No two people have the same experience hearing a CD. If you’re like me, you usually have one or two songs that you listen to most of the time. In creating this particular work, however, my intention was to create an integrated experience, with each song being a preparation for the next one and yet adding an emotional component to the following song that could be unconsciously felt to reverberate forward-and-back like the movements of a symphony, or the events of one’s childhood. This may not be the sanest result to reach for with songs, as each song is a symphony unto itself, each with its very own personal needs, like an individual child.
Sunshine Baby speaks to the value of being with someone you love and celebrates the idea that one is glad for the moment. Meanwhile, the middle part of the song suggests that we’re not always understood by the world, and that there is a place within each of us that can be relied on to pull us through difficult times, whether we know it or not. The song, then, is about one’s relationship to surprises in life, a good place to start on this journey, I thought.
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One hot summer, not long after I’d first learned the banjo, I met a young guitar player from South Carolina who was in upstate New York where I lived. He had the most even, solid, flatpicking style I could have imagined, and he’d sit and play anything. He made his living working on highway construction, driving those huge yellow earth-moving machines, wherever that work might take him. What fascinated me most about him was the endless stories he told about the life of his grandfather (Old Ben, as he called him), who had been a moonshiner. I based the words to this song on the character and life of that man. The melody is to an old folk song, "The Devil and the Farmer’s Wife," that I’ve never grown tired of. Old Ben, being such a quiet man, and unto himself to such an extent that some people thought he was deaf, suggests the depths that are part of us all. All songs (music and words) are metaphors for life beyond any particular lyrics. In some ways, all of us live in our mountain retreats. This needn’t keep us from openly loving our children and friends, however. Other things keep us from that. "If you harmed his kids or his wife, Old Ben could kill you," or so I was told. But the question was: how and with what? The song says, "With a fie fie diddle-i die, diddle-i diddle-i dee." From what I was told about Old Ben, he had a mystical way with people, and could change them with an attitude or a look. I don’t find this farfetched in the least. What I like most about the song, and what happens to be the underlying theme of this CD’s journey, is that he took his kids down to the sea.
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Jay Gould’s Daughter, a folk song
collected by Carl Sandburg from John Lomax, gives one a sense of
a time when the railroads were the veins of this country.
Sandburg reminds us in his American Songbag that "The Goulds
and the Vanderbilts were big names in railroading in the 1800s.
Daughters of both families found their way into railroad and hobo
songs. The ‘blind’ baggage car, with a platform, was
hooked on just back of the engine tender, and was a place bums
rode--engine crews sometimes gave them hot water. Smoke, dust and
gravel got into noses and eyes, and ground into the skin of those
riding the rods under a box car or in the trucks of a passenger
coach--loosening a hold, or going to sleep, meant death...."
The passion of most music probably comes from a sense of the preciousness of life. In the case of this song, we are reminded that death is a shadow that follows our days, and, hopefully, moves us to take life more seriously.
Child, Child is the centerpiece around which the CD expanded. The song raises the questions, “Do you feel heard in your life? Were you listened to as a child? And as much as you needed to be?” I know of no greater issue that faces humankind than this one.
I’ve found that it isn’t so easy to be authentic, open, and forthright with someone you’re close to. Sometimes to say what I feel is like leaving a comfort zone. I’ve been afraid people would think that I’m silly or weird, would not understand, or wouldn’t like me---as if lies were a better way to relate than the truth, as if being liked for who you are not is being liked. I believe finding one’s self, where one is, at heart, is the place where authentic relationship starts, to say nothing of love.
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If one reads the news about random acts of violence, cruelty, abuse, misunderstanding, and neglect; about nuclear superpowers crumbling into chaos; about hurricanes, tornadoes, killer bees, and cholesterol, one could come up with the idea that the scariest thing about life is life itself. It’s always been scary, of course, and it’s always been worth it. I’m not sure there’s any philosophy or religion in 3,500 years that has been able to successfully teach us common-sense decency or how not to be ignorant and fearful. So it is possible you could get the Black Snake Shakies on occasion, and nobody wants those for long. The wise old owl is nearby for each of us, though, if we would only but listen.
