I Go, Yugo, We All Go
You know how it is that you buy a used fuchsia Yugo and suddenly it seems like everyone's driving used fuchsia Yugos? Two good friends of mine died recently and for a while everywhere I looked there was a death reference.
Just last night (Saturday, Oct. 21) I watched another five minute episode of the PBS show Star Gazer (formerly Star Hustler) starring Jack Horkheimer. This former Wisconsinite is one of the Great Fascinators. He makes looking up as thrilling as the late crock hunter Steve Irwin made looking down. (Incidentally, Horkheimer's show is celebrating its thirtieth birthday on November 4; send him a card!) On Saturday's show, he was talking about the Halloween night sky:
"To many peoples long ago, when the Pleiades reached their highest point at midnight, which happens every year around this time, it was a signal that this was the time of the year to honor the dead."
So, being a music bloke, right now it feels doubly appropriate to continue thinking about death and music -- folk music in particular -- which already has preoccupied me for a few days.
I remember back in the 60s suddenly realizing that almost all the movies I had seen in the last five years or so ended in death: Last Tango in Paris, Easy Rider, They Shoot Horses Don't They, Bonnie and Clyde, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Midnight Cowboy, the Wild Bunch, Dr Strangelove, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and so forth. Though this trend, which continues today, is weird, it doesn't necessarily make these movies what you might call "death movies" (except maybe for Dr. Strangelove).
The same sort of realization, though, is hitting me right now about folk songs that I usually don't think of as "death songs," like good ol' Goodnight Irene, for example. I usually wouldn't peg this -- the first huge folk hit -- as being a "suicide song," but dig these verses:
Sometimes I live in the country
Sometimes I live in the town
Sometimes I have a great notion
To jump into the river and drown
I love Irene God knows I do
I love her till the sea runs dry
If Irene ever turns her back on me
I'll take morphine and die
But you wouldn't find Goodnight Irene in the "Death Songs" chapter of Rise Up Singing, even if there were such a chapter. However when you're in the proper mood, voila, it's a death song.
Folk music in general is not as completely croak-centric as, say, some of the darker persuasions of alternate rock, with band names like Dearly Beheaded; Dropdead; Doomwatch; Morgue; Obituary; Cadaverous Condition; Coroner; Epitaph; Eternal Dirge; Funereum; Graveworm; Human Remains; Korpse, and so on for Googled page after page. And that's just their names; slog through the songlists for awhile and you'll be ready for a subscription to Life magazine. But folk and folkish music does have its terminal moments, as in such songs as:
The Worms Crawl In, half of Steven Foster's stuff, Old Blue, Darcy Farrow, Barbara Allen, Silver Dagger, Deportee, John Henry, Casey Jones, Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Run Come See Jerusalem, Ramblin' Boy, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll, Frankie and Johnny, Grandfather's Clock, Swing Down Sweet Chariot, When the Saints Go Marching In, and so forth.
The Folk Music Forum of the Encyclopedia of Death and Dying says, "Common [folk song] themes are death and its relationship to accidents, the supernatural, trains, murder, natural causes, the elements, war, suicide, and religion." Part of the reason for this may be that, for a long time, folk songs were the tabloid journalism of the day, popular because of the thrill of sensationalism.
But also -- and maybe this is part of the lure -- when it comes to the grieving so closely associated with death, your brain may actively search for death metaphors in the formal structures of music and verse to use as templates in organizing its own internal mayhem of grief. I quoted this reference found in The Healing Powers of Music by M. Giles in a Whither Zither soon after the 911 tragedy:
"Altshuler, in 1941 first suggested that a patient can be relieved of some of the symptoms caused from deep seated emotions such as grief or rage by matching their moods to music that evokes the same emotional qualities."
I love this observation, which is why I've quoted it again. It begins to explain the seemingly strange desire to listen to sad songs when you're sad. It feels more natural somehow than listening to, say, the Lawrence Welk Show to cheer yourself up on the heels of a personal loss.
Another reason folk songs about death are popular is that they give you the comfort in knowing you are not alone in your otherwise lonely feelings of grief; that these feelings have been around forever and have been felt by countless others. It's an affirmation of the legitimacy of your emotions. It's like the Billy Crystal character on Saturday Night Live who, on his lunch break, asks his buddy how he's doing. His buddy gives a long, specific, peculiar tale of woe (a birdcage fell three stories and knocked a baby's pacifier under the shoe of a ventriloquist who slipped and lost control of his dummy whose flapping jaw hit Billy's buddy in the face and broke his glasses) and Billy says "I hate that when that happens."
This Whither Zither dedicated to my pals Bran and Eric. I just realized this is the second Whither Zither in a row to mourn over lost pals; I hate that when that happens. Lighter fare next time.
Webliography:
The Healing Powers of Music by M. Giles, in The Electronic Journal of the
Virginia Music Educators Assoc.
http://www.vmea.com/
Jack Horkhemer, Star Gazer:
http://www.jackstargazer.com/
Encyclopedia of Death and Dying:
http://www.deathreference.com/