COURSEPACK

POETRY & MUSICWeek 8

Between Spiritual and AnimalJulian Jaynes, Patti Smith, Harry Smith, Folk

Music, etc.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTlsSXNT2bg

Last Great American Whale by Lou Reed (1989)

They say he didn't have an enemyhis was a greatness to beholdHe was the last surviving progenythe last one on this side of the world

He measured a half mile from tip to tailsilver and black with powerful finsThey say he could split a mountain in twothat's how we got the Grand Canyon

Last great American whalelast great American whaleLast great American whalelast great American whale

Some say they saw him at the Great Lakessome say they saw him off of FloridaMy mother said she saw him in Chinatownbut you can't always trust your mother

Off the Carolinas the sun shines brightly in the daythe lighthouse glows ghostly there at nightThe chief of a local tribe had killed a racist mayor's sonand he'd been on death row since 1958

The mayor's kid was a rowdy pigspit on Indians and lots worseThe old chief buried a hatchet in his headlife compared to death for him seemed worse

The tribal brothers gathered in the lighthouse to singand tried to conjure up a storm or rainThe harbor parted, the great whale sprang full upand caused a huge tidal wave

The wave crushed the jail and freed the chiefthe tribe let out a roarThe whites were drowned, the browns and reds set freebut sadly one thing more

Some local yokel member of the NRAkept a bazooka in his living roomAnd thinking he had the chief in his sight

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blew the whale's brains out with a lead harpoon

Last great American whalelast great American whaleLast great American whalelast great American whale

Well Americans don't care for much of anythingland and water the leastAnd animal life is low on the totem polewith human life not worth more than infected yeast

Americans don't care too much for beautythey'll shit in a river, dump battery acid in a streamThey'll watch dead rats wash up on the beachand complain if they can't swim

They say things are done for the majoritydon't believe half of what you see and none of what you hearIt's like what my painter friend Donald said to me"Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over, they're done"

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O Delmore how I miss you, Dreams from his teacher.

by Lou Reed (2012)

O Delmore how I miss you. You inspired me to write. You were the greatest man I ever met. You could capture the deepest emotions in the simplest language. Your titles were more than enough to raise the muse of fire on my neck. You were a genius. Doomed.

The mad stories. O Delmore I was so young. I believed so much. We gathered around you as you read Finnegans Wake. So hilarious but impenetrable without you. You said there were few things better in life than to devote oneself to Joyce. You’d annotated every word in the novels you kept from the library. Every word.

And you said you were writing “The Pig’s Valise.” O Delmore no such thing. They looked, after your final delusion led you to a heart attack in the Hotel Dixie. Unclaimed for three days. You—one of the greatest writers of our era. No valise.

You wore the letter from T.S. Eliot next to your heart. His praise of In Dreams. Would that you could have stopped that wedding.* No good will come of this!!! You were right. You begged us—Please don’t let them bury me next to my mother. Have a party to celebrate moving from this world hopefully to a better one. And you Lou—I swear—and you know if anyone could I could—you Lou must never write for money or I will haunt you.

I’d given him a short story. He gave me a B. I was so hurt and ashamed. Why haunt talentless me? I was the walker for “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me.” To literary cocktails. He hated them. And I was put in charge. Some drinks later—his shirt undone—one tail front right hanging—tie skewed, fly unzipped. O Delmore. You were so

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beautiful. Named for a silent movie star dancer Frank Delmore. O Delmore—the scar from dueling with Nietzsche.

Reading Yeats and the bell had rung but the poem was not over you hadn’t finished reading—liquid rivulets sprang from your nose but still you would not stop reading. I was transfixed. I cried—the love of the word—the heavy bear.

You told us to break into ______’s estate where your wife was being held prisoner. Your wrists broken by those who were your enemies. The pills jumbling your fine mind.

I met you in the bar where you had just ordered five drinks. You said they were so slow that by the time you had the fifth you should have ordered again. Our scotch classes. Vermouth. The jukebox you hated—the lyrics so pathetic.

You called the White House one night to protest their actions against you. A scholarship to your wife to get her away from you and into the arms of whomever in Europe.

I heard the newsboy crying Europe Europe.

Give me enough hope and I’ll hang myself.

Hamlet came from an old upper class family.

