Week 4: Oh Mary, Don't You Weep

This week, we continue with our theme of spirituals and work songs with a focus on "Oh Mary, Don't You Weep." This theme was particularly present in my daily life because of the kick off of a lot of Free Speech Movement 50th anniversary events -- Visitor and Parent Services is part of the Office of Public Affairs so we are very involved in promoting it.

One of the events this week was the concert of songs from the Civil Rights Movement by the University Chorus and the Gospel Choir on Sproul Plaza. There was one song that they sang ... I can't remember what it was called but the general idea was about suffering and how much longer they had to endure it. It reminded me quite strongly of "Oh Mary, Don't You Weep." I'll try to email someone from the choruses to see if they have a setlist.

I really like how upbeat the songs are -- this takes me back to the quote I pulled from the reading: "The music was explaining the history as the history was explaining the music." As these people are working, suffering, they are singing. This singing is a better and richer documentation of the time period than any history book.

I really like the Leadbelly version of "Oh Mary." It has almost a lullaby sound to it... reminds me of that children's song "Hush, Little Baby." I listened to that version probably about 10 times. It made me smile. The John Hurt version of it is similar melodically but not as upbeat as the Lead Belly version... it conveys a little more gravity. 

The Gomorrans version is pretty cool too -- a little more modern, very indie feel to it -- kind of a hipster thing to do. Goes to show how these songs persevere through history. I could probably imagine hearing that version on the radio. 

As for the biblical references, they make me appreciate the meaning of the song a little bit more, but I didn't really grow up with the bible so that meaning is not as rich. Nominally, I am Serbian Christian Orthodox, but I moved around a lot and church wasn't a part of our lives beyond just acknowledging that there is something up there. My family goes to church on major religious holidays but this is not nearly enough to appreciate all the symbolism and depth of the biblical references.   

Week 3: Work Songs and Spirituals

This week we got a whole bunch of music to listen to. It exposed me to a whole realm of music that I'd never heard before, as well as different renditions of songs that I had heard before.

A common theme of many of these songs is "going home" and what happens when it's all over... "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," "Since I've Laid My Burden Down"... which is what inspired my art for the week. The general sense of a better future life.

"Since I've Laid My Burden Down" was my favorite song of the week: there was something about it that really resonated inside me... Not sure what or why...

In one of the YouTube videos Tony posted, someone said that "a moan turned into a song." I found that to be symbolic. Despite the conditions and the context in which they were sung (the cause of the moan), there is a positive mood to all the songs.  The songs were a way to persevere and an effort to make the work they had to do easier. The ability to do this is arguably one of the most impressive things about all of these songs (again with the positive psych).

Of course, not all the songs were like that. For example, "Sometimes I Feel Like a Moteherless Child" reflects more closely what Leroi Jones was talking about when he explained that Africans were brought to the US to be slaves where their culture and their basic human rights were completely disregarded.

Yet all the songs revealed quite a bit about the history. As Leroi Jones puts it, "the music was an orchestrated, vocalized, hummed, chanted, blown, beaten, scatted, corollary confirmation of history ... The music was explaining the history as the history was explaining the music."

Below is the artwork from last week:

Week 2: You Are My Sunshine

The theme this week was "You Are My Sunshine," recorded by Jimmie Davis in 1940. Jimmie Davis was the governor of Louisiana. His first wife was Alvern Adams, who was by his side while he was in office, but passed away in 1967. I'd like to think that he's singing "You Are My Sunshine" to her following her death, although the dates don't really make sense, nor does the mood of the song. The version that is on the Box would suit that idea much better.

He later married Anna Carter Gordon, who was in the Chuck Wagon Gang Gospel Choir.

I also listened to the Ollie Gilbert version of the song and the differences were striking - while Jimmie Davis' version was more melodic and more rhythmic, Ollie Gilbert's version is more raw... she seems to be more upset than Jimmie Davis. He seems to be singing about the hypothetical situation, while she is in the reality. Sort of goes back to the point I made last week about how regardless of how you sing the song, as long as you have the passion, the emotion will come through.

I never thought about the idea that the song is about place. Having moved around quite a bit, I struggle with identifying a place that I could feel so strongly about. Whenever I try to think of one, the only thing that comes to mind is my family. I guess my sunshine is wherever my family is.

The reading this week was two forewords by Alan Lomax, who was a renown ethnomusicologists and a big collector of folk music, as well as a passage by Charles and Ruth Seeger who were musicologists and parents of Pete Seeger. My favorite part of the reading was in the first foreword by Alan Lomax, where he describes the folk song as a "continuum of performances, each one varying in great or slight degree, and thus it grows as it lives, acquiring fresh material or losing bits of the old and spawning variant forms, which continue to evolve."

What a beautiful way of putting it... It's almost like a snowball effect, where one person's interpretation inspires the next person and so on.

But what I found especially interesting is a few pages later, when describing how to sing he says "it is most important to sing and especially to try to feel these songs as they were intended to be sung or felt." Are these two sentences not somewhat contradictory?

I find them contradictory in two ways. First, if there is this pile up of variations of folk songs, then how do we know "how they were intended to be sung or felt?" Second, if everyone is singing with the same way, where does the variation come in?

Below is my artwork for the week:

Week 1: Down in the Valley

This was the first week of Visual Studies 185X and the theme was "Down in the Valley," a song that was recorded by everyone from Burt Ives to little girls with musical bells.

My favorite version of the song is the one by Solomon Burke that Tony posted on his blog. Songs that are classics and that have a lot of meaning are meaningful regardless of the musical interpretation. "Down in the Valley" is a sad song, but it doesn't necessarily have to be performed as a ballad for that sadness to be conveyed. Passion seems to be the only necessity. Solomon Burke clearly has it.

Here was my piece of art for the week:

Not very artistically sophisticated, but I had fun making it.

I've been doing a lot of research on positive psychology so that was really the reason why I drew what I did in the way that I did. Apparently, if you change the way you think (ie think positively) you become happier. Sounds easier said than done. But what if the person singing the song wasn't in a valley in the negative sense of the word (an emotional rut, an inescapable place, somewhere he didn't want to be?) What if he was in the valley relaxing? What if things were actually pretty good for him? His letter was coming, the love of his life is committed to him, nothing was really wrong, all he had to do was be patient. Nothing in the song really suggests it, but that's the scenario I was trying to depict.

In class, Tony asked what the river represented... I still don't know. I kind of like the idea of it representing the flow of time... everything will eventually pass... how temporary everything in life is. The river itself is permanent, but the water in it keeps moving.