How to Lament, Part 3
Narratives without Arcs
Before we look at how the lament becomes entwined with instrumental music, let’s take a moment to see what becomes of the lament’s lyrical legacy.
As we saw in the last post, the Old Lament does not console. It starts with bad news and stays that way. In each of the songs that follow, we see the same dynamic at work. I’ve posted just a handful of examples, but enough I hope that you can begin to get a taste for it and see that this sort of approach is widespread.1
For years I listened to songs like the ones below and never noticed the lack of either consolation or narrative arc.2 I only noticed this dynamic when reading folk song lyrics in translation. In print, it struck me how weird, beautiful and straightforward they were, especially in comparison to contemporary songs. So, what do these songs do?
In Aesthetics of Sorrow, Tova Gamliel identifies four categories of lament speech that she noticed amongst Israeli Yemenite Jews. She noticed that the wailers shifted perspective amongst living to living, living to dead, dead to living and dead to dead. This over-simplication makes even more sense if you understand “dead” as being anything From the Other Side, including Death itself, or even God. The lament often switches from one mode to the other.
The lament is not a story, it is a conversation.
It’s a funny feeling that you get from these lyrics without an arc. It’s hard to describe, but without the arc, they are irreducible as images. They stay in the moment and refuse to budge. They are images that stay images.3
By not consoling, they refuse to participate in the social cliches that make sense out of the absurd. These cliches are often polite but necessary lies we all tell ourselves.4 These lies are often especially obvious to those who suffer the most and live in the outcast or oppressed classes.
In the end, this points to the paradox at the center of the female/male lament traditions and one of the reasons why lament-based music captures our imagination so powerfully: to console someone is a wonderful and necessary gift, but on some level, it is a betrayal of their grief. To welcome them back into civilization from the wilderness of their suffering is a blessing, but it can’t help but be a lie. This is why we so often do not know what to say. To not console, even for a moment, has the virtue of facing things as they are, in Baldwin’s words, “to have no need to pretend to be what we are not.” The sufferers are almost ecstatically intimate and are profoundly not alone, even in the wilderness.5
Rita Abadzi, “Hour of Death” (1935)
Holst-Warhaft (H-W) traces the history of the Greek amanes genre, a predecessor to rebetika. She demonstrates its connections, both real and imagined, to the feminine and the “Orient.”
“Thus the dark mysterious oriental strain of the Greek character is linked to the feminine through the art of lament…As a sort of stylized lament, the amanes is associated, in the Greek tradition, with the female voice.” (Amanes, the Legacy of the Oriental Mother, H-W)
As part of her demonstration, she includes the following song and says about it, “To anyone familiar with the Greek folk tradition, it is impossible not to see this bleak amanes as a form of lament.” (H-W)
Aman, aman (a hard to translate word- think “woe…”)
A man must think, aman aman…
At the hour of his death, aman, aman…!
That he’ll go into the black earth, aman
Into the black earth,
And his name will be erased, aman!6
Vera Hall “Death is Awful” (1939)
This is a good example of the difference between religious and non-religious lament. According to the headnotes in the Alabama Songbook, “The negative and earthly view of death expressed here is very unusual in spirituals.” Ralph Stanley would record an almost identical and much more popular version, but he, being more "religious," very revealingly leaves out the “is awful” part. Stanley and Hall both preserve the melismatic approach typically referred to as “Oriental.”7 Notice how the singer's identity changes from the afflicted to Death.
Oh, death is awful, (x3)
Spare me over another year.
If I was a flower in my bloom
Make death cut me down so soon
He'll stretch yo' eyes an' stretch yo' limbs,
This is the way death begins
Oh, death is awful, (x3)
Spare me over another year.
He'll fix yo' feet so you can't walk
He'll lock yo' jaws so you can't talk,
He'll close yo' eyes so you can't see,
At this very hour you must go with me
O death, have mercy,
O death, have mercy,
O death,
Jes' spare me over another year.
O death, have mercy,
O death, have mercy,
O death,
Jes' spare me over another year.
He'll fix yo' feet so you can't walk
He'll lock yo' jaws so you can't talk,
He'll close yo' eyes so you can't see,
At this very hour you must go with me.
Elvie Thomas and Lillie Mae “Geeshie” Wiley, “Motherless Child Blues” (1930)
Lillie Mae “Geeshie” Wiley has long been a source of fascination because of her odd slightly minor-keyed guitar style. Greil Marcus has posited that her other more famous song, Last Kind Word Blues, is a coded communication, with everyone in the song being amongst the dead in some fashion. In this song, which begins in a similar fashion, the communication from the dead is mediated by the “just before she died” trope.
My mother told me just before she died
My mother told me just before she died
My mother told me just before she died
My mother told me just before she died
Oh, Daughter, Daughter, please don't be like me
Oh, Daughter, Daughter, please don't be like me
Oh, Daughter, Daughter, please don't be like me
To fall in love with every man you see
But I did not listen what my mother said
But I did not listen what my mother said
But I did not listen what my mother said
That's the reason why I'm sitting in here today
Baby now she's dead, six feet in the ground
Baby now she's dead, she's six feet in the ground
Baby now she's dead, she's six feet in the ground
And I'm a child and I am drifting 'round
Do you remember the day baby, you drove me from your door
Do you remember the day baby, you drove me from your door
Do you remember the day you drove me from your door
"Go away from here, woman, and don't come here no more."
