Week Four: Banks of The Ohio

This song (and I am listening now to the Joan Baez version) is so sad and so beautiful. It is an combination of the sense of the loss, the guilt the singer feels for killing his love, and the sense of the love, a love which could render such great loss. It is the sense of holding tight to something that you know is going away soon, that you only want to keep holding on to. Further, it is something that you are driving away, or have driven away, so mixed in is a sense of anger and regret.

My piece this week (sorry I still don't have images) is a wire sculpture. I think that the river is a great medium to express the feeling of this song, as I said above, the sense of something that you can't hold onto, like water running through your fingers. It also makes me think of the passage of time, of the ability to move over and through love and loss and anger, and then to sing about it. I tried to capture this movement in my sculpture, and to make one think of a river through the use of blue and from having an origin of flow, an upstream vanishing point so to say. There is downward movement too, however, because it is a song about loss and ultimately of drowning. The ring is sort of obvious, but I like it.

Week Three: Mary Don't You Weep

Listening to the different versions of Mary Don't You Weep, I am thinking about the conversation we had in class about You are My Sunshine, why the Dylan/Cash version seemed so much more performance oriented than felt, so unlike the Mississippi John Hurt version. Similarly, I am drawn more to the Spiritual versions of Mary Don't You Weep than the Gospels. It seems less of a style, less recognizable perhaps as a genre, but more honest.

We spoke about voice last week. I find that in the spirituals, especially the Leadbelly version, the voice is really prominent. This version is not very much like the Pete Seeger version, but in both I feel like I am listening to someone singing a song....and it is very much about what they are singing, how they feel the song, and how they are able to communicate it. I like how both Seeger and Leadbelly sung the song in a faster pace than I would have because it gave the words a different feel than when I first read the lyrics. The Leadbelly version is my favorite....and I think part of that has to do with the different voices that come into it, the second singer, and the fact that there is talking at the beginning of the recording.....it gives it a sense, once again, of someone singing a song in a place, with other people, and with their own story to tell with it.

Week Two: Down in the Valley

Sorry this is a late start with the blogs.


What was very strong for me in this song, despite my uncertainty about the lyrics at times, is a sense of intensity of feeling that is fully divulged, of acceptance of a loss and reverence for the melancholy that ought come with it. In my picture I wanted to link the idea of a valley, this lowness, this melancholy, with the people who are involved, and to pain the part of the woman, whose side you do not hear. I did not mean for the two figures to be the speaker/singer and his lady, but rather the lady and her lover, or at least a possible form of them. They are meant to be beautiful and easy because I wanted to hold onto the idea that the melancholy and loss of the speaker might not be unjust, but just be, as loss is sometimes the way of things, and that sadness can be caused by beauty.

Week One: You are My Sunshine