Some thought him drunk but—really—he was a manic-depressive—which is like having brown hair.

You have to take your own shower—an existential act. You could slip in the shower and die alone.

Hamlet starting saying strange things. A woman is like a cantaloupe Horatio—once she’s open she goes rotten.

O Delmore where was the Vaudeville for a Princess. A gift to the princess from the stage star in the dressing room.

The duchess stuck her finger up the duke’s ass and the kingdom vanished.

No good will come of this. Stop this courtship!

Sir you must be quiet or I must eject you.

Delmore understood it all and could write it down impeccably.

Shenandoah Fish*. You were too good to survive. The insights got you. The fame expectations. So you taught.

And I saw you in the last round.

I loved your wit and massive knowledge.

You were and have always been the one.

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him think.

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I wanted to write. One line as good as yours. My mountain. My inspiration.

You wrote the greatest short story ever written. In Dreams.

* Refers to Schwartz's short story, "The World Is a Wedding," as well as, prehaps, his own life.

* Character in several Schwartz works

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vVpwNoRYmg

The Boy Cried Wolf by Patti Smith (2000)

Oh the story's told been told retoldFrom the sacred scriptures to thetabloidsAll the fuss and fight none above awhisperThe soul of gold the belly of a boy

Well they drew him from the forestLike they draw bloodTied him to a tree like St. SebastianAnd he turned his head and let thearrows flyThrough the trees, the treesThe ornamental leaves

Boy cried wolfWolf don't comeWolf withinBoy cried wolf

In the ancient mold they're dancingdownCalling to the moon but it don't answerAnd they fell on their kneesand passed the bowl aroundAnd the blood the blood thesacramental blood

Boy cried wolfWolf don't comeWolf withinBoy cried wolf

I am the body I am the streamI am the wake of everything

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They bring me flowers that are myselfGarlands of blood that are myselfSlain the lamb that is himself

Torn reborn the cries of our dismayAre nothing to the wind but whose tomindKings are lifted up and kings are thrown

Lost received retrievedThe human tide

Innocence had its dayInnocence had its dayInnocence innocence

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High on Rebellion, by Patti Smith (1978)

what i feel when i'm playing guitar is completely cold and crazy, like idon't owe nobody nothing and it's just a test just to see how far i canrelax into the cold wave of a note. when everything hits just right (justand right) the note of nobility can go on forever. i never tire of thesolitary E and i trust my guitar and i don't care about anything.sometimes i feel like i've broken through and i'm free and i could diginto eternity into eternity riding the wave and realm of the E. sometimesit's useless. here i am struggling and filled with dread-afraid that i'llnever squeeze enough graphite from my damaged cranium to inspire orasphyxiate any eyes grazing like hungry cows across the stage or page.inside of me i'm crazy i'm just crazy. inside i must continue. i see her,my stiff muse, jutting around round round round like a broken speedingstatue. the colonial year is dead and the greeks too are finished. theface of alexander remains not only solely due to sculpture but through thepower and foresight and magnetism of alexander himself. the artist mustmaintain his swagger. he must he must he must be intoxicated by ritual aswell as result. look at me i am laughing. i am laughing. i am lappingcocaine from the hard brown palm of the bouncer. and i trust my guitar.therefore we black out together. therefore i would run through scum. andscum is just ahead, ah we see it, but we just laugh. we're ascendingthrough the hollow mountain. we are peeking. we are laughing. we arekneeling. we are laughing. we are radiating at last. this rebellion isjust a gas our gas a gas that we pass

-------------------------------------http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4fUk5XhGGk

25 TH Floor by Patti Smith (1978)

We explore the men's roomWe don't give a shitLadies lost electricity

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Take vows inside of it

Desire to dance, too startled to tryWrap my legs 'round you, starting to flyLet's exploreUp there, up there, up there on the twenty-fifth floor

Circle all around meComing for the kill, kill, kill, oh, kill me babyLike a Kamikaze heading for a spillOh, but it's all split milk to me

Desire to dance, too startled to tryWrap my legs 'round you, starting to flyLet's soarUp there, up there, up there on the twenty-fifth floor

We do not eat flower of creationWe do not eat, eat anything at allLove is, love was, love is a manifestationI'm waiting for a contact to call

