On Beyond Lyrics
--Joel's Musing
There's a fair sized wad of songwriters haunting the green room who are stellar at prose as well as lyric writing. Joel Mabus is one whose website musings I have always liked. Recently, this amazing Michigan songwriter read my odd views of Oh Susanna (Whither Zither #95) and was moved to email a few of his own takes on the meaning of the song. My angle was, in part, that this was a deep song about the sorrows of romantic empathy-over-the-top, as perceived by a swain breakfasting in Pascagoula while thinking of his Shreveport sweetheart. Part of Joel's email:
...Here's a complication you may have not considered. "I come from Alabama" means perhaps "I was raised in Alabama" just as I would say I come from Illinois, though I haven't lived there in years.... SO he could be anywhere south of his destination in Louisiana. And if he were on board a steam ship in the Gulf of Mexico he could indeed be heading to New Orleans to see Susanna. If she lived in the French Quarter (which, as we know from recent flooding is built on higher ground) she could even come down the hill [Joel is referring to Foster's "I dreamed I saw Susanna, a-comin' down the hill"] to the levee to meet him...
Joel eventually summarizes:
So we have an escaped or freed slave, gone by boat to Mexico where he is planning his return raid to Louisiana to free his love (or wife) from slavery, meanwhile making his living playing a banjo in a cantina, saving his pesos for a steamer passage, singing his happy-yet-forlorn song to revelers.
Then he writes a whole second interpretation, featuring a brilliant observation about the buckwheat verse. I don't know how I could have missed this:
Susanna also suffers from painful gut-wrenching celiac disease, hence the gluten-free all-buckwheat cake and the tear in her eye.
The next day this came from Joel, returning to his role as lyricist:
O I come from Minnesota
With a zither on my lap
I'm driving to da U.P.
And I sure could use a map
It snowed all night the day I left,
The pavement it was wet
The sun come out, it turned to slush -
Sloppy? Ya, you bet!Oh Susanna, don't you give a crap?
I come from Minnesota
With a zither on my lap!I had a dream the udder night;
I tell you what I saw -
Susanna on a snowmobile
In a Woolrich MackinawShe had a pasty in her hand
And drinkin' a Labatt
I says, "I'm comin' from da north,
So save me some o' dat!Oh Susanna, don't you give a crap?
I come from Minnesota
With a zither on my lap! (©2005 J. Mabus)
Then, the next day:
I'm going to make this a writing exercise for my songwriting class next year. One day will be given to writing a new Oh Susanna with the 4 crucial elements:
1 Come from... (4 syllable places preferred) with an accessory...
2 Weather/journey elements
3 Dream verse
4 A plea for Susanna not to do something
Oh I come from Cincinnati
with a lap steel on a table
And I'm going to Honolulu --
someday if I'm able.
Oh I come from East St. Louis
with a pistol in my purse
And if you try to stop me
then you're gonna need a nurse
Oh I come from Sears & Roebuck
with a TV in my trunk
It's so much fun to shoplift
when you're just a little drunk
Have a look at Joel's website (see URL), for lyric and non-lyric words. Click on "Joel Speaks" for the latter.
--Rob's Mystery
Another multitasking pal who pops up often in Whither Zithers is Rob Lopresti of Bellingham WA. Rob is not only a fine songwriter, but an award winning mystery author. He has over thirty published short mysteries to his credit, appearing in various collections and mystery magazines. And now Rob has a book: Such a Killing Crime.
If there were ever a mystery novel to be at the top of a folkie's required reading list, this would be it. Such a Killing Crime, a "folk noir mystery", takes place in the variously subcultured Greenwich Village of 1963. The book has a fine and unexpected plot and very believable characters, but what makes it all work for me is the attention to period detail.
As Rob is a reference librarian and the Department Head of Reference and Instruction at Western Washington University in Bellingham, you might expect to find his book historically accurate, and it is indeed, but what makes it work so well is that this is not accomplished pedantically. Though it seems that Rob even consulted weather tables for that time and locale, as well as descriptions of the politics, pop whims, talking styles, and so forth, these are applied so deftly that you only come to this conclusion after analytical reflection. I'll bet thousands of ready factoids were left idling on Rob's sidestreets, never merging into the final avenue of his novel.
The overall effect of this delicate weaving of fictional story and factual background creates not only a marvelous sense of place but a solid sense of time too. The book is, as a result, believable to a spectacular degree. True characters who were there at the time, like Dave Van Ronk, Tom Paxton, and Phil Ochs, make cameo appearances alongside Rob's fictional cast, but like the unobtrusive details of the scene, they appear naturally and comfortably.
Lopresti skillfully nestles the showbizzy, romantic, and dark plotline of Such A Killing Crime smack dab in the vortex of the dying beatnik phase, the approaching hippie surge, and the blossoming folk and singer/songwriter movement, with organized crime and the inevitable tavern underworld thrown in for more dashes of color. Two strums up.
Joel Mabus' home page:
www.joelmabus.com/
Rob Lopresti's home page:
www.nas.com/~lopresti/
Such A Killing Crime by Robert Lopresti,
262 pp., published by Kearney Street Books, August 2005. Can be
ordered directly from the publisher at:
kearneystreetbooks.com/index.html
or via your local mystery bookstore.
My thanks to Joel Mabus and Rob Lopresti
for making this episode possible.