The Turnip Farmer

"I like for you to listen then what I'm saying. I'd make the gitar say what I say, you unnerstand. If I say "Our Father" it say "Our Father. If I give out a hymn, it'll say it. If I play "Amazing Grace" it'll sing that too" - Fred McDowell in "Baby Please Don't Go" \ the liner notes to "I do not play no rock 'n' roll."

 

More often than not, instruments are played like artificial appendages. 

Most musicians think that their instruments are detachable, their lives somehow disconnected with that of their own.

Here are a few examples, marked by their use of, at times, 'guitar singing,' all the while silencing the voice.

Of course, the point here is not to just drop off a word, as in Willie Mctell's song, "I got to (cross) it for myself," or in Charlie Patton's, "I'll meet you on that other (shore)," replacing it instead with an instrumental substitution of the same meaning, as if this process were a sort of musical alchemy. The point being that the guitar's heard here are not entirely separate entities from the musicians themselves.

 

     

 

The turnip-puller

points the way

with a turnip

-Kobayashi Issa

"The man who is pulling up the turnips is so much one with them that he uses a turnip as his own finger, to point the way" - R.H. Blyth in Haiku, Vol. 4: Winter.

 

Comments

[Charles Sharp]

These are great examples, but I am a bit curious about the spelling in the quote from Fred McDowell. I am hoping that this was the spelling used in the liner notes and not your decision to try to emphasize Mr. McDowell's accent and pronunciation. His pronunciation of words like "guitar" and "understand" are correct-- what do we gain by misspelling them? A more "authentic" country flavor? Do we ever spell out our own accents when writing in "our own voice"? We have third layer of speaking here: the words enunciated by the performer / the music (or instrument) enunciating words / and a writer re-inscribing the aurality of an accent. Is there a parallel here between the way in which we spell words and the way in which McDowell lets the guitar speak in its own voice? I can't help but find this act of misspelling to be an act of interpretative violence while McDowell's (and countless other musicians') practice of letting the instrument speak is a poetic act of the highest order.

[Zachary]

Charles,

It certainly is the liner notes that I quoted from, and I used the spellings just as they are found there.

I decided to type it up because it emphasized exactly what I was trying to focus the post on, and because those few lines are not isolated in McDowell's narrative in the posted video, so I thought it could be more easily seen if isolated.

I had absolutely no intent to harm in typing the liner notes up this way. Thanks for pointing out that it could come across other wise.