The Lens:
I listen to music all of the time. I am not big on silence, especially when I am driving. Ever try driving around San Francisco? In addition, to filling the silence, it calms my nerves.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, I am not quite a spring chicken. I have Spotify – sort of. My son was kind enough to share his subscription with me. I have SiriusXM. I have tried Spotify but haven’t quite taken to it. SiriusXM is usually my weekend morning entertainment.
My main go-to for music, though, is iTunes or CDs. My sporadic use of Spotify and Sirius provides an occasional change of pace in my music life as well as a introduction to or reminder of songs I can then add to my music collection. But, they are no substitute for the catalog of music I have amassed.
I have an iPod Nano for home, and a Shuffle (yes, a very old shuffle) for my car. I also have my iPhone to use at school when I play music for my students. It also makes a good back up when one of my iPods fails me (I have finally started using my iPhone in my second car as my Mini seems to have given up the ghost.)
I know the music. It is all music I like. I can make play lists to customize what I want to hear – a play list to suit every occasion, every mood.
Long intro to the story . . . I was listening to my Shuffle in the car today. The song “Ode to Billie Joe” by Bobbie Gentry came on. If you haven’t heard it, it is a haunting tune about a southern family gathering for dinner and discussing the morning’s news that “Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie bridge.”
This is an amazing song. In my opinion, in terms of music, its composition is not knock-your-socks-off amazing, though it fits the song perfectly. What makes this song amazing are the lyrics.
First, the lyrics tell a great story, full of mystery. In the 70s, the song was made into a movie. Just a so-so movie that solves the mystery. I think part of the reason the movie was so-so was because it was a mystery not meant to be solved. But, I digress.
Back to the song . . . As great a story-song it is, there is more to it that takes it to a level of legendry. The language draws you in. The choice of words, the dinner conversation – they provide such imagery, you picture the scene clearly.
I hadn’t been to the south or anywhere near it when the song was released. Still, I could see that family sitting around a county kitchen table, sharing a meal, and engaging in their small-town idle gossip.
Words. Sometimes it is a single line (like Tift Merrit’s “Patient as the easy rain” from “Good Hearted Man”), or an entire song (like Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Coming Down) that grab you.
Other times, there are pages and pages of mesmerizing words. One of my all-time favorite books is “White Oleander.” It is a tragic, heart-wrenching story as much about a girl who sifts her way through the foster care system as it is about her relationship with her mother. For all the pain in this story, I am completely awed by it and hideously jealous I can’t write like that.
Words – glorious gifts that can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, the plain into pure poetry.
The Refraction:
Go back to the “Long intro to the story” paragraph and the phrase “a haunting song about a southern family gathering for dinner.” What do you picture? I said I could see the scene clearly. Only I think I misinterpreted the meal.
It was many, many years after the song’s release, after hearing the words hundreds of times, that my error occurred to me. When you hear “dinner,” what meal do you think of?
As the gossip about Billie Joe is floating around the table, the father is more concerned about eating than Billie Joe. He says, “Well, Billy Joe never had a lick of sense; pass the biscuits, please. There’s five more acres in the lower forty I’ve got to plow.” Dad is pointing out he still has work to do that day.
There were other subtle clues I missed yet so obvious had I chosen to listen:
“And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat.” They were stopping to eat, not quitting for the day.
“And mama said to me, child, what’s happened to your appetite? I’ve been cookin’ all morning, and you haven’t touched a single bite.” Mama was cooking all morning, not all day.
I assumed when Bobbie Gentry talked about dinner, she was talking about the meal I call dinner and have at the end of the day, say around 6:00pm. Then, the lightbulb went off. She was probably talking about what I would call lunch, the noontime meal. For Bobbie, dinner was probably the main meal of the day around mid-day, and supper the lighter, end-of-the day meal. An understandable and somewhat forgivable mistake on my part, one based on making sense of things by applying my own cultural knowledge.
I wonder what other misinterpretations I have made throughout my life.
Think about this . . . If you were to read something about some ladies going to the beach wearing their new thongs, what picture would come to mind? Would that picture change if the timeframe was the 1970s?
For me, it would. In the 70s, thongs (also called zories) were what we call flip flops today. If you were unaware of that, your vision of these ladies walking on the beach 1970s would be completely wrong.
Misinterpreting may not be such a big deal when listening to “Ode to Billie Joe” and thinking there were sitting down to a meal much later in the day than was the case. And, it probably wouldn’t matter all that much if we pictured ladies walking around in scant swimsuits when that wasn’t the case.
But, there are times when how we interpret words really matters. As a Catholic, my life has been steeped in Bible stories, lessons, directives. I have long maintained that the Bible was interpreted from an ancient language that no longer exists. In addition, the writers were making their translation based on their own knowledge formed by their culture, by their time, etc. As such, how certain can we be that the words we read today are a true reflection of what was initially written.
This is important, really important. When we are choosing how to conduct our lives based on a text, shouldn’t we be sure that text is true?
I am not saying the Bible should be disregarded. Yet, we have been given a brain. Whether by God or the wind, we have been given a brain. I feel we have a duty, a moral responsibility to use it. And, using it means always thinking, rethinking, realizing the limitations of our understanding, and deciding for ourselves after careful consideration.