Month: April 2005

Orphan Songs, Part 4:
Will The Circle Be Unbroken?


The Carter Family, via The Country Music Hall of Fame

“Will the Circle Be Unbroken” is one of the best-loved, most-recorded songs ever. I’ve always loved it, but never quite understood it — it’s rather oblique. What circle are we talking about, exactly?

I was standing by the window
On one cold and cloudy day
And I saw the hearse come rolling
For to carry my mother away

Chorus:
Can the circle be unbroken
Bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, Lord, in the sky

Lord, I told the undertaker
Undertaker, please drive slow
For this body you are hauling
How I hate to see her go

I followed close beside her
Tried to hold up and be brave
But I could not hide my sorrow
When they laid her in the grave

Went back home Lord my home was lonesome
Missd my mother she was gone
All my brothers sisters crying
What a home so sad and lone

It’s no wonder I’ve been puzzled. It turns out that this version was based on an earlier song that gave a full explanation, but the story given in the earlier version has now been mostly forgotten, thanks to the new, familiar one.

A. P. Carter, of the great Original Carter Family, pieced together the more familiar version a couple of days before it was first recorded, during a session on May 5, 1935. He completely re-wrote the original song’s verses — the storyline of the song — but left the chorus essentially unchanged. So, today, we all know the original refrain, but not the narrative that gives the refrain a literal meaning. (This was probably an improvement, songwriting-wise.)

The original song seems to have been first published in a hymnal in 1907. The idea of the verses was that, back in the good old days when our family was all together and happy and harmonious, we all literally sat in a circle — maybe around the hearth — warmly enjoying each other’s loving presence. (You remember that, don’t you?)

But now, years later, many of us have died and gone to heaven, breaking that circle. The chairs are emptying, one by one. But don’t despair! In Heaven, that circle is slowly being re-assembled — member by member, as we all pass on — and some day, the circle will be unbroken once again.

But there’s a catch … well, beyond the fact that you’ll have to die to complete the story, there’s an even more serious catch. It’s not a sure thing that everybody in the family will wind up in heaven to help complete the circle. Some of us may wind up ELSEWHERE.

So the song was written to ask, in essence: Will you go to Heaven when you die? Or will your loved-ones sit in Heaven, in their broken circle, looking mournfully at that empty chair where [ your name here ] should have sat, but was instead led astray? Will the circle be unbroken? It’s up to you! It will be unbroken, but only if you quit your sinful ways and are saved!

Both versions of the song are “alter call” songs, used to invite you to come forward to the alter to be saved. Here’s the lyrics to the original:

There are loved ones in the glory,
Whose dear forms you often miss.
When you close your earthly story,
Will you join them in their bliss?

Chorus
Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, by and by?
In a better home awaiting
In the sky, in the sky?

In the joyous days of childhood,
Oft they told of wondrous love,
Pointed to the dying Savior
Now they dwell with Him above.

You remember songs of heaven
Which you sang with childish voice,
Do you love the hymns they taught you,
Or are songs of earth your choice?

You can picture happy gatherings
Round the fireside long ago,
And you think of tearful partings,
When they left you here below.

One by one their seats were emptied,
One by one they went away;
Here the circle has been broken—
Will it be complete one day?

Note that both versions have nearly the same melody as the old Negro spiritual, “Glory, glory, Hallelujah, Since I Lay my Burden Down,” which you’ll find on your copy of the Harry Smith anthology.

Part 1   Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5   Part 6   Part 7   Part 8

Acony Bell

Aconybell
Time the Revelator (CD cover detail)

Gillian Welch wrote a song about a flower she calls the Acony Bell. Like most of Welch’s songs, it’s great — beautifully performed and written. The lyrics describe the flower in terms so detailed and specific, they remind me of the kind of formal botanical descriptions you find in guidebooks and taxonomic encyclopedias.

The flower itself has always been elusive. Early attempts by botanists to study it were frustrated by the fact that the flower is rare, hard to grow, and is found naturally only in a small geographical range way up in the mountains running through Tennessee, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. The plant was so elusive that it was eventually “discovered by a man who didn’t name it, named for a man who didn’t see it, by someone who didn’t know where it was,” according to an article in Harvard Magazine.

In a way, Gillian Welch has added another chapter to this long history of confusion. My first attempt at Googling the flower was frustrated because its name is usually spelled Oconee Bell, not Acony Bell as Welch had it on her CD. To help you along in your own research, here’s some information about the Oconee Bell, also known as Shortia galacifolia.

