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:
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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:
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