Summary of the Course

The course was a real eye opener in American folk music and the impact it had over the American culture. As an Asian American whose parents immigrated from China, I felt like I missed out on a lot of traditional American culture. I also never thought about folk music very much since it didn't seem very interesting compared to all the knowledge I had about classical music. However after taking the class I found a new way in appreciating folk music and understanding the complexities in each song. Even though the notes and chords may not be revolutionary, the emotion and story behind every song and every singer is unique and unable to be copied. I feel like the songs have changed me in becoming a more accepting and open person. Hopefully this will help me in my journey "down the long dusty road" and live a happier more fulfilling life.

Oh Careless Love

I immediately read through this song as a warning against young and careless love, and how it is different from true love in that it is harmful to both parties. After stumbling across Danica's post on careless love I thought it was extremely interesting that her view on the song was that it was praising careless love and how it is pure freedom and carefree spirit. I think it reflects the experiences in her life and how she still has yet to experience a love that ends badly.

In my drawing the saxophone represents the instrument in which musicians and people express themselves. There is a bouquet of flowers near the mouthpiece representing how there are always good intentions put into the actions, and how even careless love is still love, but without enough care the end result can end up in death and tragedy, as represented by the still smoking gun.

Goodnight, Irene

I always found the song Goodnight Irene, to be slightly mysterious and I wanted to portray that in my drawing. The origins of the song are unclear, linked to no particular event or person and I feel like that truly embodies the spirit of the American folk song, and folk songs all over the world. Lead Belly only mentions that he heard it once and now it is a popular song resung and covered by many musicians across the American folk song genre.

In my drawing I illustrated a man playing his guitar and singing towards the moon. I see the moon as an embodiment of Irene, since it is a peaceful symbol and the name Irene also evokes peacefulness from history and from its name origin.

Cocaine Habit Blues

After listening to this song for the first time, I wanted to draw something that represented how a person might feel on the effects of cocaine, and why it is so powerful that artists such as Lead Belly would bother to sing about it with such emotion. In other variations of the song such as Johnny Cash's, the lyrics go even darker and narrate how cocaine had influenced a young man to murder a woman. Drugs and women seem to go together in many of these songs, it makes me wonder if musicians back then face a similar problem to many famous musicians and celebrities today with drug problems. Domestic abuse is obviously extremely frowned upon in todays society, but probably a much more common issue when these songs were popular. Feelings of anger and regret are a common theme throughout, along with addiction and lack of self-restraint.

Louis Collins

For this song, I focused on the repeated line "The angels laid him away". I found the notion of angels extremely comforting but also ethereal and otherworldly. I wanted to show my own abstract representation of "angels" coming down and laying Louis Collins' soul to rest. Another line that fascinated me was "the people they dressed in red". I found red to be an unusual color associated to funerals, so I wanted a splatter of red in the painting as well. Louis Collins was mentioned to have been shot to death, so the red splatter represents his blood leaving him, overlaid over the angels coming to take him away.

Coming Through the Rye

For this song, I thought the more sexual undertone of the lyrics made it quite different and unique from the other songs. It somehow makes the time period more relatable when I imagine this song being sung by raunchy men in a tavern, just enjoying themselves and having a jolly time.

For my drawing I wanted to express the strong imagery of a sexual encounter happening in a field of rye. The wilderness of the rye adds to the mysteriousness of the event. It hides the mans face and just barely covers the more explicit parts of the body. It almost seems like he is drawing the viewer into the rye, and into the sexually unknown.

I also wanted to express the idea of the loss of innocence and equating it with entering the rye, and thus entering adulthood and sexuality. This theme was explored in the book, "Catcher in the Rye" where the main character mishears part of the song and imagines himself catching bodies in the rye. Specifically, he wants to catch the children from running out of the rye field and falling off the cliff, or metaphorically he wanted to keep them from being exposed to adulthood and the sins that it brought.

Banks of the Ohio

For the song, Banks of the Ohio, I wanted to capture how Willie, the main character in the song, sees his lover. It is fascinating to see how common place violent acts such as murder are. I imagine Appalachia, being such an isolated place, witnessed a lot more passion driven actions.

