievable how the presentation of a song -- its chord choices and accompaniment, as Fl!p says, but also its phrasing, tempo, and so forth -- can completely change the meaning of a song's words, particularly if the song in question has lyrics as ambiguous but evocative as those of "Oh Susannah." As Fl!p has captured, if you consider her first interpretation along with her more recent one, this song is capable of having both a feeling of bottomless sorrow and a feeling of boundless joy.
But many if not most songs have enough wiggle-room emotionally to allow for great swings of interpretation. I would think that only very specific songs -- like "Happy Birthday" -- would thwart an individual slant of delivery. Then again, have a listen to Marilyn Monroe singing it to JFK, and even "Happy Birthday" takes on an entirely new life. It's downloadable as an mp3 at:
http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/Stage/4209/mm/birthday.html
One of the marvels of a song as a work of art is that it requires
a performance to be grokked. And since "performance"
is an art in itself, a song has at least TWO layers of artistic
creation involved, often by at least two different artists (often
not only the songwriter and singer, but arrangers, instrumentalists,
conductors...) This isn't unique to songs, of course; it's also
true of the dance, theater, and other performance arts.
Maybe it's just because I'm involved with songs daily in my job, but I feel that with songs at least, this reinterpretation goes on day after day in shower stalls, shopping malls and union halls all across the world. When you sing "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries," to celebrate winning the lottery, you give it a different spin than when you sing it having just lost your favorite hassock to the teeth of your brother's dog. Often I've heard folk DJs play three or four renditions of the very same song in a row, for the sake of just such comparisons.
Everyone has favorite songs on their list, but I would guess that everyone has even more favorite -- and unfavorite -- RENDITIONS of those songs on an equally important list. As a matter of fact, I would guess that the majority of us would rather hear our LEAST favorite song sung by our MOST favorite singer than our MOST favorite song sung by our LEAST favorite singer.
I've taken a bit of liberty with Fl!p's point, which she introduced as being about "Chord choices and accompaniment," and expanded it to include vocal interpretation, but it's all part of the beyond-basic-melody-and-lyric aspect of song presentation. And I doubt any of my observations here are news to anyone. But Fl!p's extreme and heartfelt experience with her changing perception of "Oh Susannah," and her passionate explanation of it, reminded me that new interpretation is responsible for keeping the same old songs interesting, and in a big way, that's what folk music is all about.
My most sincere thanks to songwriter and pal Fl!p Breskin, who does spell her name with an exclamation point, though not in her URL, which is: