by Anna Journey
My mother played the role of folk singer in two different productions: Hewitt Griffin’s A Walk in the Forest and Charles Aidman’s musical adaptation of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. In a photograph from another clipping my grandmother saved from the Jackson Daily News (January 19, 1971), my mother perches on a stool, as she sings and strums an acoustic guitar for her role in A Walk in the Forest. She looks like a sixties countercultural archetype: her long brown hair’s flat-ironed and parted in the middle and she wears a white peasant blouse over a patchwork skirt. In The Clarion-Ledger (March 4, 1971), Jean Culbertson writes of my mother’s performance in Spoon River Anthology: “Cindy Hanes’s lingering voice has an especially memorable quality on this type of folk music.” James Gordon, in the Jackson Daily News, describes Spoon River as “a panorama of human experience related by voices from the grave.”
In addition to acting as a folk singer in plays, my mother was, for several years, an actual folk singer. In 1964 she began her freshman year at Mississippi State College for Women, in the small city of Columbus, where she and her best friend Donna—a fellow Girl Scout and veteran of Camp Wahi—decided to pledge a social club at “the W” called the Lancers, which they’d heard was populated with “good girls.” Donna had told members of the Lancers’ leadership that Cindy Hanes was a formidable storyteller around a Girl Scout campfire. While the Lancers asked one pledge to churn vanilla ice cream on the dining hall’s screened-in back porch and required another to act out the phrase “give birth to a nation,” they asked my mother to tell a story. My mother stood in front of the pledges and gave one of her theatrical performances of “Bluebeard.” I’ve wondered if the roomful of Southern belles sitting cross-legged on the hardwood of the Great Hall reminded her of the crowded floor of Bluebeard’s chamber.
In my mother’s version of the tale, Bluebeard possessed the growling bass voice of an ogre, while his wife’s long vowels sounded like those drawled by a naïve yet adaptive girl from Jackson. She lingered over the description of Fatima’s discovery of Bluebeard’s secret room, the one he’d forbidden his new bride from entering: the blood coagulated on the floor like canned pie cherries; the rows of dead women—his former wives—wrapped in sheets; the most recent victim still swinging from the chandelier, her toes swollen and blue. Even the bottom hems of the white curtains in Bluebeard’s murder room were soaked with foot-long stains that spread up from the gory floor. The women clapped, roaring their approval, and elected my mother vice president of the Lancers and the social club’s resident storyteller.
Because my mother and Donna—who roomed together in the dorm—often sat outside strumming the instruments they’d brought from home (my mom on acoustic guitar and Donna on baritone ukulele) and singing songs they’d learned together at Camp Wahi, the other Lancers encouraged them to form a folk band with another woman in the social club, Iva, who sang in an ethereal, clear soprano. The Lancers needed a regular band for entertainment at their events as well as the parties they often co-hosted with the Mississippi State University fraternity, Phi Tau, at which several Lancers had boyfriends. So my mother, Donna, and Iva formed a folk trio and called themselves the Guineveres, after Queen Guinevere of Arthurian legend. In the harmony Iva sang soprano, Donna alto, and my mother the melody, the latter two taking turns playing rhythm and lead on their instruments.
At Lancers’ parties, the Guineveres played a range of songs, drawing from American roots music as well as more recent popular tunes: George Gershwin’s haunting, jazzy “Summertime”; the African American spiritual “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore”; Lead Belly’s bluesy downtuned “Bring Me a Little Water, Sylvie”; Peter, Paul, and Mary’s whimsical “Puff, the Magic Dragon”; The Limeliters’ political tune “Harry Pollitt”; the utopic Girl Scout campfire song “I Know a Place”; the eerie New Orleans ballad “The House of the Rising Sun.” At one point, while my mother was rehearsing “The House of the Rising Sun” in a communal room in her dorm, a woman asked permission to record her singing. The woman wanted to send a tape to her boyfriend, who was fighting in Vietnam. Midway through the song, there’s a verse that reminds me of my mother’s cautionary tales:
Oh mother, tell your children
Not to do what I have done
Spend your lives in sin and misery
In the House of the Rising Sun
I’ve wondered about the young soldier in Vietnam who received the tape of my mother singing. I’ve tried to imagine her warm mezzo-soprano and simple, strummed chords echoing in the remote jungles. I’ve hoped he found comfort and beauty in her voice, and that he finally returned, alive, to Mississippi.
