Love is red, death is blue

Rennie Sparks is a great lyricist for the Handsome Family, and she's also published short stories. But it wouldn't have occurred to either of us that Rennie would write a serious, historical, mythological essay based on an enormous amount of research. We had to cut her bibliography way, way back. It was maybe 10 pages long. David Thomas, who is the leader of Pere Ubu, has written some very evocative liner notes. But we had no idea that he would come up with a theoretical essay about the influence of modern communications on creativity and music, and the inevitability of why certain events are attractive to ballad makers and singers, and why others are kind of thrown away. Completely theoretical piece.

Anna Domino, who neither of us had met -- she is the singer in Snakefarm, which in 1999 put out this amazing record called "Songs From My Funeral," which are techno versions of the most common American ballads imaginable, everything from "John Henry" on down. We knew nothing about her. As far as we knew, she'd never written a line. And here she comes up with this stunning piece of fiction where she chooses the balled "Omie Wise" about a pregnant woman who's drowned by her lover in North Carolina in 1807, and she inhabits that character, she becomes her, she's writing to her aunt the night that she's going to be murdered. Sean can talk more about this in terms of what's actually going on in literary and historical terms in that piece. But it was a feast of surprise as these pieces began to come in.

SW: Same thing was true on the other side with the literary people, when I approached Joyce Carol Oates, just knowing that she likes music but not really knowing what she'd pick. I had no idea, first of all, that she would write a story rather than write a piece of criticism, and then that she would pick that song. Which if you asked me, would have been the last thing I would have imagined. But she picks "Little Maggie," which is a song about a woman who is desired and unattainable and slightly cracked. And what she makes of it is something completely different, completely outside the song but very much true to the ballad itself.

It sounds like you didn't have to even encourage people's idiosyncrasies; they just brought them to it freely. Here's a small example of language from Sarah Vowell's piece where she starts a sentence by saying, "Like a lot of your bigger hit songs ..." I love that "your," instead of saying, "Like many hit songs," which would probably be the standard way to do it.

G.M.: It's conversational but it also has that [pause] salesman's tone. You know, "You got your big cars over here, you got your small cars over here, but what you're really looking for is style." It's that tone, too, immediately bringing you into a commercial conversation with commercial language.

S.W.: The other part about this is not only the freedom of language but the willingness of people to do this. I mean, everybody we asked came through and they all came through brilliantly. And my theory behind that was that the writers have never been asked to write about music and the musicians have never been asked to write, or rarely been asked to write. And I think that people carry these songs around with them -- even more than we realize -- carry around with them not only in their brains but in their hearts and there was just this burst of creativity among some creative people, to be sure, but beyond that. Someone like Paul Berman, for example, who writes about politics ["Terror and Liberalism," "A Tale of Two Utopias"], given the chance to write about a ballad, took us to the heart of Brooklyn, and took us all over the place from Longfellow to Mexico City. I don't think he has ever been asked to write about this kind of thing.

About a year ago, one of your contributors, Howard Hampton, told me that he thinks there are many Americans now who no longer have a sense of the past as a real place. And reading through the book it struck me that each of these pieces, in its own way, is an affirmation of the past as a real place.

G.M.: Well, a real place that we still live in, that we carry with us whether we know it or not, that can't ever be escaped. I mean, there are lines throughout the book where this comes across to me -- they're almost dreamlike in the way that they carry you to another country, which someone once said the past is. The first line in Ann Powers' piece on "The Water Is Wide": "In this part of the story, nothing happens." What could be more alluring? You know: Tell me about the part where nothing happens, because obviously, that's where everything happens. It's an incredible invocation of suspense. And then there's David Thomas, saying just bluntly, "Thomas Alva Edison is the father of Elvis." And there, if in fact you live your life according to the notion that the past is not a real place, one simple line like that, a few words, immediately pulls the ground out from under your feet.

Unless you think of Elvis as part of the past.

GM: Well ... maybe. But then there's no hope for you and we can't help you.

Next Page: Are we, as Lincoln suggested in his second inaugural, still fighting the Civil War?

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