Love's war, love's cruelLove's pretty, love's pretty cruel tonightI'm waiting here to refuelI'm gonna make contact tonight

Love in my heart, the night to exploitTwenty-five stories over DetroitAnd there's moreUp there, up there, up there

Stoned in spaceZeus, ChristIt has always been rock and so it is and so it shall beWithin the context of neo rock

(I feel it swirling around me)We must open up our eyes and seize and rend the veil of smoke(I feel it feeling no pain)Which man calls order(I'm waiting above for you baby)Pollution is a necessary result of the inability of man(I know that I'll see you up there)To reform and transform waste

The transformation of waste(I'm floating in a door backward)(On boundaries over this world)The transformation of waste(I'm waiting above in the sky, dear)The transformation of waste(Upon a [Incomprehensible])

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The transformation of waste is perhaps the oldest pre-occupation of man([Incomprehensible])Man being the chosen alloy, he must be reconnected via shit([Incomprehensible])At all cost inherent within us is the dream of the task of the alchemist([Incomprehensible])To create from the clay of man([Incomprehensible])

And to re-create from excretion of man pure and then softAnd then solid goldAll must not be art, some art we must disintegratePositive

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Powers in the Air by Peter Blegvad (1983)

Say someone stole a linefrom Ezra Pound.Who’s to say it hadn’t lay therefor centuries just waitingto be found?And he did not create it,naw. he heard a voice dictate it.In fact all he did waswrite it down.‘Cos there are powers in the air,and they make all our choices.Powers in the air,with such seductive voices.Pull up a chair...

Say when we’re surroundedit seems like we’re alone,but they’re looking over every shoulderwe’re always chaperoned.They infiltrate like vapour,they’re thin as a piece of paper,and they can dance right through meat, steel and stone.They’re the powers in the air,and they’re gonna lay it on ya,The powers in the air,don’t say I didn’t warn ya —people, beware!

Say your steps are shadowedby you can’t say what or whom,just as you in turn pursuewhat you’re helpless to subsume.All you know is it’s the first thingyou ever hungered for, you were thirstingfor it, even as you were burstingfrom the womb.

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Now now now, it’s the powers in the air,who bait us with abstractions.The powers in the airwho divide us into factions.Once you’ve been snaredyou’re in the powerof the powers in the air.

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Review in the Guardian, Feb 2013, of CD by Anais Mitchell & Jefferson Hamer, Child Ballads

Anaïs Mitchell: 'They’re very hardy songs. They have weathered centuries'

Anaïs Mitchell is wondering whether her new record, Child Ballads, should come with a disclaimer. "Because of the name a lot of people think they're kids songs," says the Vermont singer-songwriter. "Until they hear them, that is." Indeed. It's hard to think offhand of any children's songbook that includes the tale of a vastly pregnant woman who can't give birth after being cursed by her lover's mother, or of the young man fed poisoned eels by his sweetheart, or the girl who stabs herself after inadvertently sleeping with her brother, who then tearfully buries her.

Rather than the kindergarten, Mitchell's album draws from the most influential and emotionally powerful canon in traditional music. The Child Ballads, a collection of 305 songs, run like a deep, dark seam through the coalface of British folk. Named after Francis J Child, an American folklorist and Harvard professor who published The English and Scottish Popular Ballads in five volumes between 1882 and 1898, most of them date from the 17th and 18th centuries, though the roots of several are much older. Veteran folk singer Martin Carthy points out that one of his favourites, Willie's Lady, "goes back to Heracles".

While there are other significant traditional song collections, the influence of Child's is impossible to overstate. Since the folk revival of the 1950s they have been sung and recorded by every notable traditional musician, from Joan Baez to Nic Jones, and adapted by folk-rock pioneers including Steeleye Span and Pentangle. Fairport Convention did extraordinary things with Tam Lin and Sir Patrick Spens. Bob Dylan not only sang several Child Ballads, including Barbara Allen, but used them as prototypes for his own songs. A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall derives its haunting imagery and question-and-answer structure from Lord Randall.

