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.