The Civil Wars (photo by Allister Ann)

[This is our third post this week on The Civil Wars’ “Barton Hollow.”  Read the first one here, and the second one here.]

Take me to the river

In her debut week with the blog, Shaleane introduced us to Nick Cave‘s beautiful and terrible “Little Water Song,” an incredibly gripping murder ballad from the victim’s perspective.  She writes:

What I find compelling about this song — besides the beautiful lyrics — is Cave’s empathy for the victim, the way he makes explicit the role that nature plays in her death (weapon, witness, grave, comforter, confidant, new lover), and the way he introduces in the last line the emotion that we haven’t really talked about yet but surely must at some point: hate.

What Shaleane finds in “Little Water Song,” and some of the other songs we’ve discussed is the way in which water and especially rivers represent multifaceted, or multi-functional, symbols in the lexicon of murder ballads.  Water brings death and water brings (re-)birth.  Rivers wash away our sins and rivers hide (or at least relocate) the evidence.  Water, or the lack of it, is a sign of our distance from redemption.

In “Barton Hollow,” our despairing perpetrator is haunted by what is underneath the water.  He is fully convinced, perhaps because of what is hidden there, that washing in the river, a re-baptism at the hands of a “preacher man,” is not going to save his soul.  I’ve noted in the last two posts the way in which The Civil Wars make use of the metaphors and imagery of Southern, mostly Christian, religion to present psychologically and artistically compelling songs that engage us both in utter despair and complete rebirth.  Their achievement, in part, is in making these metaphors and symbols from the engaging and meaningful for a broad audience.

I don’t know that I can come close to completely summing up here all that the river represents, or how the various things that the river represents interact with each other, but wanted to make an installment in this ongoing conversation.  There is drowning and death; there is (re)birth and baptism.  All of these streams wind this way and that across an overgrown, lush, Southern landscape of song, flowing slowly, occasionally filling lagoons or overgrown coves.

Let’s give “Barton Hollow” another listen, and then see where things flow from there.  

It’s a long way down

North Carolina-based Delta Rae gives us “Bottom of the River” on their debut album, Carry the Fire.  In a song suffused with biblical allusion, and a landscape pervaded with God’s judgment, the river again gives us birth and death, sacrifice and catastrophe.  We encounter a song, and hear a voice, that floods the banks and threatens to overwhelm us with powers both natural and supernatural.

Here’s a clip of the song from Soundcloud.  The graphic gives you a good indication of what’s to come, so adjust your speakers accordingly.




“Bottom of the River” by Delta Rae (Spotify)

Hold my hand
Ooh baby it’s a long way down to the bottom of the river
Hold my hand
Ooh baby it’s a long way down
A long way down

If you get sleep or if you get none
The cock’s gonna call in the morning baby
Check the cupboard for your daddy’s gun
Red sun rises like an early warning

The Lord’s gonna come for your firstborn son
His hair’s on fire and his heart is burning
So go to the river where the water runs
Wash him deep where the tides are turning

And if you fall, if you fall

Hold my hand
Ooh baby it’s a long way down to the bottom of the river
Hold my hand
Ooh baby it’s a long way down
A long way down

The wolves will chase you by the pale moonlight
Drunk and driven by a devil’s hunger
Drive your son like a railroad spike
Into the water, let it pull him under

Don’t you lift him, let him drown alive
The good Lord speaks like a rolling thunder
Let that fever make the water rise
And let the river run dry

And I said hold my hand
Ooh baby it’s a long way down to the bottom of the river
Hold my hand
Ooh baby it’s a long way down
A long way down

Delta Rae

Although this song is not as spare in its musical arrangement as “Barton Hollow,” both songs clearly come from deep within the gut, with a power that invokes the Spirituals of that region, but perhaps of another time.  This latter song really is a stand out for Delta Rae on their debut album, most of which is fairly pop-oriented.  “Bottom of the River” is in another league, to my ears, as far as its power to arrest our attention and catch us with echoes of Abraham and Isaac and the prospect that death and redemption will arrive for us at the same moment.  A call-and-response structure to the verses evoke Southern Gospel traditions, and its rhythm moves from the predictable hammer swings of a work song into an ecstatic frenzy at the end of the song.

Here is Delta Rae providing a live performance of the song for a Los Angeles radio station:

I’m not sure exactly whether what goes on in this song is good for the soul or bad for the soul.  Whatever it does, it does thoroughly.

The wolves will chase you by the pale moonlight

I talked a little bit about playing with fire in the last post; at least relative to the use of religious symbols and metaphors in the songs of The Civil Wars.  It’s somewhat of an aside from the main point of the above discussion, but it seems to me that Delta Rae does a different kind of playing with fire in the music video that they developed for “Bottom of the River.”  Here we have a Southern setting, an all-white road crew or chain gang, a witch trial, Chinese demon masks, and a style of dancing evocative of South African gumboots dancing or African American fraternity “stepping.” 

Sort of a “Thriller” for the post-irony age in some ways.  To my initial viewing, it’s a bit of an overload of not exactly mutually-reinforcing symbols.  It sent up a few internal flares of alarm with regard to some of the racial coding of the video’s imagery and narrative–especially before I picked up on the witch hunt aspect.  The strange thing, for those of you not familiar with the history of witch hunts in the U.S., is that they were primarily a New England phenomenon.  This video, by its architectural and other symbols, is set in the rural South.

I don’t know what to make of the choice of flourescent lanterns…

Delta Rae’s Eric Holljes explains at Spinner.com what the thought behind the video was, especially that they wanted to separate the video from mapping exactly onto the song.  The witch hunt motif is an interesting, if not entirely geographically and (sub)culturally appropriate, overlay to the song.  It’s another set of tools, this time perhaps pagan or mystical, to work with in contemplating the song’s themes.  

However successful they are with the video at layering in new possibilities for meaning, the song still stands out as a sonic and symbolic tour de force.  Like “Barton Hollow,” it taps into a metaphysical landscape of pervaded by God’s judgment.  In “Barton Hollow,” our protagonist knows which way that judgment will fall.  In “Bottom of the River,” that judgment is a thing to be feared and managed by the appropriate sacrifice.  Death and redemption found in the same place, as the river continues to flow. 

That’s it for this week.  Pat takes up the reins for the next week.  Thanks for reading.

Oh, and here’s a short Spotify playlist with a few songs for the week.