I walked away and I wrangled my hands and cried
I walked away and I wrang my hands and cried
I walked away and I wrang my hands and cried
Didn't have no blues, i couldn't keep tarryin' aroun'
Lottie Kimbrough, “Going Away Blues” (1929)
If you substitute a lost lover for the deceased, you get a very typical blues formula that was found in the earlier, female-dominated phase of blues singing.8 In these blues, we find the same method of addressing the other, and the same lack of consolation or narrative arc.9
I'm going away, it won't be long
I know you'll miss me from singing this lonesome song
I'm going away, won't be long
And then you know you must have done me wrong
My daddy got ways like a baby child
Those doggone ways are driving me wild
Those doggone ways are driving me wild
And that is why you never see poor Lottie smile
My heart aches so I can't be satisfied
I believe I'll take a train and a ride
I believe I'll take a train and a ride
'Cause I miss my cruel daddy from my side
I've got Cadillac ways, got some super ideas
I can't see what brought me here
I can't see what brought me here
It must have been this new canned city beer
I'm lame and blind, can't hardly see
My doggone daddy turned his back on me
'Cause I'm lame, I can't hardly see
I ain't got nobody to really comfort me
Anonymous, trans, Lorca “Cante Jondo” (1922, translation)
Lorca’s defense of the Cante Jondo makes a distinction between the ancient forms and the modern variations. He says: “Estébanez Calderón, in his lovely Escenas andaluzas, notes that the cana is the primitive stem of these songs, which preserve their Arab and Moorish affiliation, and observes, with his characteristic perspicacity, that the word caña is little different from gannia, which is Arabic for ‘song’.” Note here again how the voice changes perspective and the impossibility of consolation. Also, and in this tune, and the next, we find the (pantheistic?) practice of speaking to animals, plants and rocks, just like Jephthah’s daughter.
Amidst the sea
a rock was standing
my girl sat down
to tell her suffering.
Only to Earth
will I tell my ruin,
in all the world
there’s none to trust in.
I ask the rosemary
ask each morning
if love has cure,
for, oh, I’m dying.
Hannah Rosenberg “I’ve Traveled Across Fields and Forests, Oh Woe!” (1947)
The sheet music says, “Lament” as printed in Yiddish Folksongs from The Ruth Rubin Archive. Notice the changing perspective of the voice as it goes from the living to the dead. The “oh woe” endings, similar to the “aman”s in Rita Abadzi’s lament, could be stand-ins for call and response parts from an audience missing in the recording booth. Adapted from a popular Ukranian WW1 song apparently.
I’ve traveled across fields and forests, oh woe, (x2)
Over there lies a dead soldier, oh woe. (x2)
And his body is torn asunder, oh woe,
From his limbs blood is flowing, oh woe.
Three brothers were escaping, oh woe,
But a bullet struck one of them, oh woe.
Who will chant the kaddish for me? Oh woe,
Who will bear the burning tapers at my funeral? Oh woe.
Who will come to my funeral? Oh woe.
Oh, only my faithful horse, oh woe.
Blackbird, blackbird, come a-flying, oh woe,
Rest a moment on my grave, oh woe.
Blackbird, blackbird flying swiftly, oh woe,
Tell my mother I am well, oh woe.
Mother, mother eat your food, oh woe,
You have already forgotten your son, oh woe.
Yiddish Lullaby, Anonymous
This lullaby is sung by “strangers to a child whose mother died in childbirth” or perhaps its “a bitter lament…uttered by the mother on her deathbed.” At any rate, this lullaby speaks for the dead to the living. Even though every parent has had this thought at some time, how many of us have put the feeling into words and spoken them out loud? How many have had the courage to face this fear, without consolation? See also the Motherless Child variations in blues.
My child, who will comb and caress you?
My child, who will clean your cradle?
Refrain: Without a mother, there is no comfort!
My child, who will clothe and adorn you?
My child, who will take you to cheder?
My child, who will make a man out of you?
My child, who will bless you under the khupe?
An International Anthology of these would be lovely.
Douglas Rushkoff has recently pointed out the male basis of the drama-> climax-> resolution narrative arc and called for post-narrativity. It’s an interesting tangent but he doesn’t tie it to the female lament structure.
"Images become the means of translating life-events into soul", “images don’t stand for anything” James Hillman
“The hostility to psychoanalysis in the past, today, and in the future, will always be a hostility against admitting that man lives by lying to himself about himself and about his world, and that character, to follow Ferenczi and Brown, is a vital lie.” Ernest Becker, Denial of Death
“There we seem to be most alone is where we most truly are not, if the depths of that heart are truly expressed and heard.” Kirkland, Gypsy Cante
Martin Schwartz, who included this track in an important anthology, translated this as follows:
Let each one stop and think of how the hour of death grows near:
Into the deep black earth he'll sink; his name will disappear.
He continues: “The phrase 'black earth', found already in Homer, occurs in other amanedhes about death. The mode sabah (of which neva sabah is a variant) is common for amanedhes about the transiency of life. The piece ends with a brief upbeat tsi'fte-teli [the two string style I discuss here].”
Whether or not all of these laments trace back, ultimately, to the “Old High Culture” of the neolithic Near East (Lomax), is something we’ll address further in the Orientalism series. I’m tempted for now to say that it is not bizarre to think that Vera Hall and Rita Abadzi’s singing styles could be historically related, but obviously direct connections are impossible to make. See Van Der Werwe’s Origins of the Popular Style for more.
“Ma” Rainey heard [the blues] in 1902 in a small town in Missouri where she was appearing with a show under a tent. She tells of a girl from the town who came to the tent one morning and began to sing about the “man” who had left her. The song was so strange and poignant that it attracted much attention. “Ma” Rainey became so interested that she learned the song from the visitor, and used it soon afterwards in her “act” as an encore.” John Work recalling an interview with Ma Rainey
Tammy Kernodle writes about the connections between the African and African-American lament and the blues. It’s a funky article, and I disagree with some points, but also valuable. It starts with this:
