When I moved to Bangkok (and lived there for two years), I wasn’t too happy about being an American. It was during the height of the Bush years, when my lack of health care and a steady income was giving me hell, when it just wasn’t cool to say you were from America in other parts of the world (Is it now? Who knows.) Though I threw myself into the Thai culture, picking up on everything I could to put aside my national identity, I found that I craved American music. It was the one thing I was proud of; one thing I felt we had done right. Later I got to appreciating Thai music too (the country stuff is fantastic), but at first I only noticed the songs that were covered everywhere–The Eagles, Brittany Spears–the kind of stuff I wasn’t too excited about. I listened to Wilco, Woody Guthrie, Lucinda Williams, Eric Bibb, John Lee Hooker, and later John Legend and Corinne Bailey Rae. Friends sent me CDs.
I’m only writing all this because I’m in awe of the fact that I’m enrolled in a class called “The Rhetoric of Song.” We’re assigned American roots collections every week and we read essays by the Lomax Brothers (Land Where the Blues Began guys…) I feel like I’ve waited my whole life to take this class. The songs we listened to this week are ballads, and the language is just incredible.
“I’ve been to the river to be baptized, now I’m at the burial ground.”
“I got so thin I could hide behind a straw.”
A man tells a woman, “You’ll rue the day for givin’ me the devil because I wouldn’t hoe m’corn.”
People are dying of heartbreak, literally, or getting so drunk they fall in love with cows.
Here’s one about some boys who throw their ball into a gypsy’s garden, with fatal results:
That one was adapted from an English ballad, a commentary about when all the gypsies were exiled, sometime in the 1200’s. That’s at the core of American Music. I know, because of this class. Seriously, people. It’s the stuff I’d read if I had more time and now I’m forced to read it.
Here’s one with a jugband:
Jugbands! God bless America.
Jealous . . .
this is great!