Mystery in American Song

Bob Dylan once said, “All these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels. . . . I mean, you’d think that the traditional-music people could gather from their songs that mystery is a fact, a traditional fact.”

Dylan may or may not have come up with this idea back in 1967, when he told this to Nat Hentoff in his justly famous Playboy interview. But the idea took hold. Simply put, the idea was this: that in traditional American songs are mysteries, and these mysteries are not solvable ones. Instead they lend the music a quasi-religious significance. The mysteries in traditional American songs are akin to the mysteries of faith--the unknowability of God, of death, of salvation.

This brings up a question. Did the people who created and sang these songs find them mysterious themselves, or is the mystery we find in them purely a product of our distance from them?

First, let’s look at “The Old Black Crow in the Hickory Tree,” first recorded by Harry Frankel in 1924 and 1925, and then by The Allen Brothers in 1930. The song starts by posing the mystery of the old black crow in the hickory nut tree, but never tells us exactly what is so mysterious about it. The rest of the song is a series of jokes, interspersed with the chorus: “It certainly is a mystery about the old black crow in the hickory nut tree.”

The song was most likely a minstrel number, and could have been anywhere from ten to fifty years old when it was first recorded. Frankel, a minstrel performer from Indiana who lived in New York, later said that he didn’t write his own material, and I have no idea if the Allen Brothers heard Frankel’s version or whether the song was simply frequently performed back then.

At any rate, what strikes me is that the song is all about a mystery, and we don’t find out what the mystery is. In other words, the whole concept of mystery is treated as just as much of a joke as the doctor who falls in the well because he should have been tending the sick.

The same thing happens in “Diddie Wah Diddie,” here performed by Blind Blake. Once again, we’re introduced to a mystery in the first verse, and the chorus is about the same mystery; the rest of the song is a series of jokes.

So here are two examples, both of them probably from the nineteenth or very early twentieth century, of songs that deliberately obfuscate meaning, that create mystery by talking nonsense, all the while commenting on that very fact. In other words, to use a British phrase, they’re taking the piss out of mystery.

Harry Smith, who compiled Folkway’s Anthology of American Folk Music, was quite enamored of mystery. He began Volume 3 of the Anthology, the one devoted to “songs” (as opposed to “ballads” and “social music”), with Clarence Ashley’s “The Coo Coo Bird,” probably one of the hardest songs to summarize because every verse is about something completely different. But in the light of “Diddie Wah Diddie” and “Old Black Crow,” it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on in this song: it’s nonsense, plain and simple.

You have to keep in mind that there was very little mystery in the popular songs of the 1950s and early ’60s; by contrast, the commercial cultural musical products of the South a generation or two earlier already sounded as weird to Smith and Dylan as traditional Bulgarian, Mongolian, or Central African music might have. There were various reasons to be impressed with the mysteries of this old music: the methods of transmission through the ages had resulted in strange corruptions and recombinations, the sound was abrasive and harsh in comparison to contemporary music, the subject matter often implied the universality of death.

I won’t claim that there’s nothing really mysterious about the old traditional American songs. But I do think that with a little digging you can find pretty reasonable explanations. Some songs were mysterious on purpose--Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night--Cold Was the Ground” is clearly meant to be as mysterious as God himself, especially since Blind Willie Johnson’s other songs are all about God. (Dolly Parton’s “The Mystery of the Mystery” is another song that falls firmly in the religious camp.) Junior Parker's "Mystery Train" is also deliberately mysterious, quite self-consciously so. Some songs, on the other hand, were mysterious as a joke. And some songs were simply nonsense--which is inherently mysterious if you try to take it seriously.

I’m going to come out and say it: Dylan was wrong. I think it’s important to make a distinction between the kind of mysteries one solves and the kind of mysteries that confront us when faced with the ineffable. It’s only natural and probably inevitable that we should confuse the two, so that what is not yet solved gains an aura of the sacred. We naturally, then, elevate the more mysterious products of our culture. The mysteries they evoke lend them depth, and we call them more authentic, among other things. This is what attracted Dylan and Smith to them, and, in part, what caused them to elevate the “old, weird America” (to quote Greil Marcus) over, say, the relatively un-mysterious music of Duke Ellington or Cole Porter.

But if we rob traditional music of its mystery, are we necessarily lessening our enjoyment of it? This reminds me of how entranced I used to be by R.E.M.’s Murmur when it first came out, or how the mysteries of what Mick Jagger was really singing in various places on Exile on Main Street kept me listening far more studiously than if I’d known all the lyrics. As any reader of crime novels or watcher of crime shows can attest, mystery is very compelling stuff.

But what makes mysteries compelling isn’t just letting them sit there, or accepting them as fact, as Dylan advocated. What makes mysteries compelling is trying to solve them. I hope I’ve solved a few, and I hope you can too.

--Yuval

Comments

[Graham Vickers]

I offer the theory that Dylan championed mysteries because it meant that if his own songs didn't make a whole lot of sense it might always be ascribed to mysticism rather than the ingesting of mind-altering substances. "If dogs run free, then why not we?" Us enjoyed that one.

[Scott Sherer]

Just a word of thanks. My maternal grandmother Goldie Ford Morris (1907-1989) would have been 100 this past week. When I was a child, she would sing "The Old Black Crow.." to me. Your .mp3 recording is the first I've found which mentions the horse, the flea and mice shooting dice. Where did you find it?

[yuval taylor]

On an Allen Brothers CD which I bought for other reasons. I became quite enamored of this track. I'm so glad that you've found this song, and it's great that your grandmother used to sing it to you.