 My Homasote house. |
My father was an artist, and he built us a cardboard house ten feet from the shores of lake Canandaigua, in upstate New York. The stuff of the house was called Homasote, and was an inexpensive soft kind of cardboard about one-half inch thick. In the evenings, over coffee or a gin-and-bitters, my father and I would sit on our front porch and look out over the water watching flycatchers, cliff swallows, and gulls. Now and again he would say, "Far through the memory shines the happy hour." When I wrote this instrumental years ago, it made me think of those times. And this was the place in the album where I thought it was time for a musical interlude, before moving on. |
Ego, to me, means "title, arrogance, a pedestal one can fall off of or be knocked down from." This song is saying, "You don’t need a title. Let your hair down, pretend nothing." Think what would happen if most of us did that. The most scary things in the world may come from the pretending we do because we’ve been toxically shamed and abused, in one way or another.
From the ragtime feel of "Walk Right In," we gently move into this country song which is about having chosen the wrong person to live with for the rest of your life, and you’re glad they are leaving. I’m not going to tell you how many times I’ve made that mistake: "Love (or something like it) had a hold on me." Yet, it is possible to find the right person. I’m just not sure it’s a perfectly natural process. It might well take listening, again. What I mean, listening!
I first heard a version of "Cotton-Eyed Joe" on an old 78 rpm recording of Burl Ives, and he only sang one verse on this recording--that was the version he knew. Since then I’ve heard many other versions of the song, from Texas versions to West Virginia versions, none of which I could remember when I knew I wanted this song on the album. The song has a heart that simply belonged at this point in the journey. The first verse is the one I learned from Burl Ives, the next-to-last verse begins with a line I got from John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers, "A shoestring fiddle..." With old songs like this that grew out of the hills, verses were often made up so the song could keep going, and I’ve done the same.
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Me and Blackie.
My father taught art and shop in a boarding school I went to in Croton, New York. At that time we had an English setter, a small black and white dog with soft setter hair; my dad called her Blackie. We always had a dog and a sailboat of some kind, but this dog was my favorite of all the dogs we ever had. There was something about her style and mine that just matched in some way. She only had one little problem. Apparently, before we got her, when she was a child-dog, she got whacked by a closing door, because she would hesitate next to forever before you could get her to go through a door, no matter how open. We had left her at the boarding school in Croton while we drove back to New York City to pick up stuff of my father’s. We were to pick up the dog just before heading upstate to the lake for the summer. My father went in to get her while I stayed in the car. When he came out, he told me she was dead. According to their story, they were fumigating the dorms, and she pushed her way in through some door, and they didn’t know it. Of course, we knew she would never have gone inside on her own; I thought, wait a second, she would never have gone IN. I sat in that car, as the upholstery closed in around me, and managed to hold back the tears. I managed hard, and I managed long. There is little that hurts more than when a kid’s dog has to die. This is why I put in the middle of this traditional song a verse from another old song about the death of a dog. I have never forgotten that pain, or the lie. Such things are a part of anyone’s odyssey. The greater sense that I have when I hear this old song, though, is the power of old southern songs, and the spirit they have. Beyond any crimes and denials it holds to in some part of me, it is music, after all, and old folk songs have a singular sense of humanity, and that is what drew me to them, in the first place. The song is as much a part of my life as it was of the people who created it I feel.
The music of this song is in three/four time, a time that one dances slower to, and its basic guitar line is one that is familiar to the sound of the Mariachi band, music that is closer to the gut-level feelings of life than the math and the high tones of the old southern banjo. In our journey we’re approaching a more gut-level music as its evolvement draws near. The first verse was written by a modern painter, Tom Riker, whom I came to be friends with when his wife bought him guitar lessons from me when I lived in New York. I wrote the rest of the song to the feel of the music I heard in a small border town not far from Brownsville, Texas, on the Mexican side of the river. I like the idea that he knows she ain’t no angel, because she’s somewhat like he is, which, of course, is why he loves her, whether he knows it or not.
This is my voodoo zap song, and moves ever deeper into undefinable places. This instrumental "lays back" and integrates all that has gone on until now, as I hear it, a dream-space voodoo zap song from the island trade winds, between here and there, wherever there is.
With the feel of the waves, as Bahamian fishermen sing to the feel of their boats, "Hill and gully rider, hill and gully....," from railroads, to loss, to the needs of a child, to hope, and to love, the journey completes with this song, where it was headed, with a sense of moving beyond, a going to sea. . . .hopefully finding what always we’ve secretly wanted.......
Copyright © 2006, Erik Darling. All rights reserved.