One song the Guineveres regularly performed, “The Little Land,” by the folk and blues singer-songwriter Malvina Reynolds, warns of the harrowing spells of Irish leprechauns, who would work their Rip Van Winkle-esque magic on unsuspecting travelers. The lyrics remind me of the fairy tales my mother tells:
When you’re in the Little Land,
They fill your hands with gold,
You think you stay for a just a day,
You come out bent and old.
I remember the single summer day that bent and aged my mother. The day Rebecca ran down to the basement, where I was watching TV, to tell me she could hear our mom calling for help but that she couldn’t find her. Our dad was at work in DC. We climbed upstairs together—Rebecca was seven and I was ten. When we found our mother, she was sprawled on the garage floor and couldn’t move. She’d stepped through a thin patch of drywall in the attic’s floor and plunged to the concrete, breaking her spine. I called 911 and shrieked at the operator that I thought my mother had cracked her head open and was dying.
I don’t have a clear sense of the months my mother spent in the hospital after the accident. I remember my godparents driving Rebecca and me to the pool, taking us camping by a lake, and giving us a video to watch while our mother was away in which three chipmunk sisters (relatives of Alvin, Simon, and Theodore) sing about missing their mother. “A friend and a teacher, always I need her. My mother, that’s who I need,” the little girl chipmunks sang.
After multiple surgeries, fused vertebrae, and steel screws that left her back permanently curved at forty-four, my mom was the one who needed a protector and a storyteller. I quit horseback riding. I quit the swim team. I quit piano. Although Rebecca wasn’t old enough to understand why our mother was suddenly unavailable, why she’d shape-shifted from the ebullient facilitator of our lives into a groggy, horizontal specter, I knew the reason our family’s dynamic had shifted. Our mother was now the vulnerable one, dazed from her constant pain and bound to the grey couch in the living room. For a year, my mother and I switched roles: I’d perch at her feet as she lay in her white turtle-shell-like back brace and tell her about the silver mine I believed I’d discovered in the black soil beneath the deck or my plans to make bamboo paintbrushes tipped in bristles from the severed squirrel’s tail my father had found and saved for me while raking the hillside’s leaves.
In “The Little Land,” the chorus goes:
Dead leaves in your pockets,
Oh, my enchanted, have a care!
Run, run from the Little Folk
Or you’ll have dead leaves in your pockets
And snowflakes in your hair.
I’ve tried not to picture the Vietnam soldier running through the jungle, his pockets filling with dead leaves as he falls. I’ve tried not to see the snowflakes gathering in my mother’s once-dark hair.
The summer before her sophomore year of college, my mother played in an unnamed folk quartet at the Sea Gun Sports Inn, in Rockport, the small coastal city known as “the Texas Riviera.” The band’s other members were my mother’s Aunt Jeannette (nine years her senior) and two of Jeannette’s friends: Denny, a laid-back local singer, and Mark, a brilliant minister’s son who built early computer prototypes out of his garage. My mother played rhythm guitar, while Mark and Jeannette traded on lead. All four of them sa
ng in harmony. Mostly they performed by the inn’s poolside and then played another set on the Whooping Crane, the cocktail boat that took hotel guests for a slow jaunt at dusk around the bay.
My grandmother, who’d majored in Home Economics before attending nursing school, made a matching set of hippie shirts for the quartet: four vest-like burlap pullovers appliqued with flowers and finished at the collar with decorative leather laces. She also made my mother an elaborate grey chiffon gown for her musical performance at the college’s “Miss W” pageant in which she dressed up as the wind. My mother sang Alan J. Lerner’s and Frederick Loewe’s show tune “They Call the Wind Mariah” from the Broadway musical Paint Your Wagon and, as she strummed her guitar, the draped lengths of fabric billowed and waved.
