So I've got a notion to blog about music for a while. The last two posts being indicative. This blog is transitioning thematically from mostly religious faith commentary to, well, anything and everything that happens to take my interest. In case anyone's wondering, this does not indicate a decline in personal faith or something, just that I've exhausted the theme, said all I've had to say for now. Not guaranteeing I won't ever return to that theme on occasion though.
The Songs of Place series represents the intersection of several interests, among them being cultural history and geography. I've always noticed that country songs are far more likely to mention a place than are straight pop songs. Country songwriters are always naming rivers, towns, valleys, states. Pop songs occasionally name major cities, but that's about it.
Country songwriters, even today, are often hearkening back to the good old days, simpler times, etc. Pining for the homeplace. This made a lot of sense during the country-to-city dislocations of the mid-twentieth century in America, when Country music rose to prominence, but the tendency lingers even today. A lot of contemporary Americana still uses the naming of places to anchor the song in a certain feel. For example, the much played "Wagon Wheel." Darius Rucker's version captures the importance of place in this song in pictures as well as words:
I have always liked songs that named places, places on the map, places in our mental geography. Springtime (or Autumn) in New York, Livin' on Tulsa Time, Are Yo Going to San Francisco? I've always thought that the naming of places in songs and poems helps to anchor them somehow. Place names are full of personal associations, even when (and perhaps especially when) you've never actually been to that place. Place names can be powerfully connotative. I have never been to Paris, for example, but the name of Paris is nevertheless strangely evocative .
One of the first songs I remember loving as a child was the Cowboy's Lament, also known as the Streets of Laredo. That's where I realized a song was a drama, and could make you cry. When I realized the voice of the narrative here is a dying man, well, that struck as a deeply imaginative act.
I had the song on an old record of cowboy songs by Tex Ritter, a record dramatically entitled "Blood on the Saddle." Here's Tex:.
Wikipedia is always useful for this sort of thing. It's there that I discovered that The Cowboy's Lament is derived from an old English Ballad called The Unfortunate Rake.
Also, the St. James Infirmary Blues goes back to the same roots. As it happens, another record I treasured as a youngster, was a collection of Josh White songs:
Well, the Blues is a teacher, where a young man learns about matters of life and death before he actually experiences these things first hand. But even before I loved the Blues I loved cowboy songs like Streets of Laredo. Like a lot of young boys in my childhood I loved cowboys, cowboy stories, gunfight showdowns in the dusty street, fistfights in the saloon, herds of cattle barreling down the main street of town. We choose sometimes to call it history, but really it is nothing more than another room in our own mental theme park, one part flickering Hollywood set-piece, one part Buffalo Bill's Wild West extravaganza, and one part a boy's discovery of life and death in a Western song.