They remain a vibrant source today. Acclaimed wyrd folk artist Alasdair Roberts returns continually to the Child Ballads, while Fleet Foxes recently recorded The Fause Knight Upon the Road. With collaborator Jefferson Hamer in tow, Mitchell is simply the latest singer to fall under the spell. She initially heard these songs via Martin Carthy's 1976 album Crown of Horn and recordings by Paul Brady, Anne Briggs and Fairport Convention. "I just fell in love with the stories," she says. "They're so beautiful, so strange and weird. That's the poetry of it. When I met Jefferson we decided it would be cool to do them ourselves. As outsiders we had some trepidation, but they're very hardy songs. They have weathered centuries."

What makes the ballads so enduring? Although they touch on everything from Robin Hood to local clan arguments, and contain much bawdy humour, the ones that have

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made the deepest and most lasting impact tend to provide "serious lessons in life and love," says Carthy, who regards Child Maurice and Prince Heathen in particular as "quite astonishing jewels. None of the other songs in the British tradition carry that sort of weight and have that sort of depth. Or bite. Some of them are very brutish and dark."

For Roberts, these ancient songs of murder, incest, love, birth and magic fulfil a similar function for adults as fairytales would for a child. "They are a way for a community to deal with or rationalise the worst aspects of human behaviour by transmuting them into song," he says. "The ones I'm attracted to are archetypal, they touch on primal emotions stripped of all specificity. Things like The Cruel Mother or The Two Brothers. If you can sing about these things it becomes an exorcism." And however compelling they might be individually, the Child Ballads also possess a cumulative power. According to Roberts, collectively they constitute a "pan-British national epic of the Anglophone people, like the Homeric epics in ancient Greece or the Kalevala in Finland."

Child's five volumes of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads remain vital works of reference: Roberts often directs those who inquire about certain songs to the numbered ballad in the relevant book. Yet it isn't an exhaustive collection, nor is it flawless. The American academic made often negligible distinctions between ancient ballads handed down through the oral tradition and Broadsides, the cheaply printed street songs which he described as "veritable dungheaps". In Carthy's opinion, Child "had good days and bad days. He left out some curious stuff, like The Bitter Withy and The Seven Virgins, which are very old songs from the Apocryphal Gospels. And perhaps he put in some stuff where you think, 'What the hell is that doing there?'"

Even the versions that did make the cut can't be called definitive. The ballads remain fluid and almost endlessly mutable; multiple variations in words, melodies and titles exist for each one, often depending on their geographical origins. "All canons deserve to be challenged," says Roberts. "Some people take the Ballads as sacred texts, which can become a problem. I'm always excited when I hear new or different versions."

Honouring that restless, exploratory spirit, on their new album Mitchell and Hamer tweak lines and subtly alter melodies. "We wanted to be able to stand in our own shoes as Americans, to sing these songs and have them be understood without feeling like we were playing dress up or posing," says Mitchell. One hundred and thirty years after Child's first volume appeared, these remarkable ballads continue to evolve. Carthy, for one, couldn't be happier. "The great thing about this stuff is how much you can change it," he says. "You can do anything you like with it, as long as what the song is saying isn't obscured. The variation is still there to be found and wondered at."

Child Ballads by Anaïs Mitchell & Jefferson Hamer is released on 11 February

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Allen Ginsberg on Harry Smith (1923 – 1991)

“When I was in San Francisco, I heard from a filmmaker, Jordan Belson, about a fabulous magician painter-filmmaker, Harry Smith, who had been a student or descendant of Aleister Crowley, and had Crowley manuscripts. In 1960 I saw this old guy at the Five Spot in New York with black and white beard making little marks, listening to Thelonius Monk, and sort of notating something. From Belson’s description and from the concentration of his activity and his locale, I decided maybe that’s Harry Smith, so I went up and introduced myself. He said, yes, that was his name. I said, “Well, what are you doing there?” He said I’m trying to determine where Monk comes in on the beat–before or after, what are the recurrent syncopations, what is the pattern, the mathematical