Although my mother’s thyroid cancer may have cut short her professional career as a folk singer, there’ve been no shortage of songs in our house. She taught Rebecca and me the haunting English round, “Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose,” about a father urging his daughter toward marriage, which begins:
Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose,
Will I ever see thee wed?
I will marry at thy will, Sire,
At thy will.
A subsequent verse conflates the wedding ritual with a mossy funerary stone, the church bells tolling for both life changes, and the song suggests the Elizabethan maiden sees in the marriage union her own inevitable death:
Ding dong, ding dong.
Wedding bells on an April morn’.
Carve my name on a moss covered stone,
On a moss covered stone.
There’s a quality of psychological darkness to so many of these folk songs—fraught with death and human suffering and beguiling or cruel magic spells—that I’ve always admired. I love them for their vivid imagery, charged diction, and stories of longing and mystery. In third grade, I remember wielding the Appalachian murder ballad “Tom Dooley” as a playground taunt to verbally assault my neighbor when she teased Rebecca for wearing glasses. I substituted the condemned murderer Tom Dooley’s name with my neighbor Brie’s and sang:
Hang down your head, Brie Roddy
Hang down your head and cry
Hang down your head, Brie Roddy
Poor girl, you’re bound to die
This time tomorrow
Reckon where you’ll be
Down in some lonesome valley
Hanging from a white oak tree
Brie, a gregarious tomboy with a knack for doodling cartoon cats, did in fact hang down her head and cry. As she sprinted off, I felt guilty, but I also felt the awful power of the song’s dark story.
John and Alan Lomax, the nomadic song-collecting father and son duo who were the most influential documentarians of American folk music during the twentieth century, describe in their preface to Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads the cultural importance of preserving the songs of ordinary American folk. “Most of these singers,” write the Lomaxes:
are poor people, farmers, laborers, convicts, old-age pensioners, relief workers, housewives, wandering guitar pickers. These are the people who still sing the work songs, the cowboy songs, the sea songs, the lumberjack songs, the bad-man ballads, and other songs that have no occupation or special group to keep them alive. These are the people who are making new songs today. These are the people who go courting with their guitars, who make the music for their own dances, who make their own songs for their own religion. These are the story-tellers, because they are the people who are watching when things happen.
The Lomaxes traveled the US recording folk songs in the 1930s, creating, under the direction of Herbert Putnam, the Archive of American Folk Song in the Library of Congress. Popular awareness of this diverse and vibrant narrative tradition in American blues, folk, and country music culminated in the 1950s and ’60s, with the release, by Folkways Records, of Harry Smith’s groundbreaking compilation of folk songs, Anthology of American Folk Music, in 1952. At the time, the LP medium was still fairly new. Smith’s six-album set directly led to the rediscovery (by singers such as John Cohen and Mike Seeger, of the New Lost City Ramblers, and by later artists such as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, and Dave Van Ronk) of performers previously known only to regional audiences.
It’s not coincidental that the folk movement, with its potent narratives of human suffering, longing, and labor, began to coincide and coalesce with the civil rights movement. The union-organizing song “We Shall Overcome,” written by Zilphia Hart and published by the folk singer and activist Pete Seeger in People’s Songs Bulletins, in 1948, became the anthem of the civil rights movement when the folk musician, musicologist, and activist Guy Carawan taught the song to the members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in 1960. Although my mom sang “We Shall Overcome” at home, among her friends and family, she didn’t dare perform it in public with the Guineveres. “That’s not a song you would ever sing at a fraternity party in Mississippi,” she told me. “I would never have performed that song in the South and kept my life.” Her fear at first dismayed and even angered me. Then I recalled the murders, by the Ku Klux Klan, of the three civil rights activists, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964, two months before my mother began her freshman year at MSCW. The site of the shootings lay fewer than eighty-two miles from my mother’s school, less than an hour and a half’s drive down highways 82 and 45.
