Survival by Ballad
[Notes: Thanks to Pat for the title. I’m going to add some songs in here that are not murder ballads, but they fire some of the same synapses, and their relevance to the story I tell below should be apparent.]
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| Tim O’Brien |
If there’s one song that has been most influential in providing the personal impetus to create this blog, in collaboration with my friends, Shaleane and Pat, “Down in the Willow Garden” is it. Through this song, I came to understand better the deep and peculiar power of this genre. Here’s why.
I first learned the song because I liked the melody, and the poetry. I’m an amateur guitar player, and primarily learned to play it in order to accompany myself singing. “Down in the Willow Garden” was a tune that I learned to play “Carter-scratch” style—playing the melody on the bass strings through small modifications of chord shapes as I strummed along. I learned this style of guitar playing in a class at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, and still look for song melodies that lend themselves to it.
Ten years ago, when I worked in a college dorm as a member of residence life staff, two students came bursting into our apartment one late afternoon. They couldn’t wake their friend, the roommate of one of the two students. Let’s call her “Rebecca.” I went straight to their room to see if I could help. It was too late.
Rebecca, a young woman in her first year of college, had died in her sleep. But we didn’t know this at first. Her roommate had left for class early in the morning that day, thinking that Rebecca was still asleep. Our attempts to wake her that afternoon were futile. When the EMTs arrived, they made no attempt to revive her. The final report was that she had died of natural causes; her heart stopped, perhaps 12 hours or more before we discovered her.
This is the first and only time I have served as a first responder in a fatality. It was first of two times I have had to manage a death in a professional situation.
The hours, days, and weeks that followed involved a lot of crisis management—with the scene at hand, with the roommate and friend, and with the rest of the students in the dorm. There was a frightening mystery, as none of us could fully take it in and the cause of death was initially unknown. The students all basically shared identical dorm rooms, so the idea that somebody just like them could suddenly die was very present to them–all this piled onto their grief at losing a friend they had known and lived with for about 4 months.
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I didn’t know Rebecca particularly well. She was one of about 50 new students who had arrived on campus (most traveling by car or train in the immediate aftermath of September 11) and joined our residence community. I knew that she was friendly, active, and a very positive presence in making the most out of her early days at college and inspiring her new friends to do so as well. She was adventurous and friendly. I had never for a second had a worry that there was anything wrong with her, and was grateful that she was part of our dorm community.
All this is to say that my sadness at her loss did not arise from the loss of a personal friend, but from the loss of an active, bright, and promising young person, and somebody who was effectively in my charge. This sadness was overlaid with the demands managing through the shock of the experience of finding her dead, dealing with the emergency and police response, managing the visit of her devastated parents, and supporting a community of students who had both suddenly awoken to their own mortality and deeply missed their friend. It was a busy, demanding time.
I don’t remember the first time I picked up the guitar and started playing and singing in the days after her death. I don’t remember if I started playing and singing “Down in the Willow Garden” by accident or on purpose. What I do remember is that when I did start the song, an enormous amount of feeling unexpectedly and suddenly poured into it, through my playing and singing. I was quite unprepared for the song to catalyze my feelings about this whole situation.
Without going line by line, the song uncovered the shock and seeming unfairness of a young woman’s life ended while she was in her sleep—somebody who had every reason to believe she was safe where she was and that when she went to sleep, she would wake up. The vivid depiction offered by the protagonist’s confession in the song somehow tapped into the survivor’s guilt that I felt, and I’m sure many of her fellow students did, too. There was literally no sign that this was something that could have happened to her, and it seemed wrong that she went and we didn’t.
The survivor’s guilt had a different inflection for me, I suppose, because of my role with the students. There was a responsibility to look out for them and their health and well-being, and it had been circumvented by this completely unseen, sudden, and unlikely medical tragedy. My ability to protect my students had some pretty significant limitations. I knew this, of course, intellectually; but I felt it now. (See “White Squall” below.)
