Music

It pleases Welch when songs prove to be malleable in meaning. “I love that Dave and I kill ourselves working to make things just so,” she says, “and then we put them out there into the world and they can do anything and mean anything to anybody. That’s why we work so hard on them.” But there is one way of interpreting the spirit of their music that bothers her: “If someone were to think that our songs are maudlin or pessimistic, I would be shocked. Because I hear them as strong, quiet. I think if you really digest those narratives, there’s an incredible undercurrent of perseverance. When we’re singing those songs, we think the people are going to make it through.” Lange had a similar perspective on the people she photographed weathering the cruel deprivations of the Depression. “I many times encountered courage,” she told a Smithsonian archivist. “Real courage. Undeniable courage.”

There’s another point upon which Welch is insistent: she and Rawlings haven’t walled their material off in the past by depicting characters in the throes of displacement, hardship, and economic precarity. She throws out hypothetical questions: “Do people not still have children who die tragic early deaths? Of course they do. Do people not still take narcotics to try to ease the pain for a moment? Of course they do.” “One More Dollar,” her song about the inner turmoil of a migrant worker caught between the necessity of toiling for meager but essential pay and a longing to be back with the people they love, has powerful resonance at a time when when ICE raids — blatantly driven by racial profiling and often targeting businesses staffed by immigrants — have created life and death stakes nationwide.

Welch’s singing, initially squarely in the austere Appalachian tradition, has developed a miraculous blend of leanness and litheness over the years. Her recordings of “Dark Turn of Mind,” on 2011’s The Harrow & The Harvest, and “Here Stands a Woman,” on 2024’s Woodland, are fine examples; she applies her reedy instrument to supple slides, bluesy bends, and insinuating phrasing. What comes through in Welch’s vocals is a sense of bearing up beneath the weight of the world.

When I describe this quality, she confirms that she feels it too, and points to the influence of Jerry Garcia’s singing. Recently, she tried to turn a friend on to the Dead, and received a disappointing reaction. “They just sound really tired to me,” the friend commented dismissively. That left Welch feeling at least partially justified: “I said, ‘Well, yes, of course they’re tired. They’re touring musicians. They’re exhausted. But don’t you hear that [Garcia’s] constantly pushing up against that incredible weight?’”

So many folk and country songs pine for the idealized and unchanging old home place and the saintly, nurturing mother figure who waits there. But there’s an equally long tradition of ballads of the rambling, rootless, implicitly male troubadour. The Dead served as colorful embodiments of the latter role, and Nevins, Welch’s college buddy, could see her migrating toward it before she’d formally chosen music as her vocation.

This story might have faded into history. But a few years ago an elderly, unhoused man named Charles McDowell walked into the Philadelphia record store Brewerytown Beats, looking for a copy of the “From The Inside…” He revealed to the store’s owner, Max Ochester, that he had played bass in the band. McDowell later passed away, but Ochester tracked down the former lead singer, Ron Aikens, singing street karaoke for tips outside of Philadelphia City Hall.

Aikens told me in an interview that the band had been allowed to spend entire nights away from the prison attending industry parties, wearing free-world clothes. When they returned, he recalled, other prisoners called them “idiots” for not using the opportunity to escape.

At least one member took the bait. At the Stevie Wonder gig, Aikens recalls McDowell, the bass player, fled the venue and remained on the lam for a few months until he was caught. But even with the occasional scandal, the band was good PR for the state: “We were ambassadors for the prison system,” Aikens said. “If something was going wrong, they’d roll us out to show what wonderful things they were doing.”

These thoughts were brought to me powerfully by one of my favourite songs — “The Man Comes Around” by Johnny Cash. It’s a remarkable song, with a remarkable backstory. Released only a year before his death, in 2002 when Cash was an old man, it was the fruit of an improbable musical resurrection. After years in the musical wilderness, music producer Rick Rubin, known for his work with rappers and heavy metal bands, formed an improbable partnership with Cash, who produced much of his best work in the twilight of his life and career. Rubin, a secular Jew with an eclectic spirituality, got on remarkably well with the evangelically Christian Cash, and the pair would “take communion” together every day, with Cash describing the eucharist over the phone to Rubin.

The song itself is suffused with the words of Job, Acts and Revelation, but its origins, strangely, were in a vision. Cash dreamed that he was in Buckingham Palace, where he met Queen Elizabeth, who turned and said to him “Johnny Cash, you’re a thorn tree in a whirlwind”.