He is infatuated with her in his own way but when she rejects his marriage proposal, he goes blind with rage and kills her. In my drawing I show a romanticized face of a woman "bleeding" into the darkness. The black stripes are slashing away at her face, in the same way that I imagine Willie to be slashing away at her body.

The black stripes are also representing the fading of both her memory and also his rage and passion after the act. I imagine a lot of regret after he killed her and wanting to take back his actions, but he cannot stop the inevitability of ending her existence.

Mary Don't You Weep

For this week's song, I focused on the imagery of fire for multiple reasons. The most obvious is the line, "No more water but fire next time" when describing God's next way of cleansing the world after the great flood. The constant reference to Moses also brought to my mind when Moses saw the burning bush, which was when God revealed himself to Moses. Fire thus brought a feeling of ferocity and life and "cleansing". I thought it was an interesting way of interpreting the song, which is to tell Mary to stop weeping and to see that no matter how hopeless it seems there will always be a fire to bring back life and hope.

Swing Low Sweet Chariot

For this week I chose the song, Swing Low Sweet Chariot. I was enamored by the bittersweet sound of the song and how such a deep sense of hope could be conveyed through music. Reading through some of the history of the song, I was really attracted to the idea that it was not only in a religious context but also used to reference the Underground Railroad movement when slaves from the south would use it to escape to their freedom. The chariot of angels became a sign of hope and freedom, which I tried to convey through my drawing.

In the song it mentions looking over the Jordan River and seeing the chariot, so I imagined seeing it's bright reflection in the waters. Perhaps it is actually the sun's reflection, and it is simply the bright colors that is the symbol of hope. Either way I wanted to give it an ephemeral feel of being this seemingly unreachable glimpse of heaven, or freedom.

You are my Sunshine

I had a much darker impression of You are my Sunshine than most people. While the main chorus brings up a happy feeling the more I listened to the rest of the lyrics the more I felt a little disconcerted. The singer says many things such as "If you leave me to love another, you'll regret it all one day" which I found border line creepy and sadistic. While it is natural to feel jealous and petty I feel like a healthy person would be able to understand, contain, and eventually let go of these feelings if he/she truly loved the other person. But to hold on this jealousy and almost have a threatening subtext behind the words is a clear indication of that one "psycho ex" that just won't leave you alone.

In my drawing I tried to represent this clear light or "sunshine" that pushes away the darkness, or in my drawing, I have more literal representations such as demon faces and snakes that are fleeing from the light. However on closer look, in the center of the light I have drawn a vague outline of another demon-like face, to show that it is not true light (or love) that is the source, but is actually evil disguised by other feelings such as lust and greed, but not love.

Down in the Valley

With Down in the Valley, I had a very literal understanding of the song, where the singer is a man who is longing for this unreachable woman. She is, in his mind, this angelic being that can save him from this "Birmingham Jail". This is why I wanted to draw a woman in white in a very dreamlike setting with her back to him. I did not want her to seem too real because I think that she is more of a memory or a construct of woman that he may have been with once, and is more of a hope than a real person.

First Song

For my first song, I chose a chinese song that I remember my mom singing to me when I was very little. It was ingrained in me deeply because it was one of the few chinese songs that I remember hearing and it was one of the few thin strings of connection I had to my chinese heritage.

The song itself is called "Song of Kelamayi" and it is about a place in Xinjiang, China, a desert in the northwest region of China. Since my Chinese was never the best, I only understood a few phrases and  my interpretation of the song was that Kelamayi was a vast and beautiful place of a certain wildness that was destroyed when oil was discovered there and it became industrialized into an oil town. In my drawing I tried to convey the sense of vastness and the beauty of this desert landscape with oil towers slowly encroaching on the sides of the drawing.

It is with a sense of irony that much later I asked my mom about the specific meaning of the song that she told me the complete opposite was true. The song was describing the original landscape of Kelamayi as unfavorable and barren, and that the singer only started to appreciate the land when the oil town started to boom and provided a habitable city to live in. I found it interesting to note that the song was written in the 1950s-60s when the Communist mentality was extremely prevalent and they wanted to encourage the idea of labor. In this case the oil town was a prime example of how labor brought profit to the government and therefore the people and the country. This song was commonly sung throughout China back when my mom was still a young girl. Very comparable to how American children learn patriotic songs such as "This land is your land"