At the end of “Down in the Willow Garden,” the line “my race is run beneath the sun, the devil is waiting for me,” again captured that guilt, but also captured the sense of mortality that Rebecca’s situation presented to us all. I know I didn’t feel like I had enough “put right” to feel ready to leave this earth. I was far from ready for judgment, whatever it might be. This idea of facing doom and feeling unprepared probably also felt like clinging to life. Songs about facing death seemed to fit.
“Won’t You Come and Sing for Me?” by Hazel Dickens,
performed by Hot Rize (inc. Tim O’Brien)
Fundamentally, there was really no logic or meaning to Rebecca’s death, but there was a great deal of emotion, both within me and all around me. All that could find its way into the song, and into the playing of the guitar. It was overwhelming, but it worked my soul over. It continued to do so for some time.
What happens in the singing of these songs is not a macabre celebration of death or murder. One thing that often happens in these songs is that the singer, and probably the listener, get taught a strong lesson in the fragility of life. For centuries, people have lived with this truth, and I think it teaches compassion.
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Modern medicine probably isolates us from it a bit more now, but everyone at some time comes to confront death directly. In earlier, more violent and less healthy times, the people that made and sang these ballads also experienced this as a fact of life—probably from when they were very young to when they were very old. That I had made it as far into life as I had without such an experience is probably far, far from the norm for most of human history.
“O Death,” by Ralph Stanley
In a small postscript to her imaginative construction of the back story to “Omie Wise,” novelist and singer, Anna Domino (one half of the duo Snakefarm), writes:
“American folk ballads bear testimony to our hopes and fears. They are composed of human experience and the peculiar perceptions of right and wrong through which we view and interpret the battle raging between good and evil. With these songs, we conjure up forgiveness, consolation, and the power to face and defy the implacable forces that would destroy us: poverty, the wrath of God, and the temptation to stray outside the social contract. Tales of strength and achievement have their place, but the stories that really take hold of us and make the myth personal are those of loss, regret, and the terrible distance of home. A distance each of us walks alone, through a vast and unforgiving landscape, eyed by a harsh and implacable God.”
I hardly ever tell this story in person, let alone write it up for public consumption. But, if anybody wants to know why I started this peculiar little blog, it’s because of this song. It healed me. Anna Domino’s statement suggests that I’m probably not alone in having this experience through a ballad such as this.
I probably could add further layers of generalizations and summary statements about what happened to me and what we should all learn from it. I’m trying my best not to do that, though. I hope what I’ve said here about the particulars of my experience resonates with somebody somewhere and is helpful.
I probably could add further layers of generalizations and summary statements about what happened to me and what we should all learn from it. I’m trying my best not to do that, though. I hope what I’ve said here about the particulars of my experience resonates with somebody somewhere and is helpful.
In writing this story up, I had to go back and revisit memories of that time, which was challenging (as was the deliberation about how to present it here), but I should also add that “Down in the Willow Garden” no longer opens the door for that level of feeling anymore. I still enjoy the song and play it from time to time, but it no longer does the work it once did. I can’t say the same for “White Squall,” though. This one still gets me, just about every time.
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“White Squall,” by Stan Rogers, performed by Dan McKinnon.
“White Squall,” by Stan Rogers (Spotify) — Lyrics
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Coda:
I went to a memorial service today for a friend, who also died suddenly and naturally of heart failure, while driving near his property in rural Indiana. He’s gone too soon, and I was incredibly saddened to hear of his loss. He was a man of enormous spirit, heart, and compassion; a healer and a teacher. I don’t have enough distance from his death or from today’s memorial to write about them appropriately here. But, I hope I’ve learned something from him. I’m sure I didn’t learn enough while he was here.
“Longest Days,” by John Mellencamp
(Mellencamp talks about the conversation with his 100 year old grandmother that led to this song in the early part of this interview.)