|
View the H-Southern-Music Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-Southern-Music's November 2009 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in H-Southern-Music's November 2009 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the H-Southern-Music home page.
One enticingly self-referential song is Woody Guthrie's ballad about the dust bowl: "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You." It begins: "I've sung this song and I'll sing it again/ 'Bout the place that I live on the wild windy plain./ 'Twas the month of April, the county called Clay,/ Here's what all of the people did say:/ They said, 'So long...'" At the end of each verse some character in the song experiences dust storm conditions that prompt him to leave town while singing or saying the words to the song we are singing. Some of the examples that Michael cited in his original post did not strike me as particularly self-referential. A case in point is "The Battle Cry of Freedom." The refrain is "So we'll rally round the flag boys, rally once again, shouting the battle cry of freedom," but this does not necessarily imply that the battle cry that is shouted is the song being sung. The song simply takes its name from a catchy phrase in the refrain. The same may be true of "Georgia On My Mind." Is the old sweet song that reminds the singer of Georgia necessarily the same as the song he/she is singing now? This may seem like nit-picking, but many songs take their titles from catchy repeated phrases and are not necessarily self-referential. Think of "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening." Do we need to conclude that when "singing fills the air" in the shank of the night, it is the composer's song being sung? Does anyone else see the problem? Dave Crosby
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
|