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pattern of syncopations in his solos, and how they vary.” I said, “Why are you doing that?” he said, “Well, I’m keeping track of his time, because I’m using his music as background to films that I’m making, hand painting frame-by-frame, and collage drawing.” So one thing led to another and we listened to Monk night after night. Then Harry invited me up to his studio. He had a crowded little apartment and the walls were covered with his paintings, which were these amazing cosmic monsters. He’d get me very high on grass, then turn on his little projector and show me these movies, which he had hand-painted, frame-by-frame, some abstract and then moving on into animated collage, then moving on to Tibetan imagery, and finally the Heaven and Earth movie, which was an hour and a half at the time. What he had done was set a lot of them, certain ones of them, short ones, to Misterioso. I saw that his point was that the actual frames moved in relation to the music–he had been calculating the frames to the Monk music. It turns out he was a musicologist. he showed me this set of six records, The Anthology of American Folk Music, a three–box set he put out way back in 1952, which was on Folkways. He did ethnomusicology studies here in America. So this is now eight years later, and he had gotten into making these films and had already passed through the mixed–media projections. One day he offered to sell me a rather dark version of the rather long Heaven and Earth movie for one hundred dollars. Every time we’d go up there he’d get me high, then he’d ask me for money, because he was starving. Apparently he’d do that with everybody. I go to be scared of going up there because he’d get me tremblingly high on grass and show me these amazing movies. I’d be totally awed and intimidated by the universality of his genius in music and painting. I took the Heaven and Earth movie?” I didn’t have any use for it, I didn’t have a projector, so I took it down to Jonas Mekas, whom I knew through Robert Frank. Mekas had never heard of him. He played the film and said, “Who is this Harry Smith? He’s an absolute genius.” That’s how Smith connected with the Film–Makers’ Co–op and Anthology Film Archives and became with Brakhage and Robert Frank and Warhol, one of the founding fathers of underground film and an influence on subsequent MTV.”

Excerpt from Forms of Visionary Collage: Harry Smith and the Poets, by Stephen Fredman:

“Smith was always making art. Because his art practice relied on his understanding of how meaning happens, he was constantly engaged in it, forever building collections—bringing things into startling new relationships—and by so doing making explicit his notion that reality is composed of meaningful, if unanticipated, conjunctions. As one of his students put it, ‘Harry was always into the process. The one thing that he said to me that I particularly remember was the most important thing about reality is the relationship of objects. And he said that what makes everything real is the fact that things are ordered in the present status. In other words, things are set beside themselves and that is what makes reality. Reality is made up of just the placement of objects.’ Smith not only collected things, he placed them in suggestive contexts that would allow them to call attention to themselves by virtue of what was around them, thus turning a collection into a work of art. Many people have noted that the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) is a very peculiar kind of collection, ordered not by any simple method of classification but as an assemblage in which songs call out to one another along multiple axes of meaning. Smith himself admits to this mode of composition: ‘The whole Anthology was a collage. I thought of it as an art object.’ To have practiced standard classification in keeping with the disciplines of folklore or ethnomusicology would have meant acceding to a preestablished order, rather than engaging in the active pursuit of meaningful patterns—the foremost concern of his every waking (and probably dreaming) hour.

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In viewing composition as a boundless process, in which nothing that occurs is exterior to the artistic activity, Smith carried forward the avant-garde collage enterprise spearheaded by people such as Gertrude Stein, Hans Arp, and Marcel Duchamp. These precursors had opened the way to conceiving of collage as not merely an artistic form but a way of life. In Composition as Explanation (1926), for instance, Stein gave a classic formulation of the central idea behind such collage composition: ‘The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.’ […] Across the gamut of his endeavors, Smith’s method involves a number of processes that conduce to an understanding of and participation in ‘the composition of the time in which [he is] living.’ These processes include perspicacious collecting, diligent study, striking insight into hitherto unnoticed relationships, and, finally, surrender to the arbitrariness of the moment. One of Smith’s students describes this methodology as an intertwining of purpose and chance: ‘he would just concentrate and study and work and go haywire, drive himself crazy, getting everything in exactly the right order and then he would just give it a kick and say ‘that’s it.’ But he knew when he kicked it that he’d chosen the right moment and however it fell was going to be right.’