Cash is a late flowering of a very old tradition: the popular musical and religious imagination of the English-speaking peoples, and it’s nowhere more evident than in that song. From “terror in each sip and in each sup”, to “it’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks”, the poetry of the King James Bible vibrates through his music. At once sinister and joyful, sublime and homespun, it’s a song about the end of the world and it is impossible not to feel a chill as Cash sings of “measured hundredweight and penny pound/When the man comes around”.

I love it because it is a 21st century song plugged directly into the crackling electricity of the soul of English religiosity.

The other acts on the Winter Dance Party lineup were Ritchie Valens, a 17-year-old kid from the San Fernando Valley who had had a breakout hit with “Come On, Let’s Go”; the Big Bopper, a 28-year-old deejay from Beaumont who had made a splash that year with a novelty hit, “Chantilly Lace”; Dion and the Belmonts, a quartet of teen singers from New York with a few minor hits (“I Wonder Why” may be the most notable); and Frankie Sardo, an Italian kid from New York with another minor hit, “Fake Out.” Holly would be the top draw. At Christmas he returned to Lubbock to put a new band together. Earlier Holly had befriended and recorded a young deejay and singer named Waylon Jennings. Now he told him to learn how to play the bass; Tommy Allsup would play guitar and Carl Bunch drums.

The tour had no frills. Jennings, Allsup, and Bunch backed up all the stars, who sang through one microphone and whatever primitive public-address system the local promoter had found for the show. Sardo—whom Jennings later called “the worst singer you ever heard in your life”—was on first, then the Bopper, Valens, the Belmonts, and Holly (sometimes the Belmonts played second). There were no set changes; the show was a dance, and the stars played one after the other, the earlier acts doing a handful of songs and the later ones getting more time. Holly played 45 minutes to an hour. He began every performance with the old folk song “Gotta Travel On,” then moved through his hits, as well as “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” which had just been released, and a few covers, such as “Lucille,” “Great Balls of Fire,” and “Salty Dog Blues.” The whole concert was about two hours long.

That winter was brutally cold, and the musicians traveled in a series of cramped, drafty old charter buses that kept breaking down. The first performance was a January 23 show in front of six thousand kids in Milwaukee, where the temperature was 17 below zero. From there the tour crisscrossed between Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. The bands played every night, sometimes driving three or four hundred miles to make shows in tiny towns like Kenosha, Mankato, and Montevideo. After about a week, they were miserable. Valens was sick, and the Bopper was coming down with the flu. There was never any time to do laundry, so besides being cold, the buses began to stink. “We smelled like goats,” Jennings later recalled. On January 30 Holly asked the Fort Dodge, Iowa, promoter about chartering a plane.

The term “folk opera” refers to the European genre of sung theater that borrows musical material of a specific region or people—melodies, modal scales, or dance rhythms—to create operas of popular appeal that reflect national identity. Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride (1866), for example, used Czech dance rhythms and melodic patterns that his regional audience recognized as their own. Gustav Holst’s opera, The Wandering Scholar (1934), likewise based its style on English folk music, though it never quotes any actual folk tunes. Gershwin used the term both to claim operatic status for Porgy and Bess and to acknowledge the work’s debt to African American music. A musicologist might debate how accurate the term “folk opera” is in this case. The pointed Gershwin/Heyward lyrics have a Tin Pan Alley polish that hardly feels folkloric. But it helps to know where the composer stood. The question matters because Porgy has inspired many subsequent works of American musical theater whose popular sources have complicated their identity.

The problem is older than Porgy. When Joplin published the score of Treemonisha, he subtitled it an “Opera in Three Acts,” although the work resembled operetta far more than traditional opera. Joplin understood that opera had greater prestige. The genre of a musical work establishes specific expectations for the audience, performers, and critics. Joplin wanted Treemonisha regarded as a serious work of art, not as a musical entertainment.

The concept of genre is important because it suggests what formal elements a composer and librettist might bring to new works. In American opera that question becomes complicated when creators want to incorporate elements from popular music and theater. It confuses the frame of reference. Porgy has spoken dialogue; it also has self-contained songs. Both of those features associate it with the Broadway musical. Traditional opera generally sets the entire libretto to music. How far can a composer depart from the conventional model of opera before the audience changes its perspective on the work? Must every word be sung for the work to be serious?

