Mom and Music
Sometime in the fall of 1983, Mom and I walked to the Third Street Music School and met a young woman tasked with helping us figure out which musical instrument I should choose to begin lessons. We went into a storage room full of various items, and she listed the options. “Guitar,” I said, and she put an unlit cigarette into her mouth so that she could use both hands to grab a classical guitar from a shelf. I took lessons through high school, and brought my guitar with me when I moved to San Francisco after college. Once I decided to move back to New York in late 1998, I gave it away to a friend who told me she had wanted to learn to play.
Mom played piano during her childhood, continuing until she was twenty-one, but ultimately decided to stop for practical reasons. Her sister Margaret also studied piano, and became a teacher and Brahms scholar. There was a small upright piano at the family house in Needles, and Mom would occasionally play it a little on trips to visit their mother, Beulah. She didn't pick up any other instruments for a long time, until at some point in Paris in the late 90s she acquired a small Casio keyboard with the intention of studying certain folk melodies. “The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies” was a point of interest. Mom was also dreaming songs on occasion, and wrote down the lyrics, sometimes including them in her poems.
Around this time I was sending her and my stepfather Doug Oliver mix CDs, containing either depression-era folk and country blues songs, various Bob Dylan live recordings, and/or a smattering of indie rock, tending towards artists on Drag City. The folk and blues material had always been an interest of hers. She had been to one of the Newport Folk Festivals in the 60s, and also one of Bob Dylan’s “controversial” electric shows at Forest Hills in 1965, where he was booed for plugging in. She also saw the Fugs and the Velvet Underground during that time period.
We would discuss various songs over time, with Dylan often as a catalyst. How his version of “Black Jack Davey” was a descendant of “The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies.” But in the Woody Guthrie version, the woman won’t forsake her children. How do the versions of “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” differ between the young Joan Baez and opera singer Oriel Smith? Did the lyrical phrasing of Dylan’s “Man in the Long Black Coat” influence the meter of her epic poem The Descent of Alette? She had already been using the meter, but Dylan’s song gave her inspiration to finish a particular part... the beginning. I sent her a live version of Dylan performing the song at West Point Academy in 1994, dubbed from a bootleg cassette version I had bought on St. Mark’s Place as a teenager. It’s a passionate performance, where the end syllables of certain phrases are drawn out in haunting crescendos. “It’s acid!,” she remarked, meaning LSD.
During Doug’s illness and death, we listened a lot to a Blind Willie McTell album called Atlanta Twelve String, with its masterful idiosyncratic performances of songs like “Don’t a Man Feel Bad When His Baby’s on the Cooling Board.” The Complete Recordings of Blind Willie Johnson was also in rotation, especially the song “What is the Soul of a Man?” Phrases from these songs, and also many others became incorporated into her book In the Pines, with the title taken from the Leadbelly song. My favorite version of the song had been dubbed off of a blues mix that originated from Allen Ginsberg’s apartment.
At some point in the last 10 years or so, Mom got interested in instruments again and acquired a ukulele. Ultimately she deemed it insufficient and expressed an interest in a guitar. One year, maybe 2020, I ordered a classical guitar for her for Christmas. It took a while for her to make a sufficient sound, but she would try to play for 20 minutes a day. She bought a music stand, and acquired sheet music—a Robert Johnson song book, a compendium of folk songs, and chord and lyric print outs of “Yellow Kid” by the Royal Trux, and “Smith & Jones” by the Silver Jews. There was a version of “Black Jack Davey.” But her main musical interest for a few years had been centered around bluegrass musician Tony Rice, and several musicians around his circles, including Vassar Clements, Sharon Gilchrist, and Molly Tuttle. Tony Rice’s version of the traditional song “Shady Grove” really stayed with her, and was one that she continued to focus on learning. We watched endless clips of performances of the song whenever she would come to visit.
The last musical email that Mom sent to me was in reference to a video of musician Billy Strings talking about Tony Rice. I was hesitant to watch it, and she explained “It’s a conversation about how Tony Rice mixed bluegrass and jazz, the open E of bluegrass and how to let in blues keys. It’s quite interesting, I listened to about ten minutes of it. If you don’t quite concentrate, it works.”
A few days before she died, in conversation with Anselm, Mom made a long list of favorite folk/country/blues songs on a couple of notebook pages.