Like Duchamp, whose accidentally cracked The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-23) he keenly admired, Smith had a Dadaist’s trust that the carefully prepared work of art achieves final realization only through a chance operation. But unlike Duchamp’s acolyte John Cage, whose compositional methods of chance and indeterminacy reflected a philosophical commitment to letting be, Smith joins the great bebop improvisers (whose procedures he charts note by note in some of his paintings) in insisting that an inherent rhythm to the way things happen can be found, although it can be apprehended only by the most rigorous, vigilant attention. In his notes to The Kiowa Peyote Meeting, issued by Folkways records in 1973, Smith lauds an ascetic rigor he finds in the singers and contends that their philosophical asceticism brings them to an appreciation of the rhythmic nature of life: ‘I particularly hope that examples of the Kiowa approach to things will give an insight into how one people has dealt with the problem of rhythm in relation to thought.’ The desire to relate rhythm and thought has been around in Western philosophy at least since Pythagoras combined mathematics, music, and asceticism, and it reached its zenith in the works of Plato. Smith himself invoked the Platonic tradition by reproducing on the Anthology’s three LP covers the image of the divine monochord—in which the Ptolemaic universe is related mathematically to musical intervals—from a treatise by the Renaissance Neoplatonist Robert Fludd. It should not be surprising, then, that in 1962, Smith calls upon Plato’s example to explain how high his hopes had been for the Anthology: ‘I felt social changes would result from it. I’d been reading from Plato’s Republic. He’s jabbering on about music, how you have to be careful about changing the music because it might upset or destroy the government. Everybody gets out of step’—which was exactly what Smith was hoping for. He affirms this statement when accepting the lifetime achievement Chairman’s Merit Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 1991: ‘I’m glad to say my dreams came true, that I saw America changed through music.’”

[Fredman’s is one of several essays in Harry Smith, the Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular ed by Andrew Perchuk and Rani Singh, Getty Research Institute, (2010)]

Old Dog Blue - Jim Jackson

I'm goin' back to where I'm come

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I'm goin' back to where I'm comeI'm goin' back to Giles CountyMy wife died and left me a bountyWay them pretty girls ganged aroundThat's the reason why I'm goin' to Giles County

I had an old dog whose name was BlueYou know that Blue was mighty trueYou know Blue was a good old dogBlue treed a 'possum in a hollow logYou know from that he's a good old dog

Blue treed a 'possum out on a limbBlue looked at me and I looked at himGrabbed that 'possum and put him in a sack"Do fer me, Blue, 'til I get back."

"Here, Ring! Yeah, Ring Here!Here Ring! Hey, Ring here!"Who's been here since I been goneLittle bitty girl with the red dress onWho's been here since I been goneLittle bitty girl with the red dress on

Old Blue's feet was big and roundOld Blue's feets was big and roundNever 'lowed a 'possum to tech the groundMe and Blue went out on a huntBlue treed a 'possum in a hollow stumpYou know that Blue was a good old dogBlue treed a 'possum in a hollow logYou know from that he's a good old dog

Old Blue died and I dug his graveI dug his grave with a silver spadeI let him down with a golden chainAnd every link I called his name

Go on Blue you good dog youGo on Blue you good dog youBlue laid down and died like a manBlue laid down and died like a manNow he's treein' 'possums in the promised land

I'm goin' to tell you this jes' to let you knowOld Blue's gone where the good dogs goWhen I hear old Blue barkWhen I hear old Blue barkBlue's treed a 'possum in Noah's arkBlue's treed a 'possum in Noah's ark

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from THE CELESTIAL MONOCHORD, a blog by Kurt Gegenhuber

On the song OLD DOG BLUE, by Jim Jackson (1928)

When I first heard Jim Jackson sing Old Dog Blue, my reaction was to regret its sexism. In the first verse, the singer off-handedly mentions the recent death of his wife, and then goes on to mourn the death of his dog, movingly, in verse after verse after verse:

I'm going back where I comeI'm going back where I comeI'm going back to Giles CountyMy wife died and left me a bountyMe and them pretty girls ganged aroundThat's the reason I'm going to Giles County

Had an old dog whose name was BlueYou know Blue was mighty trueYou know Blue was a good old dogBlue treed a possum in a hollow logYou know from that he's a good old dog

Do we take this as a joke about the relative importance of wives and dogs?

I've seen (can't remember where) the explanation that the song is hard to sort out because it's really two or more songs spliced together. The line mentioning his wife is like a vestigial organ, left over from some previous stage in the song's evolution. There's some support for this view. Later, in the middle of everything, we get this strange non-sequitur:

Blue treed a possum out on a limbBlue looked at me and I looked at himGrabbed that possum, put him in a sackDon't move, Blue, 'til I get back.

