<<<Back to page 1

Ballads of the Barefoot Mind

I’ll return in the Refrain below to a deeper discussion of the murder ballad, though you’ll see we never quite got away from it – but for now I’ll move on specifically to Dan’s ballad project.  First, I must note that it is neither singular nor isolated.  Barefoot Mind is part of his internal warp and weft, a string intoning in a resonating web of connections with the rest of his work and life.  It involves everything from simple sketches to opera, from the false track of foxes to the magic and deceit of elves.  I can’t do its breadth and depth justice in this medium.  

Yet, Dan summed it up succinctly.  “My artistic interests are situated at the intersection of visual, musical and storytelling arts. Happily, the Ballads of the Barefoot Mind project has allowed me to combine all three.” 

MBM: Your ballad project seems to have developed over several years and has many ‘working parts.’  How did it come about and take shape?

Tam Lin (original sketch) – 2004, Dan Dutton – ink and watercolor on paper

DD: Ballads of the Barefoot Mind started with a little set of thumbnail-sized sketches of images from 36 ballads that I made in my teens, all the ballads that I was learning to sing at that time. From the ’70s, when I began working on learning the ballads in earnest, up until the point that I began the set of twelve large oil paintings for what would become the Ballads of the Barefoot Mind show, I would occasionally draw or paint one of those ballad images. My idea was that, just as the title of a ballad sums up something about the story, there is a mental image – the ultimate scene from the ballad which best expresses the story…

I have always been a trance style singer – I pretty much have to close my eyes to sing a ballad. When I close my eyes, the film begins! This happened to me when I was a child – when I listened to the ballads I saw them in my mind, the characters, the scenes, their clothes, the landscape, etc. I suspect that most people do something similar, but a visual artist develops particular skills in this regard, as does a budding theater director. Each pass through the ballad adds another layer of detail, and the film comes into greater focus.

The paintings are large, most of them 10 ft x 12 ft, and the technique that I used on them requires careful planning and a lot of time painting layers of colored glazes. It occurred to me that although the approach had something in common with the long period required to learn a ballad in depth, the actual performance length was radically different. So I decided to do a set of “one-a-night” paintings… for 36 consecutive evenings. I could develop the image in my mind, but I was not allowed to make preparatory sketches. (I would break that rule a few times!) The images would be done with the quickest technique I had, which was to use sepia ink and a large brush. I could add watercolor after the image was laid down, but the goal was to do the painting as quickly as the ballad could be performed. The longest one was “Tam Lin,” at under 14 minutes – most were under 6.  When I started work on the twelve large paintings I had to pick that dozen from the full set and, although a lot of considerations went into the choices, generally I chose the ones I knew in the greatest detail, the ones I had worked through in a number of drawings and paintings.

“True Thomas” and “Tam Lin” are the two great ballads about the otherworld and that’s the reason that they form the entrance and exit to Ballads of the Barefoot Mind. “True Thomas” is an enticing, if perilous, there-and-back adventure that “explains” how one becomes a singer, and a prophet – “Tam Lin” is a kidnapping, or hunk-knapping, with a narrow escape showing that real love is not for the faint of heart. So those were the bookends.

Tam Lin – 2004, Dan Dutton – oil on canvas

During that same period I was doing a lot of research, both on the ballads and various theories concerning text and performance, the symbolism of blood, comparative mythology of fox and wolf imagery, the symbolism of colors… I filled many notebooks with quotes and citations.

The tougher side of the research was in crime. Luckily, I [knew] a judge at the time who helped me with recordings and videos of testimony from a laundry list of violent crimes. I looked at police photos of crime scenes, read studies of serial killers and garden variety killers, studied knives and talked to knife nuts until I understood what a “little pen knife” actually was, and exactly how to kill someone with one. You name it. This is not the type of material I thought that I was interested in! I have never been especially drawn to murder or horror genres in film, for instance, or literature. I don’t own a gun, and even the knives I have are culinary or aimed at art. I actually thought that I might be a pacifist at one point in my life. Now I know better.

The turning point in the one-ballad-a-night challenge came when I got to “The Cruel Mother.” The image I chose was the wiping of the pen knife on her shoe, after she’s killed her new born triplets. As poetry it all comes out so quick, just four lines plus the burden. As an image, it’s complicated – one has to incorporate the bloody corpses of three newborn infants. There are little hands and fingers, legs, heads – how are they to be arranged? In a pile? How would a real murderer do it – one that would think to wipe the blade on her shoe?

I didn’t have the technical skill to pull off the pile as an improvisation, so I resorted to making preparatory sketches. And just how much preparation is necessary to do the job well? Would looking at the murdered corpses of newborn infants be required? Yes, it is required, at least in the realm of reverie – imagination – that intangible but essential skill. Otherwise what makes the ballad singer think they are qualified to walk in The Cruel Mother’s shoes?

Perhaps it is better to keep everything at a superficial level after all. Back away from that ballad, lest ye know too much! I did the drawing, and I recorded the ballad, but it cost me.  And these experiences are part of what convince me that the murder ballads are still a great and very perilous territory in the human condition, hardly explored after centuries of use.

Continue to page 3>>>