Time Done Been Won't Be No More by William Gay

Author:William Gay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Time Done Been Won’t Be No More
ISBN: 9781938103742
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2010-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

MUSIC CRITICISM

TIME DONE BEEN WONT BE NO MORE

(But See That My Grave Is Kept Clean)

SEE IT AS A TREASURE CHEST or, more aptly, a Pandora’s box unleashing into the world not evil or hardships or death but ruminations and lamentations and commentaries upon them, fading picture postmarks mailed from a world that was already growing remote in 1952. That was the year Harry Smith released his Anthology of American Folk Music, and it must have been something to see: eighty-four songs on six LP records, two discs each for the three volumes, each volume with a title: Ballads, Social Music, and Songs. All in an elaborate, metal-hinged album accompanied by Smith’s surreal liner notes in a homemade booklet festooned with occult and arcane symbols.

The LP format was new in 1952. No longer was a record restricted to one song per side. Now each side could contain a series of songs, and the producer could play with them, arrange them in any order he chose. This was a revolutionary concept, and Harry Smith made the most of it.

The Anthology is a case of the sum being greater than its parts, and Smith achieved this because he heard sounds not just as themselves, but in relationship to other sounds, and set out to make a sort of aural hologram. Perfectly ordinary voices, even pleasant voices singing pleasant songs, are interred side by side with brief three-minute vignettes of darkness that light will not defray, horror that is only heightened by its contrast with the ordinary, so that some of the voices sound like screeches and mumbles and whispers leaked through mad-house walls, while the normal world continues without a misstep or altered heartbeat.

His thinking, in the sequencing of the Anthology, is so strange as to be almost beyond comprehension, but there’s a clue on the cover of the original liner notes. A drawing shows the hand of God tuning a dulcimer to the Celestial Monochord, tuning it to a Heavenly harmony that unites Air, Fire, Water, And Earth. His plan was to tie together the four volumes of the Anthology in a similar fashion, but only three were released in ‘52. (the fourth, which Smith apparently meant to represent Earth, was put out last year by Revenant Records.)

There wasn’t much of a market for folk music in 1952, other than prettified versions of songs like “On Top of Old Smoky” and “Goodnight Irene”, sweetened and made palatable enough for Your Hit Parade. To a generation of ears attuned to Perry Como and Patti Page, the Anthology’s old hardscrabble songs full of loss and death must have sounded totally alien, rantings and ravings and exhortations from another dimension.

Although the bulk of the songs was recorded only twenty-five or so years earlier (between 1927 and 1932), they seemed to be coming out of a world far more remote than that. This was not easy-listening music, it was not soothing Muzak played in the background as you lived your life. This was darker stuff. There was something there, crouched down out of sight, but you had to squint to see it.

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