Critics tend to deny any work with substantial dialogue the title of opera. Real operas should have continuous music to guide the drama without relying on dialogue to move the plot. Depending on the context, a piece with spoken dialogue is labelled an operetta, musical, Singspiel, or zarzuela—all less exalted categories than opera. The criteria seem clear, but, in practice, they are applied inconsistently. Many classic musical works escape the downgrade.

No one refers to The Magic Flute as a Singspiel, even though it has a great deal of dialogue. Three factors elevate The Magic Flute to the status of opera. First, the score shows Mozart in the full maturity of his genius. Second, in addition to its low comedy, the work has a Masonic subplot with music of undeniable nobility. Third, The Magic Flute was Mozart’s last opera, and no one wants the divino maestro to have checked out writing an operetta. Likewise, Carl Orff’s Die Kluge (The Clever Girl) and Der Mond (The Moon), both of which have dialogue, earned the honorific by the brilliance of their music and the parable-like quality of their libretti. Based on two folk tales from the Brothers Grimm, the operas have a tough edge and dark vision that no one would associate with operetta or children’s theater.

There is a theoretical bias among critics that opera should be entirely sung

The John Coltrane Quartet this Sunday – recorded live by Sveriges Radio at the Konserthuset in Stockholm on November 19, 1962. featuring McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones, drums.

The last time I wrote a profile of a musician—that Jimmy Martin piece, twenty-two years ago—I ended up backstage at the Grand Ole Opry. Crowded hallways with people hollering and pushing their way through, musicians in jeweled suits warming up with fiddles and guitars, people telling jokes and other people squeezing past on their way to the stage. Jimmy had gotten drunk at his house, and I had to drive us to Opryland in his midnight-blue Lincoln stretch limo, which kept stalling out; when we got there he tried to pick a fight with Ricky Skaggs and almost managed to punch out Bill Anderson. So far the worst thing that’s happened on this trip is that Prine hogged all the tiramisu last night. And now we are going to a shoe store. A shoe store, I think—this is what twenty-two years can do for you.

We walk into the store, and John heads for a display where leather Top-Siders are lined up. I look around the shop. I’ve been having trouble with my own feet, actually. The salesperson greets me respectfully and calls me “sir.” As long as John’s trying out shoes I figure there’s nothing to lose by looking at some myself. There’s a slightly weird-looking pair, a dove-gray hybrid of sneaker, boat shoe, and walking shoe. I ask the clerk for a pair in 10 1/2; he brings them and they feel pretty good, incredibly lightweight, although there is a lot of room up by my toes, and the tops of the shoes have a kind of weird pucker; they look like space shoes. I ask the clerk if I can see a pair of tens.

While I’ve been doing this, John has settled on a pair of boat shoes featuring extremely shiny brass eyelets. They are some seriously bright eyelets.

“Jeez,” I say. “You’ll have to wear sunglasses to cut down on the glare.”

“They feel great,” he says, walking back and forth.

“It’s nice they throw in the shoes when you buy the eyelets.”

“I can black them out with a magic marker.”

We both buy the shoes we’ve been looking at. We walk outside into the heat and stand in front of the store, holding our shopping bags. I’m trying not to imagine what we must look like. We put on our sunglasses. “There’s your article, right there,” he says. “Buying shoes with John Prine!”

The systematic fragmentation of music was the logical working out of the premise that music is not governed by mathematical relationships and laws that inhere in the structure of a hierarchical and ordered universe, but is wholly constructed by man and therefore essentially without limits or definition. Tonality, as the pre-existing principle of order in the world of sound, goes the same way as the objective moral order. So how does one organize the mess that is left once God departs? If there is no pre-existing intelligible order to go out to and apprehend, and to search through for what lies beyond it—which is the Creator—what then is music supposed to express? If external order does not exist, then music turns inward. It collapses in on itself and becomes an obsession with technique. Any ordering of things, musical or otherwise, becomes simply the whim of man’s will.

