By Mac McKinney at OPED News:
Caroline Herring’s newest album (source: http://carolineherring.com/)
It is amazing what one can do with just an acoustic guitar, one accompanist and your voice, especially if your name is Caroline Herring, well-known country and folk singer/songwriting daughter of Mississippi, who published her first album, Twilight, in 2001 and has now just released her fifth, Golden Apples of the Sun, five being, as I will explain later, quite an appropriate number for such a title and album.
Mississippi means many things to many people, Old South, segregation, the BigRiver, MagnoliaState, college football, not to mention Mark Twain, George Ohr and Walter Anderson, three of the state's greatest artists. And that is where the thread picks up with Caroline Herring, who deeply shares the love of Nature that possessed Anderson and inspired his own creativity. What is more, she expresses this love on two fronts, poetically and musically, both of which she is adept at.
In fact, her first song, Tales of the Islander, is a tribute to Walter Anderson, the famous painter, writer, and naturalist from New Orleans who finally settled in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, just west of Pascagoula, and whose bayous I coincidently was trudging through back in 2007 as I investigated Katrina's damage, damage that extended to many of Anderson's works, although much of it has been restored. Anderson was an eccentric icon in Ocean Springs, not unlike the Mad Potter, George Ohr, in Biloxi. Both left huge legacies for their respective cities.
Anderson, however, was a living embodiment of Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer combined, who used to regularly hop in a rowboat riggable with a sail and navigate to nearby Horn Island, where he absorbed himself in Nature to produce fascinating works of art, such as these:
CLICK HERE (permanent museum collection)
Tales of the Islander, with its steady and intricate, hypnotic guitar rhythm, becomes an invitation to you and I to join Caroline in a mystical raft float, a la Walter, Huck and Tom, down the Mississippi River against the canvas of the majesty of its wildlife and the sun, moon and stars. The lyrics are exceptional and strikingly poetic, to note one stanza:
A full moon rising
On all of nature's powers
Stars just observers
Of zinnias and moonflowers
We could bathe in the nullah of a gulf stream
Prowl like cats in the night
Then transform like moths
In a chrysalis of light
Chrysalis of light
Since the first song of an album often sets the theme, I asked Caroline if Walter Anderson is a major influence to her, above and beyond Tales of the Islander, to which she replied:
“He is an influence, especially in regards to this album. I meant for there to be a constant theme of nature as sacred, nature as illuminating... I based the Walter Anderson song on his cottage murals, which are four: sunrise, day, sunset and night. So those (other album) songs are companions."
Certainly this is evident in other songs, such asAbuelita, a languid song with a hauntingly beautiful melody, which is also a Spanish term of endearment for grandmother:
Abuelita
underneath the trees
Of Costa Rica
and her dark shored seas
They won't tell me about you
They don't want me to see
Abuelita you're just like me (refrain)
The song invokes, in the first stanza, the virgin of the moon, who could be Diana or Artemis the Huntress from Roman and Greek mythology, or the Virgin Mary of Catholics, before segueing into a reverence for Abuelita, grandmother, which, whether Caroline is doing this consciously or not, can't help but associate the song a bit more with mythology, with, to be exact, the archetype of the Crone. Crone today often means hag in our youth-obsessed culture, but in the distant past it meant Wise Woman, the elder woman of great experience who passed her knowledge down to young girls and women. The Crone is also the third aspect of the ancient European Triple-Goddess, whose triad is Virgin, Matron and Crone, new moon, full moon, old moon.
Her choice of inclusion of W.B. Yeats' famous poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus, in this album continues this connection between her music, Nature and mythology, because Yeats's poem is a great opus invoking the mystical/magical powers of Nature, as you can note below:
The Song of Wandering Aengus
William Butler Yeats (1899)
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lads and hilly lands.