It rained, it rained, yeahIt rained, it rained, yeah

Who been here since I been gone?Little bitty girl with the red dress onWho been here since I been gone?Little bitty girl with the red dress on

Is the dog wearing a dress? No, this verse about a girl in a red dress waiting for the singer appears often in old folk and blues songs — so, it's what's called a "floating stanza."

But I think it's slightly condescending, a little dismissive of Jim Jackson's artistry, to think as if he's just a passive antenna through which floating stanzas appear and disappear without rhyme or reason. I trust my own aesthetics here — this performance of this text is heartbreaking, and increasingly so each time I hear it, year after year. Jackson chose his words to move us, and it works.

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Once you accept that the text is very deliberate, the song comes into focus as brilliant psychological observation. It's a study of grief, the way it really works in a real brain. It hits with the force it does because it mirrors sorrow as we actually experience it. Do we really always mourn the most obvious things, or do we sometimes focus on proxies, fetishes, or symbols instead?

Jackson's character's wife has just died, so he's decided to go back to a place of his youth, before he was married, to relive happier days. It seems rather optimistic, even desperate — Jackson's character doesn't sound so young now.

Blue, too, seems to have been gone for a long time — so long that you'd expect a grown man to have gotten over it a bit. And I suspect he has. What I hear is a mind returning to everything its ever lost, trying to reconnect with it all both physically and emotionally.

By so vividly recalling this dog, by revisiting that intense ENCOUNTER between species ("Blue looked at me and I looked at him"), the singer is tracing his own edges, the limits and contours of his own identity. He is refamiliarizing himself with his manhood and his humanity, through memory.

In this way, Jackson's character is like the later folk revivalists of the 1950's and after, … They renounced their identities, abandoned all hope, denied their inheritances, and then — through song — rebuilt themselves. They invented themselves as a new cast of characters meant to inhabit a new world, which they then also built, on a foundation of reinvented memories.

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When That Great Ship Went Down - William and Versey Smith ( 1927)

It was on one Monday morning, just about nine o'clockWhen the great Titanic began to reel and rockWell people began to cry, oh, Lord, I don't wanna dieWasn’t that sad when that great ship went down

It was sad when that great ship went downIt was sad when that great ship went downHusbands and wives, little children lost their livesWasn’t that sad when that great ship went down

When the ship left England making for the shoreThe rich declared they would not ride with the poorSo they pushed the poor below, they were the first to goIt was sad when that great ship went down

People on that ship, long ways from homethey’re praying all around when they know there time has come.[indecipherable] comes riding by[indecipherable] time to die.

[indecipherable] sail the ocean blue.they would build a ship that water could not go through.It was on its maiden trip, that an iceberg hit the ship.It was sad when the great ship went down.

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When That Great Ship Went Down [this is a more polemical and bitter version than the one on the Anthology]

Oh, they built the ship Titanic, to sail the ocean blue.For they thought it was a ship that water would never go through.It was on its maiden trip, that an iceberg hit the ship.It was sad when the great ship went down.

Chorus:It was sad, so sad.It was sad, so sad.It was sad when the great ship went down (to the bottom of the....)Uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants.It was sad when the great ship went down.

They were not far from the shore, 'bout a thousand miles or more,When the rich refused to associate with the poor.So they threw them down below, where they were the first to go.It was sad when the great ship went down.

Repeat chorus

Oh, the heroes saved the weak, as the ship began to leak.And the band on deck played on.With, "Nearer my God to Thee", they were swept into the sea.It was sad when the great ship went down.

Repeat chorus

Oh they built a sister ship, Called the S.S. KunatahAnd they knew it was a ship that would never get very far.So, they christened it with GOP,And it sunk with a Ker-Plop!It was glad when the sad ship went down.

Additional Verses:

They threw the lifeboats over, in the dark and stormy sea.And the band began to play "Oh Give Thy Soul To Thee."Little children wept and cried as they left their mother's side.

Oh the moral of this story, the moral of this song,Is that one shouldn't go where he does not belong.For in the good Lord's eyes, you're as good as other guys,It was sad when the great ship when down.

Oh the moral of this story, is plain as you can see.Never trust a sailor on the high sea.He'll call you honey-darling, and say that he'll be true,But when the ship goes down he'll say the hell with you.

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Kerplunk, it sunk, hunk a junk,in the sea,without me,luckily,hee hee hee.

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