Sometimes it’s a hard world for the little things
Holly Hunter and Nicholas Cage in “Raising Arizona”
Watching this pitch-perfect clip from Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Raising Arizona,” reminded me of Pat’s introduction to “Two Sisters” , where he mentions that he first heard Clannad’s version as his wife sang it to calm their infant son. Here, in the Coen’s cinematic and hilarious meditation on life and death, guilt and innocence (among other themes), Edwina sings “Down in the Willow Garden” to their “adopted” (kidnapped) son.
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As I mentioned in my last post, “Down in the Willow Garden” has been in my playing repertoire for a long time. My kids, however, have never heard me play it, or if they’ve heard me play it, they’ve never heard me sing it–for more than 10 years. I don’t think that they, like young Nathan Arizona, Jr., in the clip above, or like Pat’s son with “Two Sisters,” ever heard a murder ballad as a lullaby. I could be forgetting. But, I know that as my kids have been growing up, “Down in the Willow Garden” hasn’t been part of their musical environment–at least if I’ve had anything to do with it.
When Pat mentioned that he performs “Fair Ellender” for his 8th grade students as part of an introduction to early American history, it made me think about how children first come to encounter these songs, and the related questions of when and by whom.
These songs are hard, and they deal not only with graphic violence but with dark feelings. Is there an appropriate instinct to shield kids from the violence or from the emotional complexity that makes these songs compelling? It’s an interesting question regarding poetics and moral formation, and is one that I think a little differently about in the abstract than I do as a parent. I’m still trying to figure out how to fit it all together. (As I think I noted in a recent comment, I forgot a certain important point about “Matty Groves,” because I’m in the habit of skipping over that song when it pops up on a Sing Out! mix cd that we often road-trip with.)
I think there’s probably an age of innocence where the songs are not verbal nonsense, like they would be for infants, but are in a sense emotional nonsense–that is, the complexity of what’s taking place in the song and why somebody would sing it can’t be unraveled by the child, but the song still can be understood literally. That probably makes the songs more distressing than helpful or interesting. By the time kids hit the age of Pat’s middle school students, though, I’m it’s probably helpful to introduce kids to the power of what’s present in these songs. There going to tap into that power somewhere, this venue might be preferable to some others.
It may also be that kids merely take away what they’re able to hear, and ultimately we don’t present these songs to kids so much as they go out and find them–or whatever their more contemporary iterations might be. This may mean that they might treat a murder ballad as a horror story, and an older kid might treat as a cautionary tale, or a still older kid might hear it as a cathartic proxy “confession” (as we discussed in the comments about “Little Water Song” here.). For as simple as these songs seem, I think those layers of complexity and meaning are there.
Steering back to “Down in the Willow Garden,” though, there’s something that rings true in the “Raising Arizona” context, particularly because of the generational aspects of the song–the father’s bad advice, and the son’s regret at his execution now being the spectacle that the father is forced to watch. Edwina’s moment of singing to the baby rings true, given their uncertain circumstances and the sense of life’s fragility that the song can invoke. The beauty of the Coen Brothers’ irony in this scene is that the humor and the truth come through with equal salience.
A short series of somewhat incomplete thoughts, I suppose. I’ve been digging up a lot of themes over the last week and a half, and a good bit about what I’ve drawn out is unsettled, at least for me, and not particularly susceptible to conclusion. I find, though, that your questions and comments help, so please weigh in if you have some thoughts about this.
I have a few contemporary performances to add to the mix for one final, mostly musical post before the end of the week, and then Shaleane will take us to some new places; including, I think, an artistic response or two to “Down in the Willow Garden.”
Steering back to “Down in the Willow Garden,” though, there’s something that rings true in the “Raising Arizona” context, particularly because of the generational aspects of the song–the father’s bad advice, and the son’s regret at his execution now being the spectacle that the father is forced to watch. Edwina’s moment of singing to the baby rings true, given their uncertain circumstances and the sense of life’s fragility that the song can invoke. The beauty of the Coen Brothers’ irony in this scene is that the humor and the truth come through with equal salience.
A short series of somewhat incomplete thoughts, I suppose. I’ve been digging up a lot of themes over the last week and a half, and a good bit about what I’ve drawn out is unsettled, at least for me, and not particularly susceptible to conclusion. I find, though, that your questions and comments help, so please weigh in if you have some thoughts about this.
I have a few contemporary performances to add to the mix for one final, mostly musical post before the end of the week, and then Shaleane will take us to some new places; including, I think, an artistic response or two to “Down in the Willow Garden.”