The Following Is Something Written a Few Years Back by My Nephew Who Just Blew His Brains Out North of Los Angeles Near Ventura in December 2006--This Piece Concerns the Folksong "Oh Shenandoah" or "Across the Wide Missouri"
The true nature of the song really shows up with what you've (he's writing to a musicologist) found. The fragment reveals yet another take on the word Shenandoah and makes plain the song's original explicitness. It helps to demonstrate the complicated background we are dealing with.
This stanza adds support to an overall evaluation of "Shenandoah". Direct and literal interpretation of the contemporary lyrics, so tempting, doesn't work. The song suggests a romance but close inspection soon washes that away. The song appears wholly metaphorical, in fact, centered on no one actual person or place after all.
Ironically, it may be that the song has little or nothing to do with obvious contemporary associations: Shenandoah as Valley, River or Indian chief. I expect that many simply will not accept that, and I certainly can be wrong, but I just cannot found the word "Shenandoah" onto the original song at this point. I feel that that exact word came into it late. While most easily peg it as a very old song (and therefor of some obscurity) it seems that the idea of the lyrics changing over the years is taboo with Shenandoah. In other postings this idea of a Shenandoah-less "Shenandoah" has been taken as fightin' words. But the well-founded association as a shanty is also dismissed by some. Go figure.
The word Shenandoah et al. is aboriginal and typically phonetic. Historical variations include Gerando, Gerundo, Shendo, Genantua, Sherando. Schin-han-dowi and a host of others may translate into River-Through-the-Woods, Silver-Water, and such. One assumes that whatever phrase Shenandoah may actually represent, it is most likely a place name and associated with water. But again, studying the etymology of the word 'Shenandoah' doesn't clue us much at all to the song by the same name.
I appreciate your example of the bawdy lyrics. No doubt shanties got quite 'robust' as the work crews of men alone sang them. The more "offensive" the better it seems, all to stir their spirit on the job. I have to smile: if only folks knew that that sweet song tinkling in the background is actually so filthy.
I think it important to dwell on just how profane shanty lyrics were as we look at "Shenandoah". Abusive, criminal and lascivious mildly describe the tone of these shanties. The "true words" to any such shanty are not likely easily revealed. The need for re-written, "tamer" versions for the historical record, as it were, must have existed all along. The naieve scholar would assume that these things can ever be nailed down patently.
I do not expect to find the song originating in America from what I've seen so far. Is or was there a Shennydore community in Ireland? Somehow I believe this was an Irish work song that went to sea.
The big mystery to me is where the word "Missouri" got in there, a far murkier quest it seems than ironing out old Shen'.
It is the song's association with Western Expansion, 'crossing the wide Missouri', that most intrigues me, as I've said. The song's transport to the West is of no question, any number of songs were sung in the West, but the current association of Shenandoah as a "western theme" is daunting. I have no background in music whatsoever, my work is in history. Help finding the above mentioned reference volumes, especially Legman's, would be appreciated.
Another Winter of My Family's Discontent
I was at the hospital the night my 2nd nephew, this nephew, was born in 1959. My first nephew was already 6 years old when this next one came along. My brother was infatuated with the poet T.S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot, whom he later met while the poet was giving a lecture at the University of Texas. At that meeting, my brother informed Mr. Eliot that he had named his second son after him. Later T.S. sent a letter addressed to my nephew in which he told him to wear the name proudly just as he was proud to have so fine a young man named after him. My nephew kept this letter framed and over his bed up until his dying day as far as I know.
My nephew was preciously cute as a kid. All the family women adored him. He was especially cute with his little toy kitchen he'd put together, a stove, a refrigerator, an enamel worktable, pots and pans, the works just outside the backdoor of the house his family first bought after they had moved from our hometown out in far West Texas to Dallas in 1961 when my brother, his father, was hired by the large Dallas afternoon newspaper as editor of the book review section of their Sunday paper.
All my brother's boys turned out to be extremely "smart," too smart for their own good, if you know what I mean. They excelled so rapidly in elementary school that they lost a lot of comprehensive-type learning, which they replaced with the autodidactic way in which their brains forced them to go--a path of self-directed direction, an unknown but guessed-at direction, which made it even more thrilling, never knowing whether you are a genius or a fool and never knowing from one day to the next who you can rely on whether you are a genius or a fool. The problem these kids had to constantly face growing up was the overwhelming presence of their aggressively ambitious father, who had been a little smart-ass, too, as a kid, being advanced 3 grades in elementary school to the point he was 15 going 16 (in November) when he went to college. He said he felt totally out of place yet right at home at the same time in college; he knew the subject matter required to pass his courses but he had nothing in common with the older kids who were his classmates. My brother had a mean wit; he was also a raconteur of supreme presentation--once my brother started declaiming it was hard to stop him and even if you could stop him, it was hard to top him. His presence even among his wife and kids was imperial. He ruled his household through his own self-image, the "cultured" Wit from the vast prairie lands of West Texas, the open spaces under the big sky, and in his quest for his own sky-high dream he idealized himself as the greatest writer in the world out of sheer failure at being able to do anything else with as much zeal and determination, and my brother could write--at his death he had 29 books credited to him in his bibliography and hundreds and hundreds of published articles, columns, and his many NYTimes Review of Books articles, one of which, his appreciation or depreciation of Texas writers like Larry McMurtry, who my brother knew personally and who I had gone to college with, became quite a controversial article in the national literary world and led to his rating of Texas literature becoming the gold standard when it came to the best books ever written either about Texas or by Texas writers.
