My son Thomas, age eight, has been taking piano lessons long
enough to start studying Beethoven, but his younger sister Jane is
new to that instrument, and currently practicing from Keyboard
Talent Hunt, Book One. The book is part of a program from John
W. Schaum Publishing for the “early childhood beginner,” and the
copyright on it dates back to 1967.
The folk tune “Aunt Rhody” is among the pieces Jane is learning.
To my consternation, however, the piano teaching junta behind
Keyboard Talent Hunt has tamed Rhody’s lyrics. This is the Schaum
version:
Go tell Aunt Rhody!
Go tell Aunt Rhody!
Go tell Aunt Rhody,
We’re waiting in the car.
Whoa, doggy. Waiting in the car?!
You must understand that my brother and I grew up listening to
vinyl records just as the “New Folk” movement was taking off. Dad
was short on Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez, both of whom were
displaced for sentimental reasons by the Andrews Sisters. He was,
however, big on Peter, Paul, and Mary. His record collection also
included Up With People, Dusty Springfield, and Mitch Miller. One
consequence of this musical taste is that while other people were
starting to holler about the Beatles and the British Invasion, my
brother and I learned to appreciate music by waiting out the folk
acts until we could persuade dad to play Irish tunes enough to make
us spin ourselves dizzy on the orange shag that covered our living
room tile (an album by David Curry called “My Ireland” seemed made
for that sort of thing).
While waiting out the folk singers, we heard a lot of them. We
respected Mitch Miller and his orchestra more than most of his
contemporaries, partly because Miller, who never tried to hide his
bald spot, looked more like a barber than a conductor. Miller was
forever inviting people to sing along with the cornball tunes his
chorale performed so well, and his status as a frequent guest on
the family turntable made me remember that cars do not exist in the
original version of “Aunt Rhody.” What people are trying to tell
the woman is not that they’re waiting for her, but that her old
gray goose is dead.
A subsequent verse in the song has the blunt force of a
detective two-fingering a police report on a manual typewriter: The
goose “died in the mill pond, standing on her head.”
Irony, finality, pathos, black humor: it’s all there, next to a
Lucky Strike, a snap-brim fedora, and a stale cup of coffee on some
farmer’s porch. And yet my daughter, ostensibly learning the same
tune, knows nothing of the anserine drama that I grew up with,
presumably because “you of tender years / can’t know the fears /
that your elders grew by.”
Young as they are, Jane and Thomas don’t mind singing about
death, as long as it comes with a catchy beat. Motoring home from
the grocery store, all three of us have joined Willie Nelson and
Ray Charles on the verses to “Seven Spanish Angels” (“There were
seven Spanish angels / At the altar of the sun / They were praying
for the lovers / In the Valley of the Gun”).
OF COURSE MY WIFE and I do not want to drag our children out of the
innocence that is rightfully theirs, but we do not want to
sugarcoat what it means to be human, either. Any child who has seen
what a predatory housecat can do to a bird or a rabbit is not
likely to be traumatized by lyrics about a dead goose; my kids
happen to have a father who is nonplussed by lack of carnage where
carnage should be. It bothers me that there are people who don’t
know that a certain miner (Forty-Niner) and his daughter Clementine
have something to be dreadfully sorry about. Such people have
probably heard “Kumbayah” in a candy-coated form (no “someone’s
dying Lord, Kumbayah”), but Tom Dooley’s short temper and date with
the hangman means nothing to them. Nor are they likely to sit down
with Marty Robbins for a whack at the ballad of old El Paso, where
frontier justice in the fourth verse is retribution for murder
committed in the second.
The bowdlerizing impulse at work in the fowl example that
provoked these thoughts also cons certain church musicians into
wrecking “Amazing Grace.” It’s a tough hymn to wreck, but some
doe-eyed imbeciles wreck it anyway, by substituting “saved and set
me free” for “saved a wretch like me.”
Where revisionist lyrics pretend that life has no rough edges,
original lyrics sometimes manage the same trick through
understatement. Consider the gospel tune “Lord, Build Me a Cabin,”
by bluegrass legend Bill Monroe; it scans as too laconic for its
own good:
Lord, build me a cabin
In a corner of Glory Land,
In the shade of the Tree of Life
Where it may ever stand,
Where I can just hear the angels sing
And shake Jesus’ hand,
Lord build me a cabin
in the corner of Glory Land.
That lyric drives me crazy. A mandolin player from a part of the
South where grown men are moved to tears when the dog dies at the
end of Old Yeller ought to know better than to greet his
Savior with the same gesture he’d use to congratulate Cletus or
Bobby Lee for a good game of horseshoes. A handshake in heaven
seems emotionally constipated. If nothing else, it’s evidence of a
dire need for more range in the emotional woofers and tweeters that
occupy every human heart. Any self-respecting Italian author of
self-help books for manly men would have told Monroe to lighten up
and give Jesus a hug.
HAVE I BEGUN TO SOUND like some cranky uncle? With apologies to
Arthur Conan Doyle’s dog that did not bark, I must blame the goose
that did not die, and also perhaps David Baron’s stirring chronicle
of interaction between cougars and humans. One of many salient
points in Baron’s 2004 book, The Beast in the Garden, is
that “ecologists call the zone of transition between habitats (for
instance, forest and prairie) an ecotone,” and that “America is
becoming one vast ecotone where civilization and nature
intermingle.”
As with topography, so also with personality, else we could not
be (as Blaise Pascal so aptly put it) both “the glory and scum of
the universe.” C.S. Lewis approached the same insight in The
Weight of Glory, saying that “it is immortals whom we joke
with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit — immortal horrors or
everlasting splendours.”
By shielding our children too much — sealing them off from the
ecotones in ourselves and in our culture, or acting as though
begrimed splendor is all there is — we raise journalists who write
blithely about “immigration rights” without ever using the word
“illegal,” nationalists who see no problem with remixing an iconic
anthem so that its opening line could be styled “Jose, can you
see?” pundits whose friends all vote the way they do, historians
who mythologize the “noble savage,” priests who never preach on
sin, and policy makers who confess themselves puzzled when crime
rates go down as incarceration rates go up.
Often our shields are misplaced. Whether through vestigial
guilt, as Shelby Steele argued recently, or through simple
ignorance, we’re more frank with each other about sex, for example,
than we are about terrorism. When the next Broadway fan geek says,
“life is a cabaret, old chum,” the proper response is “bite
me.”
So here’s to Aunt Rhody and the people who tell lies about
waiting for her in the car because they think a dead goose will
induce a fainting spell. She gave me a new axiom: when a culture’s
video games are more violent than its laughably sanitized folk
songs, soul-searching is in order.
