Trouble Songs
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trouble songs Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-proft press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afoat. Contri- butions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t fnd a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad- venture is not possible without your support. Vive la open-access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) trouble songs. Copyright © 2018 by Jef T. Johnson. Tis work carries a Cre- ative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and trans- formation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creative- commons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2018 by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. https://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-1-947447-44-8 (print) ISBN-13: 978-1-947447-45-5 (ePDF) lccn: 2018930421 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Book design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Cover image: Philippe de Champaigne, Still-Life With a Skull (ca. 1671). TROUBLE SONGS A Musicological Poetics Jeff T. Johnson for Josephine K. Few Track List Part One I Must Be the Devil’s Daughter 15 “Country Blues,” Dock Boggs 17 Trouble Songs: An Invocation 19 David Lynch, Trouble Man 23 Trouble Forms: Structure & Approach 25 Modes of Trouble — Terms — Elaboration, Embellishment, Embodiment 27 Not Wanting to (Formally) Listen to Trouble Songs 33 History 35 Trouble Song as Speech Act & Magic Language 38 Genre Trouble 42 I’m New Here: Te Trouble With Covers 45 Te Incantation of Trouble 47 Trouble Is a Lonesome Town, Lee Hazlewood 48 History, Continued 49 “Trouble” vs. “Remember” 50 “Troubled Waters,” Cat Power 51 “Paths of Victory,” Cat Power 52 Discomfort & the Cover Condition 53 “Good Intentions Paving Company,” Joanna Newsom 54 Trouble in Dreams, Destroyer 55 *** xi Part Two I Know a Place Where Tere’s Still Something Going On 59 “Trouble” Songs 61 “Summer Days,” Bob Dylan 63 You Know Tat I’m No Good — Amy Winehouse & the Trouble Barrier 64 Trouble With History 66 “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory” 68 Te Secret Rider 69 Not Wanting to Listen to Trouble Songs, Refrain 71 Te Trouble With Superman 73 Trouble Returns 76 Lost in the Paradise 78 Enter Trouble America 80 Fugue on Anthology Minor 81 Occupied 85 We Who Are [in] Trouble 87 We Recruit(ed), We Reinscribe(d) 88 NYTrouble, World Trouble (Hidden Tracks) 89 *** Part Tree Trouble on the Line 91 Take Apart: Room by Room 93 Annie Clark, Becoming “Kerosene” 94 If I Stay Here, Trouble Will Find Me 96 Trouble Will Find You 100 XXII: Trouble on the Line 102 One Kind Favor (“See Tat My Grave Is Kept Clean”) 107 Down the Line 109 Trouble in Heart 111 Te Circle 112 I’m a Fool to Want You 116 xii Lay It Down 118 Cause You’re Mine 121 *** Part Four Back in Trouble 123 Return to Trouble, Tat Lonesome Town 125 Death’s Head, Proud Flesh 128 Nobody Here but We in Trouble 130 A Whole House 132 Nobody Knows (Great Tings to Small) 133 Catch a Fire: One Ting for Another 140 By Any Other Name (“Trouble, Heartaches & Sadness”) 141 Notes 143 Te Author Role 146 Te Champ 147 Dear Trouble 150 Te End of Trouble 151 Song 152 Last Call 153 *** Appendices 157 Appendix A: Demo 159 Appendix B: Cover 163 Appendix C: Remix 168 Works Cited 179 Index of Names 185 Index of Titles 191 Credits 199 xiii Part One I MUST BE THE DEVIL’S DAUGHTER i must be the devil’s daughter “Country Blues,” Dock Boggs1 Come all you good time people2 is the only way it starts. Te banjo may have been playing forever — waiting for the singer to arrive, or indiferent to his presence — : a stage. Or the singer is the instrument of the (infernal) banjo.3 Still, it is impossible to decide whether the voice or the banjo comes frst, though both does not seem to be an option. Te dynamics are too irregular, too separate, for simultaneity. Te third instrument, recording static, holds them together.4 One or the other, the voice or the banjo, might be in a diferent world. Or they are not in the world together, or they are each in a world that is not this one — three worlds. Forty dollars won’t pay my fne. Te song goes around and around, insisting that it play all night (for it is always night in the song, always night when the song plays, though the song is always playing — the song doesn’t stop; we stop listening to it). Money can’t reach it, and we can’t believe the singer can reach heaven, though he sings to us from the aferworld, where corn whiskey and pretty women surround him, sweet heaven when I die. Meanwhile, before or afer, pretty women is a-troublin my mind. He’s in a prison cell, he’s in a hole in the ground, dead drunk and buried by us good people, (he’s) grinning his empty grin at us. It shines through the soil we throw on his face. 1 Tis cover is infuenced by versions and visions of Boggs by Greil Marcus, particularly in Invisible Republic (1997) and his “Old Weird America” course at Te New School. 2 transcription fails delivery: pee-ee-ee-ee-puuuuull… 3 Lee Smith’s The Devil’s Dream presents Satan’s laugher as music, played by and playing the players of the song. 4 See/hear Lou Reed’s version of Blind Lemon Jeferson’s “See Tat My Grave Is Kept Clean,” in which Reed plays (on guitar) the recording static from Jef- ferson’s 1928 record, as collected on volume three of Harry Smith’s Anthol- ogy of American Folk Music (1952). Reed’s revisitation appears on The Harry Smith Project: Anthology of American Folk Music Revisited Vol. 2 (2006). 17 trouble Songs When I’m dead and buried / My pale face turned to the sun… Te singer calls us around while he has plenty of money. As long as his pockets are full, we drink along. When the money’s gone, so are we. He’s gone too, all alone with a woman drinking to his memory: Last time I seen my little woman[,]5 good people, She had a wine glass in her hand, She was drinking down her troubles With a low-down sorry man. Her trouble is a man, and she’s drinking with a trouble man,6 and she’s drinking her troubles, and he watches her as he de-ma- terializes. She joins the invisible chorus of betrayal, along with a woman who promises to bail the singer out of jail, but never gets around to it before she leaves the song. We, good people, join the chorus as we leave, and we can never leave, and our voices dry up in our throats. Boggs too is both here and not here, as we are there and not there. If I don’t quit my rowdy ways / have trouble at my door. Tere it is now, Boggs’s fngernails scratching the banjo’s face, digging at the dirt scattered there. If I’d a-listened to my momma[,] good people / I wouldn’t a-been here today. Wherever he is, we can fnd him in the soil of the song, that too-shallow grave we pass right through if we don’t watch our step. If we do (watch our step), that death’s head keeps nodding away at us. Come all you good time people… 5 the comma makes sense, but Boggs eschews (or transcends) the comma. 6 Got me singing yeah! as Marvin Gaye had it (“Trouble Man”). 18 i must be the devil’s daughter Trouble Songs: An Invocation But before long, the words lost their sense completely, becom- ing little more than a means to regulate breath — which, she soon supposed, was as good a use for them as any. — Ted Mooney, Te Same River Twice Denaturalization of one’s personal and cultural premise. — Caroline Bergvall, “Middling English” Trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days / It seems like trouble going to follow me to my grave — Bessie Smith, “Downhearted Blues” Language is not only a means for saying, language is what we are saying. Record, we say, and we mean album, or we mean vinyl, or we mean history. Let the record show.7 Tat we say record and not CD, tape, album or document is integral to what we are saying. We place ourselves in history, and we place history in ourselves when we use particular language.8 History exists as Trouble Song and is troubled by its9 repre- sentation. Distinctions between Trouble Songs collapse into ver- sions, iterations, variations and interpretations.