My brother's presence in his home was either met with outright despite or downright silly worship. His kids were suppose to view him the same way his literary audience did. And he hobnobbed with some of the most brilliant writers, newspapermen, and publishers in the world and also his friends included some of the richest men in the world in Dallas. He himself became rich in Dallas; his rise to fame and fortune was written up in Newsweek and Time in the early seventies it was such a phenomenal story. Suddenly my brother was rich and influential in Dallas. And just as suddenly his rather extraordinary kids were expected to act even more extraordinary all for the glory of their father with no glory coming to themselves or so I think they begin to think. He was especially hard on his boys. He expected his boys to rise above him, to want to write, to want to paint, to be photographers, and they tried to please him but they just couldn't. These kids grew up beat, hip, high, and headed for heaven on earth; my brother was baptized in the principles of the Protestant Ethic under which he grew up during that horrible time in this Land of Dreams, a time lost in time but which historically became known as the Great Depression [Republican economic policy the cause of it]. My brother grew up having to "fend" for himself and when he was 14 he had to get his first job, ironically delivering the newspaper on which he would eventually launch his writing career. From 14 on my brother was on his own and having to support himself on through for the rest of his life. At that time, my parents were so desperate for work, they palmed him off on my grandmother and went traipsing off across the windswept dust-bowl-heart of the nation looking for work and income and leaving him behind to come under the influence of my old tough-as-nails pioneer-woman grandmother, the librarian, the author, the poet, and the painter, and her cultured Protestant ethical teachings. My grandmother was insistent, too, that not only your morals be pure but also your language: "Use the language correctly," was one of her main tenets; she insisted on perfection in writing prose or poetry. Her next tenet was: "Read, read, read." That became her Three R's. As he once wrote, the library was his home from the time he was 14 till he went to college and books were his education. This life experience made my brother one of the strongest and daringest individuals I've ever met in terms of wit, reply, and essaying life; yet, he was a "chicken" when it came to being a good father; the poor guy had never experienced the kind of love his kids begged for from him. It wasn't that he didn't love his kids; it was that he was ignorant as to how to show them he loved them. All my brother did from sun up to sundown was work at "the paper" or out in his office working at his typewriter writing yet another book, a column, or several articles. He went to his grave questing recognition--recognition more than just his Texas recognition--he became "the dean of Texas writers" before he died-- but he wanted all the eyes of a room, hell, of the world, on him, and that included the eyes of his kids. My brother was very hard on himself when he got rejected or when he felt he had failed, especially when he realized he was a failure as a father with his boys. He didn't dig their scene at all and considered their culture (the Beatles, Herman Hesse, Zen Flesh Zen Bones, I Ching, Jimi Hendrix, LSD, pot, getting high in order to get to that next level, that level of total freedom, that level of "with it," and "cool" that was too strange and therefore "evil" in his Protestant Ethical eyes. I showed my brother one of my stories one time--it later got mentioned for a Kerouac Prize--and my brother said it was "nonlasting" writing; childish and totally unimpressive when held up to his heroes like T.S. Eliot and Somerset Maugham or his love of Gerard Manly Hopkins, who I once heard him say was his greatest teacher. He told me Jack Kerouac's work would never amount to a hill of beans. You can imagine what he thought of the Beatles books and the writings of Lester Bang or Rudolph Wurlitzer!
My brother was a celebrity. And I know firsthand how hard it is for kids of celebrities to adjust to reality especially when their powerful celebrity father is holding such a high goal of success over their pretty little heads. All his kids were brilliant in their own sweet ways, but especially this third kid, a strange little cute boy with blazing blond hair and crisp blue eyes, an Aryan posterboy and just as mentally mixed up, so scared of life, so scared of stepping off into the normal world, that the abnormal became the norm, especially since he was so utterly unprepared for that textbook "normal" world, expecting as he did to climb that stairway to heaven in the footsteps of his mighty father, with a constant "Go to Hell, Mother, but Love me, Love me, Daddy." And like I said, his daddy just couldn't do it; like I said, too, he just didn't know how to do it. As a result, this kid, hinting at it over and over, one day admitted he was gay and gay he became. Case closed! My brother, a very liberal man really--EXCEPT in the case of homosexuality. I'm perfectly sure my brother knew about homosexuality--he had been in the damn Navy and later the Marines in WWII so surely he'd known some Matachines; plus I knew the gay part of Dallas when I lived there, so I know as a newspaperman he surely knew that gay scene, too, though it was not that flamboyant a scene and was easily avoided, still it was there. But homosexuality disturbed my brother to a bitter turning against this son who suddenly was gay and pushing his gayness in his father's face and to my brother that meant he had failed; his heterosexuality was impotent when it came to this son, this failure.
