Mona Lisa Jigsaw – Nordevco Inc.

My good friend and co-writer for this blog is visiting here this weekend, and he’s just gone off to bed, so I figured I’d dash off one last post before we take off for parts unknown tomorrow.

He and I ended up doing the shopping for supper on our way back from the airport; sushi.  As my wife had been intending to do it originally, I asked her to text me the list of things she was thinking about picking up in addition, and she did.  Then she sent one further text, stating simply “Sake?”

We got some, and when we got home Ken presented it to her, as we’d understood her text to mean that she wanted some (though she doesn’t usually drink it) and was asking me to get it.  She looked perplexed, and when we explained ourselves she said that she’d meant the text to suggest sake as something Ken might like to drink, and that I should ask him.

It’s a bit like trying to read into a ballad, isn’t it?  I know it seems a silly example, but it struck me as really rather apt.  How many words do we get in a ballad to figure out what’s *really* going on?  It amused me no end to see all of the possible complex readings one could derive from “Pancho and Lefty“, despite the fact that the economy of language in the song is extreme.  One can push it to absurdity.

L.H.O.O.Q – Marcel Duchamp, 1919

Why did the brown girl really kill “Fair Ellender“?  Did the condemned man in “The Mercy Seat” tell a truth or a lie, or both?  What does that mean?

Even when the murder motive or “the truth” is clear in a ballad, we keep pushing. Did Lord Barnard commit murder, or was it manslaughter?  Why do we revisit time and time again a simple murder in St. Louis?  What do we need to know that compels us to keep plumbing the depths of these songs for meaning?

“Edward” this week is a perfect example.  Irish and American versions almost all include that argument about the sapling that seems so odd.  Scholars read it as a euphemism concerning conflict developing around incest, even though there are examples from England and Scotland that clearly do not fit that reading.  And it seems some 18th Century gentleman rewrote the folk ballad into an excellent literary work which one might read in several different ways.

I approached “Edward” academically, mainly because I know these posts will be hanging on the Internet for who knows how long and I wanted to acquit myself well.  When people have been writing about a song since 1827, you want to make sure you’ve got your bases covered.  But I missed something too.

I came to “Edward’s” power through exactly the kind of ‘make your own meaning’ experience that David Atkinson talked about… through the “inherent instability in meaning” that “allows for the re-creation of meaning at every encounter with a ballad.” I wasn’t going to write about this, but talking to Ken tonight inspired me otherwise.

Thirty are Better than One – Andy Warhol, 1963

I first heard “Edward” when I was in the midst of a serious conflict with my brother, that we’ve since resolved. But at the time, it was intense. We didn’t speak for a good long while, and it was ultimately over nothing (or so it seemed); a passing comment made in my parents’ kitchen. It blew up into a horrible fight, immediately. So, when I understood the ballad’s theme of fratricide, it struck me.

And as I looked further into the ballad, I discovered that fateful line “It was all about the cutting of a rod that would never be a tree.”   Funny; I *never* questioned the validity of that, or saw it as euphemism.  For me, in my life, a violence between my brother and myself was born of something equally meaningless!  It made perfect sense, and in fact the song helped me slowly gain perspective on what had happened.

When you read Tristram Coffin’s essay on “Edward”, he points out that the spontaneous fight over seemingly nothing just doesn’t work in a traditional ballad.  There’s no example in the tradition where the entire back story about a rivalry that could lead to murder is simply left out.  If it’s important enough to kill over, the story gets told to one degree or another.  I’m not a ballad scholar, but I’m sure he’s right.

Self Portrait as Mona Lisa – Salvador Dali, 1954

However, the simple fact of the matter is that the ballad worked for me in the here and now precisely because I understood from painful experience that ’emotional baggage’ could easily lead to an intense fight over something as meaningless as cutting a sapling.  Coffin is right; but I’m right too.  When I hear or sing that song, I can’t help but bring my memory and experience into it, and it helps.

Isn’t that what people have been doing all along?  Isn’t that why there are so awful many examples and variants of the Child Ballads we write about here?  Jeannie Robertson’s David and Nic Jones’ Edward were born on the same island, with the same ‘ballad DNA’, but are light years apart.

Is it just with the old songs, because we’ve had so much time to reinterpret them?  No. Even the newer songs we write about here usually have multiple covers.  Did “Pancho and Lefty” mean the same thing to Willie and Merle when they sang it as it meant to Emmylou when she did?

I don’t think it can.

And I’m not sure how much we can really know for sure about any of it.

And the older I get, the more I think I like it that way.

Thanks for reading this week, my friends!

Leonardo Morphed to the Mona Lisa – Lillian Schwartz (adapted from “The Art Historian’s Computer” in Scientific American, April 1995, p. 106