Folk

13 February 2020

Often, I listen to story songs. A singer, and it can be a man or a woman, is telling of things desired but which no longeår exist. When I hear these ballads, I find myself very caught up in the narratives. 

The majority of such songs deal with love lost due to inadvertence, misunderstanding or outside interference human or otherwise. In rising melodic words, the singer says, “Some things just can’t be fixed.” And the next line will be about cardboard boxes being packed into a car, or set by the trash, keys that don’t work, or a light that won’t come on even though the curtain moved and you know someone is home. Sometimes there is a warning at the end reminding you all you have is your honest heart or your soul.

Sometimes the singer is painting a picture of a desolate motel on a barren stretch of highway. An empty pool surrounded by an eight-foot high unbroken chain link fence with a sign saying, “closed until further notice”, is offered up as the image to make the motel even lonelier. The singer is staying in a well-worn room with an air condition that barely can keep up with the heat. Looking at a picture of someone who was once important to her, she is singing about not knowing whether to go west or east. 

There are other songs of longing and loss, dead spouses and estranged children, but the standard song depicts love gravely in peril or a romantic relationship clearly and absolutely lost. The singer may say their heart was never claimed, or that they know they were too critical and they brought the loss of love on themselves.  The events may be told as a sad narrative of small things gone wrong.  In the alternative the song may focus on a single event and be surrounded by the singer asking why, and then why again.

Some of the songs use techniques to tell us something profound about the loss, like going to the first family wedding alone after a lover has left in anger.  Or they tell us something mundane, say finding a partial bag of the departed love’s coffee pushed way in the back of a cupboard. The singer opens the bag and recites memories after smelling the coffee from some morning of a shared delightful day.  This is followed by the questioning lyrics of what could have gone wrong.

Often the instrumentation tells as much of the romantic disaster as the words.  Have you even not reacted to a mournful run on a pedal steel guitar, or a rising fiddle solo that sounds almost like someone crying? Lamentation and loss, there are so many songs.

No matter what kind of life you have lived, it is virtually certain you have had a relationship disaster.  You had just gone out on you own, somewhere beyond the iron fences, somewhere beyond the point where the steeple and water tower of home have faded from view. Out there the old ways didn’t work. Your winsome smile couldn’t hold a heart so important to you. We have all crashed and burned, maybe repeatedly.  As a result, those with talents in crafting music and words write these experiences up in rhyming and melodic forms. then the singers sing these songs withal the heart and pathos they can muster.  

If you listen long enough you will hear something that resembles your pain.  In that moment you know you are not alone.