Well it makes its home amid the rocks and the rills
Where the snow lies deep on the windy hills
And it tells the world “Why should I wait?
This ice and snow’s gonna melt away.”


J. Dan Pittillo @ USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database

 

Banjos and Culdesacs

Flying into Raleigh-Durham Airport for the “Black Banjo: Then and Now” conference, I looked through the window, soaking up my first glimpses of North Carolina and dreaming of banjos. Then I noticed how much culdesacs look like banjos from the air:

Banjo culdesac

And then I thought … “I’ve got to stop thinking about banjos before I go mad!”

“Culdesac” is also a term sometimes used to describe a website that has links only to other pages within the same site, and has no links to anywhere else on the web. So if you’re just pointing and clicking at such a site, there’s NO WAY OUT.

And so, maybe banjos really are sort of like culdesacs. Hmmm, yes … food for thought …

Orphan Songs, Part 3
They All Pretend They’re Orphans

They all pretend they’re orphans
And their memory is like a train
You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away

— Tom Waits, “Time”

She made up someone to be
She made up somewhere to be from

— Tom Waits, “Dead and Lovely”

In Orphan Songs, Part 2, I speculated about why I’ve found so many songs about orphans and being parentless. Here’s one last possibility.

When we’re young, parents are sometimes an embarrassment — a reminder of who we used to be, or that we’re not yet who we hope to become. You often see this embarrassment in memoirs of the experiences of immigrants. Here you are in your American clothes with your American attitude, accompanied by your father in his black suit and yarmulka, or your mother with her sari and her bindi on her forehead.

To fantasize about being an orphan, of sorts, is to play with the idea of escaping your class, your status, and your cultural (sometimes even fanancial) inheritance.

Memory is an act of imagining, and to be an orphan is to “remember” (i.e., imagine) your parents, which is also to idealize yourself as someone able to advance your artistic, political, financial and other goals. It’s the old story of leaving home, going to the big anonymous city, and becoming somebody else.

In a post — which is no longer online — to the unofficial Martin Guitar forum, journalist Don Hurley once wrote about an encounter with Bob Dylan in England, during the filming of Don’t Look Back:

“I took a photographer to his suite to do a profile for the next day’s paper. I questioned him on his background and about supposedly running away from home at the age of eleven. He confirmed it all and said he could not remember when he last saw his parents, that he was “just an orphan of the road.” We finished the interview and made for the elevator which my photographer and I shared with an older couple and their son, who turned out to be Dylan’s parents and his brother David. They were literally in the suite next to his!”

I’ll write more about such “orphans” — in the context of the Folk Revival — in a future installment of this Orphan Song series.

Part 1   Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5   Part 6   Part 7   Part 8

Dark Was The Night: Candles

Candle flame

Night used to be dark — really dark. When the sun went down, you pretty much couldn’t see your own hand in front of your face, unless there was a moon in the sky, a display of aurora, or lightning. Or you could get light from some kind of open flame. To accept this as fact is easy enough, but to imagine it as a reality is hard for people living in the 21st century.

Consider the problem of trying to imagine living by candlelight. Candles used to be made of tallow (essentially animal fat) and bee’s wax. Both cast a dim, yellow, flickering light. Sometimes a tallow candle would spatter hot fat on someone nearby.

The first major challenge to deep darkness at night was from gaslight in major cities, made possible by late-19th century coal and oil refining. To respond to the challenge presented by the great steadiness and brightness of gaslight, the candle industry developed the paraffin candle, which produced much brighter, whiter, and steadier light than wax or tallow candles ever did.

But paraffin is a byproduct of the same refining technology that produces gaslight. So the candle itself has been modernized to respond to the challenges of technology.

If you want to imagine life before Night was banished, it won’t work to simply light some candles and turn off all your lights (don’t forget the VCR display and the clock radio and the light from your neighbor’s porchlight leaking into your windows!). The candles you’re likely to be usings are already modern lighting techology.

The Revolution Will Not Be Heavenly

Today, I bought a copy of Nicolaus Copernicus’ book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, in an edition edited by Stephen Hawking. The original 1543 book helped inspire people to give up the idea that the Earth was the center of the Universe, and that the Earth circles the Sun, not visa versa.

As I understand it, the change was such a shock and so deeply altered the way people saw the hierarchy of things, in both the heavens and on Earth, that for centuries, whenever people talked about similar upheavals, they would call them another Revolutions, meaning Copernicus’ book. After a while, the association of the term with the book got forgotten — hence the word “revolution”.

