Opposites
My husband likes country. It’s not the only music he likes. His favorite band is Swans. He likes Prince Far I, Deathspell Omega, Spacemen 3, and Robyn. He listens to symphonies.
But for country he has a separate, sacred iPod. It’s loaded up with recordings of the old-timers that he meticulously downloaded off CDs checked out from the university library. I listen along at dinner, enjoy the thrum and twang. I like hearing him hold forth about whatever’s playing, the historical backdrop, the sordid personal details of the artists.
Then one night a song came out of the sacred iPod that made me sit up in my seat and crack to attention. The music was just weird. It sounded as if the band had been wound with a hand crank and then let go to unwind like a toy. Or like these were zombie-musicians, jerkily playing their instruments and belting out their song. Or like floppy puppets.
What the hell is that?
The song begins slowly, laboriously, like a piece of machinery starting up, the violins sawing away with a clumsy grace. The band all sings together in a jumble, chanting out hallelujahs and calling over one another. The song is earnest and charming, funny and mechanical, beautiful.
It turned out to be Ernest Stoneman and His Dixies, singing “The Resurrection,” from the 1927 original Bristol sessions. Ernest, Wikipedia tells me, was born in 1893, in a log cabin in Iron Ridge, Virginia, played music from a tot, grew up, and married one Hattie Frost, who went on to have twenty-three children. Thirteen of them lived to tell the tale and play in various arrangements with their father and mother.
I like to play a little game I call “opposites” when it comes to art. The most obvious opposite of Stoneman’s “The Resurrection” that I can think of is Ornette Coleman’s “We Now Interrupt for a Commercial Break” from his 1968 album New York Is Now!. Of course two men could barely be more opposite than Ornette and Ernest, but opposites are most interesting for their similarities. In “We Now Interrupt” you hear machinery too, a relentless sawing, but it’s urban industrial. Takes you out of the realm of the country church and into the sophisticated city swarm, onto the street with the traffic, a hornet-mind buzzing along, a low chaos. The song abruptly stops three times “for a commercial break” and starts back up again, a sly self-reflexive sense of humor born of the era.
Another contender for opposite is Patti Smith’s “Kimberly”—really any song by Patti but this one especially. This one is also built on a mechanical rhythm structure, a sort of windup-clock repetitive cranking, reminding me of “The Resurrection,” but the song rips away again and again, not for a commercial break, but by Patti’s powerful, insisting voice. The lyrics feel apocalyptic, spiritual. The sky is coming to pieces in brilliant light, and Patti feels like “some misplaced Joan of Arc.” The song creates images of dissonance and strangeness, alluding to, though not mentioning the apocalypse, while dipping in and out of the mechanical repetition.
This, beside the adorable, dutiful, beautiful ballerina box of Stoneman’s representation of the end times! Love it! Most of my favorite music is built on self-expression—as declaration, celebration, musing, rage. Stoneman’s folksong feels more plainchant, connecting me to an ancient time. I can only faintly access the individuals.
Spring is here. We sit on the porch and I listen to the birds calling out in search of others like themselves, each singing their local variations, adding their drops of personality. I’d never think to identify opposites among them. I can hear songs nearby and others in the distance, the notes layering over one another, lifting into the air, blending into a sonic picture, the sound of this bird civilization: not quite defeated, though fewer and weaker than ever before. This spot that I sit in. Think of the long history of birdsong that played right here, each morning for hundreds, thousands, literally millions of years, and how it will soon go quiet.
Deb Olin Unferth lives and works in Austin, TX.