A year earlier, in August, 1963, Joan Baez famously led a crowd of over three hundred thousand people in singing “We Shall Overcome” at the Lincoln Memorial, during the March on Washington. And later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., during his final sermon delivered in Memphis, in March of 1968 (in which he declares, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”), recited the song’s familiar refrain: “We shall overcome. We shall overcome. Deep in my heart I do believe we shall overcome.”
Folk songs are not only able to enlarge the national conscience as they pass from one person to another, they often reveal the darkness and universality of intimate human suffering as well as the transformative power of the imagination. These are songs of a jealous girl pushing her sister into a stream to drown, in the English-turned-Appalachian ballad “Dreadful Wind and Rain”; of an African American woman named Dink who longs to sprout the wings of a dove to fly to her absent lover working in a levee camp upriver, in “Dink’s Song”; of an anguished man who contemplates drowning himself in the river or overdosing on morphine because he can’t get over his heartache, in Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene”; of the woman whose feet are so preposterously huge that she wears herring boxes for sandals and dies of a splinter, in the Gold Rush burlesque “Clementine.” Of the American folk singers, the Lomaxes observe elsewhere in their preface: “These are the great laughers and the great liars, because they know that life is so much more ridiculous than anyone can ever hope to tell. These are the people who understand death, because it has been close to them all their lives.”
My mother’s confessed that she’d never have thought to form a folk band on her own, that she played her guitar with Donna as recreation. It reminded her of singing with the girls around the campfire during all those years at Camp Wahi. She says she “fell into” the trio when the Lancers asked her to play with Donna and Iva. When I ask how they arrived at the name the Guineveres, my mother provides a straightforward answer: They played lots of old British songs and American folk ballads and the name sounded appropriately old-fashioned. They also attended a women’s college. Fair enough. But I like to imagine their homage to Queen Guinevere—wife of King Arthur and mistress of Sir Lancelot—as a subversive and empowering, even a defiant, choice. Guinevere is our medieval rule-breaker. She’s mythic: she’s Eve or Pandora. She’s epic: she’s Helen of Troy. Her wild, taboo passion for the knight Lancelot creates the major narrative arc in the legend—Guinevere sets all the plot twists and tragedies in motion. What better way to defy the patriarchy (the deans, the Bluebeards, the Southern frat boys) than to pl
uralize her?
I’m certain that if I’d had a different sort of mother—one who wasn’t fascinated by macabre stories and death-haunted songs—I wouldn’t have grown up to become a writer. I’m certain I would never have learned the word elephantiasis before I knew the capital of Virginia. “What the people of a country do with the music they take over for themselves and the poems they take over for themselves,” writes Archibald MacLeish in his introduction to the 1941 edition of the Lomaxes’ second volume of American ballads and folk songs, “is to pass them along from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth, from one generation to the next, until they wear smooth in the shape the people—this particular people—is obliged to give them.” I love the way the stories my mother passed down to me at the dinner table still spark and settle as if at the volatile edge of a bonfire. I love the way, repeating, they shape-shift, like the voices of young girls morphing into frog song in the dark, and how, through the years, I’ve learned to hear in these stories the echo of my own voice.
STRANGE MERCHANTS
My father was once mistaken for a hit man. A tweed-wearing, mustached former Peace Corps volunteer, he appears the most unlikely assassin. In 1977, my thirty-four-year-old father lived with my mother in Ottawa. He worked as a consultant for the health sciences division of the International Development Research Centre. On his way back from a business trip to La Paz, Bolivia, where he scouted rural areas as possible loci for sanitation projects, my father stopped in front of a leather goods store in the middle of El Alto International Airport. In the shop’s display window hung a dark brown leather trench coat, with maroon undertones, selling for the equivalent of a hundred and fifty US dollars. My father imagined himself in the trench coat, braced against the glacial Ottawan wind chill that drove his neighbor to hang herself with a clothesline the week before his trip.