Trouble is, in the original title, De revolutionibus orbium colestium, the word means “spinning around and around in circles,” as in, “the going around of the celestial orbs.” So the root word of “revolution” is not “revolt,” it’s “revolve” — to wind up exactly where you started and have to do it all over again.

And all too often, that’s how revolutions have gone, at least outside of science. You wind up with the same cast of characters, at best, and you have to stage another revolution, over and over and over.

I swear, the fact that this is Tax Day is PURE COINCIDENCE!

Amazing Cat Facts

In honor of Ralph, visit the Animal Humane Society, or just check out some amazing cat facts. They are some pretty cool little buggers, them cats:

The worlds fattest cat was a neutered male tabby named “Himmey” When Himmey died of respiratory failure he weighed a whopping 46 lbs 15.5 ounces! He had a 15 inch neck, was 38 inches long, and had a 33 inch waist.

Worlds Most “Prolific” Cat was a tabby named “Dusty” gave birth to 420 documented kittens in her lifetime.

Cat’s urine glows under a black light.

In ancient Egypt, killing a cat was a crime punishable by death.

Hunting is not instinctive for cats. Kittens born to non-hunting mothers may never learn to hunt.

Cats sleep 16 to 18 hours per day.

Besides smelling with their nose, cats can smell with an additional organ called the Jacobson’s organ, located in the upper surface of the mouth.

Cats can’t taste sweets.

The average cat food meal is the equivalent to about five mice.

Cats cannot see in complete darkness but they can navigate by sound, smell, and the sensitivity of their whiskers.

Taj Mahal: Banjo Detective

At the “Black Banjo: Then and Now” conference, historian Ted Landsmark said he often gives talks to groups of nice, middle-class, African American church ladies, who reverently listen to him talk about black history. He brings along the usual objects of veneration — quilts and talking sticks and all that.

Then he brings out the banjo.

He said you’ve never seen a group turn on anybody so quickly. He tried to impress upon the Black Banjo conference attendees just how disgusted these audiences are that Landsmark, as a black man, would even be seen touching a banjo. It never helps much to explain that, of all the material culture produced by African slaves in the New World, the most persistent and successful is the banjo.

Well, given this taboo, it’s nice that Taj Mahal is taping a segment for the PBS series History Detectives in which he researches the possible authenticity of a banjo once owned, supposedly, by an African slave. Taj was chosen for the segment because he is a knowledgeable banjo historian and player — and is, of course, a famous black bluesman. The show was taped in Cincinatti and will air some time this summer.

John Prine at The Library of Congress


John Prine

Today, my wife met Ted Kooser, the current Poet Laureate of the United States. That was neat. Even better, he told her out that he recently brought John Prine to The Library of Congress for a discussion and concert.

I highly recommend the webcast of Prine’s appearence, which is riveting — all 90 minutes of it. (You’ll need the free RealPlayer to watch it.) Prine said of his appearence, “You can bet I’m looking forward to it — taking all these people in my songs to the Library of Congress and letting ’em look around a bit.”

Prine’s first album in ten years will be released on April 26. Last time I saw him in concert, he said he releases an album every ten years whether anybody asks him to or not.

The Banjo and Africa

I just returned from the conference, “Black Banjo: Then and Now,” held in Boone, North Carolina. This blog will plunder my memories of it for months, no doubt, but for now let me tell you a story …

I sometimes hand my banjo to somebody who’s never held one before and invite them to “make some noise.” They always do very strange things with their fingers. They might rest their thumb on the “drum” head, above the strings, and pick up with their index and middle fingers, like an electric bass player. Maybe they’ll rest all four fingers on the head below the strings and pluck down on the strings with their thumb. Maybe they’ll sit like a classical guitarist and use their thumb and all four fingers to pick the strings.

It’s interesting to watch what they do, and it’s immediately obvious that they have no knowledge of any of the banjo-playing traditions.

But — in one incident after another, stretching back many decades — Oldtime banjo players hand their banjos to West African players of a Senegambian instrument called the akonting, and they immediately play clawhammer like they’ve been playing the banjo all their lives. Alternately, a banjoist will pick up the akonting and play like a master griot, much to the amazement of his West African hosts.

The banjo is an African instrument and clawhammer is an African playing technique. The instrument and the technique simply survived slavery and are alive and very well today in America, albeit generally in the hands of white Oldtime musicians. Knowing this fact, and fully imagining it, has been a profound shock and inspiration to me.