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"