Without a “music of the spheres” to approximate, modern music, like the other arts, began to unravel. Music’s self-destruction became logically imperative once it undermined its own foundation. In the 1920s, Arnold Schoenberg unleashed the centrifugal forces of disintegration in music through his denial of tonality. Schoenberg contended that tonality does not exist in nature as the very property of sound itself, as Pythagoras had claimed, but was simply an arbitrary construct of man, a convention. This assertion was not the result of a new scientific discovery about the acoustical nature of sound, but of a desire to demote the metaphysical status of nature. Schoenberg was irritated that “tonality does not serve, [but] must be served.” Rather than conform himself to reality, he preferred to command reality to conform itself to him. As he said, “I can provide rules for almost anything.” Like Pythagoras, Schoenberg believed that number was the key to the universe. Unlike Pythagoras, he believed his manipulation of number could alter that reality in a profound way. Schoenberg’s gnostic impulse is confirmed by his extraordinary obsession with numerology, which would not allow him to finish a composition until its opus number corresponded with the correct number of the calendar date.

Schoenberg proposed to erase the distinction between tonality and atonality by immersing man in atonal music until, through habituation, it became the new convention. Then discords would be heard as concords. As he wrote, “The emancipation of dissonance is at present accomplished and twelve-tone music in the near future will no longer be rejected because of ‘discords.’” Anyone who claims that, through his system, the listener shall hear dissonance as consonance is engaged in reconstituting reality.

Of his achievement, Schoenberg said, “I am conscious of having removed all traces of a past aesthetic.” In fact, he declared himself “cured of the delusion that the artist’s aim is to create beauty.” This statement is terrifying in its implications when one considers what is at stake in beauty. Simone Weil wrote that “we love the beauty of the world because we sense behind it the presence of something akin to that wisdom we should like to possess to slake our thirst for good.” All beauty is reflected beauty. Smudge out the reflection and not only is the mirror useless but the path to the source of beauty is barred. Ugliness, the aesthetic analogue to evil, becomes the new norm. Schoenberg’s remark represents a total rupture with the Western musical tradition.

The loss of tonality was also devastating at the practical level of composition because tonality is the key structure of music. Schoenberg took the twelve equal semi-tones from the chromatic scale and declared that music must be written in such a way that each of these twelve semi-tones has to be used before repeating any one of them. If one of these semi-tones was repeated before all eleven others were sounded, it might create an anchor for the ear which could recognize what is going on in the music harmonically. The twelve-tone system guarantees the listener’s disorientation.

Tonality is what allows music to express movement—away from or towards a state of tension or relaxation, a sense of motion through a series of crises and conflicts which can then come to resolution. Without it, music loses harmony and melody. Its structural force collapses. Gutting music of tonality is like removing grapes from wine. You can go through all the motions of making wine without grapes but there will be no wine at the end of the process. Similarly, if you deliberately and systematically remove all audible overtone relationships from music, you can go through the process of composition, but the end product will not be comprehensible as music. This is not a change in technique; it is the replacement of art by ideology.

Schoenberg’s disciples applauded the emancipation of dissonance but soon preferred to follow the centrifugal forces that Schoenberg had unleashed beyond their master’s rules. Pierre Boulez thought that it was not enough to systematize dissonance in twelve-tone rows. If you have a system, why not systematize everything? He applied the same principle of the tone-row to pitch, duration, tone production, intensity and timber, every element of music. In 1952, Boulez announced that “every musician who has not felt—we do not say understood but felt—the necessity of the serial language is USELESS.” Boulez also proclaimed, “Once the past has been got out of the way, one need think only of oneself.” Here is the narcissistic antithesis of the classical view of music, the whole point of which was to draw a person up into something larger than himself.

The dissection of the language of music continued as, successively, each isolated element was elevated into its own autonomous whole. Schoenberg’s disciples agreed that tonality is simply a convention, but saw that, so too, is twelve-tone music. If you are going to emancipate dissonance, why organize it? Why even have twelve-tone themes? Why bother with pitch at all? Edgar Varese rejected the twelve-tone system as arbitrary and restrictive. He searched for the “bomb that would explode the musical world and allow all sounds to come rushing into it through the resulting breach.” When he exploded it in his piece Hyperprism, Olin Downes, a famous New York music critic, called it “a catastrophe in a boiler factory.” Still, Varese did not carry the inner logic of the “emancipation of dissonance” through to its logical conclusion. His noise was still formulated; it was organized. There were indications in the score as to exactly when the boiler should explode.

What was needed, according to John Cage (1912–92), was to have absolutely no organization.