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
The hazel tree in Celtic tradition is a tree of wisdom, and all knowledge of the arts and sciences resides in what are known as the Nine Hazelnuts of Poetic Art and Inspiration. The silver trout in Celtic lore is a sacred fish, associated, like the salmon, with wisdom and the Otherworld. Apples, of course, are prime symbols of the Divine Feminine, and occur prominently in both Celtic and Greek myth. Note that Caroline's fourth album was entitled The Silver Apples of the Moon, and now this, her fifth, embraces the golden apples from Yeats' poem. This is a perfect numerical synchronicity, since, when you cut an apple in half horizontally, a five-pointed, seed-filled star or Pentagram, ancient Goddess symbol, always appears.
I asked Caroline why she picked that as the title of her album and, since it has a lot of mythological associations, primarily Goddess associations, if she is into mythology, Wicca or any such streams of thought, to which she replied:
“I wasn't thinking of goddess associations so much with this song, with this title. I saw it as the mystical hope of mankind, enduring hope. And of course with silver apples of the moon, golden apples of the sun, nature's cycle.”
Musically and artistically, this album marks a continuing expansion, maturity, and blossoming of Caroline's work. We are well beyond simple “country” or even “Southern” music with this album, with rhythms, themes and chords that merge with the greater Americana sounds and words of singers like Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell. In fact, as if to emphasize this, Caroline tastefully explores one of Joni Mitchell's well-known hits, Cactus Tree, taking up the challenge of singing one of Joni, the great octave leaper's vocally gymnastic pieces, while not trying to match Joni in degrees of difficulty.
Do not let me mislead you that Caroline is leaving her Mississippi roots behind in this album. On the contrary, The Dozens, a hard-driving, chord-throbbing drama about overcoming segregation in the South, leaps into the heart of the Mississippi experience, past and present, while A Little Bit of Mercy keeps up the torrid musical pace and existential theme of hometown limitation and tradition in tension with the need for universal freedom of heart, mind and spirit. In Mississippi and elsewhere in the Deep South, one can suffocate unless one climbs higher to breathe in the oceanic current:
Underneath this house of stones
A whole wide world beckons us on
To leave behind the walls and doors
Windows, ceilings and floors
Let us breathe in mountains
Breathe out sun
For ourselves
And this race we run
Producer David Goodrich, “Goody”, who also is the accompanist on this album, strengthens this song even further by mixing in Caroline harmonizing with herself throughout the piece, to great effect. He does the same in the refrains of the dark and haunting ballad, Long Black Veil, adding the steady, somber strum of a banjo to the gallows mood of the song.
Caroline's rendition of the Steinberg/Kelly song, True Colors, made popular by Cindi Lauper is more in the vein of a classic country piece, deep-voiced and more up-tempo than Lauper's version, with excellent and upbeat guitar work on her part.
Caroline, never shying from poetic tradition, even throws in Dante's Inferno for good measure in her song The Great Unknown, the Medieval theme of ascension from Hell to Heaven serving as metaphor for her recurring theme of escaping the darkness of the past for the Light, escaping, to borrow from astrological concepts, Capricorn and Saturn, who would eat his own children rather than relinquish power, for Aquarius and the universal and liberating energy of Uranus, planet of transformation.Here is a pretty decent video of her introducing and singing The Great Unknown on YouTube live at Toogenblik, Haren in Brussels in June 2008. (scroll down...)
..
Her last piece, The Wild Rose, which she crafted from the works of Wendell Berry and Pablo Neruda and sings to the accompaniment of piano, puts a final, lovely touch on this tour de force album, a piece part Irish dirge in somberness, pace and melody, part church hymn in power and grace, yet again with the theme of the rejuvenating majesty of Nature rising into consciousness:
Light wraps you as you stand
Oh sacred stem in mortal flame
Great roots of night they grow
The things that hide come out again
Come to me my wild, wild rose
Ablaze in all your glory
Choosing what before I chose
The blessings of God's bounty
Go out and buy this album. It's one of the best I've heard in a long time, and better still, it grows on you with each listening. Find it at: http://carolineherring.com/ It is produced by David Goodrich and Signature Sounds.
0 comments:
Post a Comment