Rising from a well of pain

The following are from a book review, Songs rising from a well of pain   written by Greil Marcus and that appeared in the Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2003. Read my extracts as if they were written about art of any kind. Don’t worry about understanding the book-review context or references to specific characters. Or, you can read the whole review,  which is very good. First, to give you a minimal, needed bit of setup:

It’s a doubled curse, moving through “The Devil’s Dream” in the shape of two songs: “Black Jack Davey,” the ballad of a dark stranger who steals a young woman from her husband and baby, offering nothing but the certainty of ruin in exchange for the promise of ecstasy; and “The Cuckoo,” a set of blank allegories that describes the simple fact that no man or woman can be at home in the world. These songs were sung in the British Isles long before travelers brought them to the Southern highlands; here, the songs have been sung from before the founding of the United States to the present day.

Now for the parts I especially like:

… “The Cuckoo” is not a ballad; it is a set of seemingly random verses that conventionally begins by invoking a bird that “warbles as she flies” – or “wobbles.” In many variants the cuckoo is linked to the founding of the country, to “The Fourth Day of July,” the first day of the year the cuckoo sings. The singer testifies that he has gambled all over the world and lays his money down one more time. Solely through differences between one singer’s tone and another’s, the cuckoo is described as innocent (“She sips from pretty flowers / To make her voice clear,” the Charlatans sang in a jangly version of “Jack of Diamonds” in San Francisco in 1965, beginning the song as a dance in a saloon and ending it in a single room in a heartbreak hotel, the vamping of the piano and the guitar fading as the vocalist recites the words as if delivering a speech in the mirror) or, as the band Kaleidoscope rendered “Cuckoo” in almost the same words in Los Angeles in 1969 (“She just sucks from / Pretty flowers / Just to keep her voice / Clear”), as a demon, as death on wings.

Despite Janis Joplin’s astonishing dive into “Coo Coo” with Big Brother and the Holding Company in San Francisco in 1966 – there is a wildness in Joplin’s voice that takes the song away from the body of myth it gathers around itself and places the source of the music directly in her own body, her own life, so that it becomes less a play of cryptic symbols than a blues, with Joplin leading up to every “I” in the lyric with a wail so lost and terrified you can feel her falling into the void that has suddenly opened up in the music – “The Cuckoo” has always been a man’s song, about a man’s adventures and failures, his fleeting triumphs and his ineradicable worthlessness, his fantasies of ruling the world and his self-loathing over his inability to master even himself.

The songs pull the men and women of “The Devil’s Dream” through the novel, across its more than 150 years, because Lee Smith reverses their poles of gravity: that is, she reverses their sex. “The Cuckoo” becomes the woman’s story, suffused not with uncertain bravado, as in North Carolinan Clarence Ashley’s definitive male versions from 1929 and the early 1960s, but with glee and sorrow. The bird is always “she” in the song, but as an object of a man’s desire; now it is what the woman wants, and fears, that drives the song. In “The Devil’s Dream,” only women sing “The Cuckoo.” Nonnie Bailey, wife of Moses and Kate Bailey’s surviving son, Ezekiel, sings the song to her children “as she’d sung when her daddy put her up on the counter as a little girl, all those years ago, her high, pretty voice trilling on the last line, ‘And she never sings cuckoo till the spring of the year,’ and for a minute she was that little girl again, so silly and so good.”

And, finally, at the end:

… With the curse never lifting, only finding new bodies to inhabit, “The Devil’s Dream” – the dream the devil dreams with a smile crossing his lips – is a contest, or a race, between “The Cuckoo” and “Black Jack Davey”; “The Cuckoo” wins. That means, finally, that at least some of Smith’s characters, all of them women but certainly not all of her women, those who risk everything for a taste of the life that Rose Anne said had ruined her for life, take their stories back from the devil, who owns every story in “The Devil’s Dream” as surely as Rockefeller owned Standard Oil. That doesn’t mean that some of the women who sing “The Cuckoo” – who in a way pray through it, pray to an unknown, unfixed and undetermined sense of life – own their stories, merely that the devil doesn’t. He has a lien, but if you die before it’s due, you don’t pay. You don’t pay him.

The full piece is well worth reading. [ link ]

-Julie

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