Oh, how deep I could go into this, but that's enough. You get my point. I was pretty close to this kid both when he was growing up and later after he was grown--hell I practically lived with my brother and his family for a year until I finally got a job and got married--and then even after living in New York City for a year, I went back to Texas and lived on my brother's "goat ranch" down near Austin for a year until my wife came and got me and dragged me back off to our idyllic life in New Mexico. I was close to this kid though in New York City when he was going to a private school up in Connecticut and he would come down to NYC and spend weekends with my wife and me.
I can clearly remember this kid from way back, like I said from the night he was born. He took an early liking to me and I to him. We spent many an hour making fun of Mister Rogers and then getting involved in huge Crazy 8 games--and oh how he loved beating me at Crazy 8s--it's where I got my family nickname, too--he got it from some kitty cats on the backs of the Crazy 8 cards and he started calling me that name that has stuck with my family to this day.
The last time I really saw my nephew I spent a whole day with him back in the high eighties. He drove me all over Dallas to all my old haunts and to the house I grew up in way out in East Dallas and we drove and talked and he told me history and I told him history and it was a great day of bonding for both of us and we ended up late in the afternoon, the sun sailing down behind the colossal home of H.L. Hunt to corona it as we looked out far across the lake as we stood talking and drinking and smoking a jay on the shores of White Rock Lake, just talking life and art and getting high on beer and Mexican mezzrolls--after that, I never saw him again--that was 20 years ago now, but I heard from him, oh Lordy did I hear from him. He got to calling me at 2 or 3 in the morning and he would beg for attention and love from me and I gave it as best I could though the phone calls eventually began to vex me and then tax me, I cannot be a daddy and I certainly couldn't be his daddy and it got to the point that finally I gave up on him and told him to quit calling me, etc., I wasn't mean about it, but it caused him to viciously turn on me and to eventually curse me as the person who was responsible for his being Gay. No living human could be as vindictive as this guy when he was full of bile. I mean he could come up with expletives Nixon never thought of; foul accusations and put downs. This he began to do to me--same as he had done to his father, I then realized. He one night told me he believe Gays were the new Jesus Christs and were put on earth like Jesus to be persecuted until death did them part and they would arise into some Gay Heaven. This kid hated women; I decided that right off the bat; as a result of his hatred of women he turned woman himself and became a bitter, bitter bitch, still pining under his breath, "Love me, Daddy, Love me, Daddy," but there was just no daddy in the world to love him.
It's sad he, like Hunter Thompson, decided there was nothing left to live for on that December day in that California state park. I can sense my nephew out in that forest that day; I even kind'a know where that area is. I'm sure it was unseasonably warm. He was camping, so he had all his camping stuff with him--probably had his car parked back at the park headquarters--he was paranoid as hell, so I now know he had his trusty rifle (it turned out to be a shotgun) with him. The part I can't imagine is his being so down that he was able out in the deepest part of that forest to somehow get that rifle barrel into his mouth--it can be done--Hemingway got a double-barrel shotgun in his mouth, much bigger than a rifle; and then pulled the trigger! That one I can't get. I have never wanted to kill myself; in fact, I'm proud I've defied death several times in my life and continue to live at life in good health. I know and have dealt with manic depressives, but I could never understand why this kid with all in life he had couldn't bear it any longer--enough to blow his bloody good brains out. God, that must have been a such a gutter-low point in this poor man's life. I feel deeply for him right now; deeply. Ironically, I was just told he is still in the morgue--hasn't been buried yet--since December 2006. How cold is that! He is a martyr; yep, my nephew is a martyr to me.
Death and friends and relatives dying no longer affect me much at all. I act insensitive most times to hearing of people dying. But when some people die, I cry, and believe me, I was taught that men DO NOT cry, and I haven't cried much at all, but I shed a tear as I was writing about this nephew's death.
His favorite artist at one time was Cat Stevens--"Tea for the tillerman, steak for the sun," so I leave this lyric with ya:
Get your bags together, go bring your good friends too
Cause it's getting nearer, it soon will be with you
Now come and join the living, it's not so far from you
And it's getting nearer, soon it will all be true
Now I've been crying lately, thinking about the world as it is
Why must we go on hating, why can't we live in bliss
Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again
for The Daily Growler
No comments:
Post a Comment