country roads
Country Roads is one song you've heard a thousand times but might not have thought much about. It's one of John Denver's most popular; everyone between thirty-five and sixty-five can hum it.
Which is what I'd like you to do, because there are some interesting things about it. I've been thinking about this ever since I got going on a Sacred Harp kick a few days ago. (At Friday's gig, after I'd been warming up, I said to Greg, "Hey! Guess what I've been doing?" He said, "Listening to a lot of Aaron Copland?" Actually, I'd been listening to what Copland listened to. Great ears, Greg.)
One of my strongest memories of the song is playing it over and over on our old furniture-stereo, so I could memorize the lyrics. Another is finding out that "misty taste of moonshine" referred not to silvery light but to backyard hooch. I'd thought that line was so poetic. I also remember thinking how odd the lyrical inversion at the end is: "take me home, country roads" becomes "take me home down country roads." That provides a nice little tang in the song's coda, but it dilutes the central image. I figured early on that I also would have changed the lyric "Life is old there, older than the trees; Younger than the mountains, blowin' like a breeze" to the more coherent "Life is old there, older than the trees; Older than the mountains, younger than the breeze."
John Denver did just fine without my ten-year-old suggestions, though. American culture at that time —– the mid-nineteen-seventies —– was going through a fascination with the South. Not the Old South of Gone With The Wind but the South of the present. "Hee Haw" was ascendant; "The Dukes of Hazzard" was in its original cast; we even managed to elect a gentleman farmer from Georgia to the White House. And on my AM radio station, right next to the Eagles and Elton John, I listened to the Bellamy Brothers' Let Your Love Flow, Kenny Rogers' The Gambler, and the Charlie Daniels Band's Devil Went Down to Georgia.
Denver's song, though, struck a note with me that the others didn't. Rogers' ballads brought the word "ballad" back to its original meaning; Let Your Love Flow was a strummy, head-bouncy, easygoing song; Devil stood on its own as a classic American artwork (as well as a wry commentary on the current state of country music, with the down-home traditionalist kicking the Nashville rocker's butt). But Country Roads reaches right to the deepest part of us, the part that longs for home, the exile for whom paradise is paradise lost.
It's been fun for me to introduce Catherine to the intricate world of music. She's a fine musician herself, but never got much into music theory, so there's much that's new to her, and I enjoy finding ways to communicate it all. After a scene in a recent movie whose score turned to the Lydian mode, I gave her a short tour of it, after which she said, "You never cease to surprise me with new stuff."
I also introduced her to the pentatonic scale. You might not be aware of the pentatonic scale or its meaning. If you hit all the black keys on a piano starting from F-sharp, you'll be playing a pentatonic scale. It has, as you may have guessed, five notes.
Most of the music that we think of as traditional American music is done with the pentatonic scale. Brethren, We Have Met to Worship can be played on only black keys. So can Amazing Grace. (Later songs that aren't real folk songs, like Stephen Foster's Oh Susannah, can be spotted by their telltale fourth-degree note. You have to hit a white key.) Chinese folk tunes are also pentatonic. Once in college I played a country tune for a Chinese foreign exchange student, and his eyes brightened with recognition, not of the individual tune, but of its sound. He was thunderstruck that there was this much musical common ground between his country and mine.
I say all this because Denver very skillfully uses the way these sounds work on our hearts. Every verse of "Country Roads" is entirely pentatonic. So is the chorus. The song could almost have been written back in the seventeen-hundreds. I say almost, because there's the bridge. The bridge is the clencher. The first verse is all principle and fact; the second verse introduces the "I" —– all my memories, a teardrop in my eye —– but the bridge is when it gets really personal. The speaker says "I hear her voice," and on the word "voice" descends to the seventh degree of the scale, piercing the song's pentatonic purity. When the radio that "reminds me of my home far away" is mentioned, the word "radio" falls on that other taboo note, the fourth. As long as the song centers on "the place I belong," the great homeland, it remains in the mode of the great American folk sound. The only time we hear the modern scale, it's connected to the anguish of exile.
There's gold in them thar songwriters.
Which is what I'd like you to do, because there are some interesting things about it. I've been thinking about this ever since I got going on a Sacred Harp kick a few days ago. (At Friday's gig, after I'd been warming up, I said to Greg, "Hey! Guess what I've been doing?" He said, "Listening to a lot of Aaron Copland?" Actually, I'd been listening to what Copland listened to. Great ears, Greg.)
One of my strongest memories of the song is playing it over and over on our old furniture-stereo, so I could memorize the lyrics. Another is finding out that "misty taste of moonshine" referred not to silvery light but to backyard hooch. I'd thought that line was so poetic. I also remember thinking how odd the lyrical inversion at the end is: "take me home, country roads" becomes "take me home down country roads." That provides a nice little tang in the song's coda, but it dilutes the central image. I figured early on that I also would have changed the lyric "Life is old there, older than the trees; Younger than the mountains, blowin' like a breeze" to the more coherent "Life is old there, older than the trees; Older than the mountains, younger than the breeze."
John Denver did just fine without my ten-year-old suggestions, though. American culture at that time —– the mid-nineteen-seventies —– was going through a fascination with the South. Not the Old South of Gone With The Wind but the South of the present. "Hee Haw" was ascendant; "The Dukes of Hazzard" was in its original cast; we even managed to elect a gentleman farmer from Georgia to the White House. And on my AM radio station, right next to the Eagles and Elton John, I listened to the Bellamy Brothers' Let Your Love Flow, Kenny Rogers' The Gambler, and the Charlie Daniels Band's Devil Went Down to Georgia.
Denver's song, though, struck a note with me that the others didn't. Rogers' ballads brought the word "ballad" back to its original meaning; Let Your Love Flow was a strummy, head-bouncy, easygoing song; Devil stood on its own as a classic American artwork (as well as a wry commentary on the current state of country music, with the down-home traditionalist kicking the Nashville rocker's butt). But Country Roads reaches right to the deepest part of us, the part that longs for home, the exile for whom paradise is paradise lost.
It's been fun for me to introduce Catherine to the intricate world of music. She's a fine musician herself, but never got much into music theory, so there's much that's new to her, and I enjoy finding ways to communicate it all. After a scene in a recent movie whose score turned to the Lydian mode, I gave her a short tour of it, after which she said, "You never cease to surprise me with new stuff."
I also introduced her to the pentatonic scale. You might not be aware of the pentatonic scale or its meaning. If you hit all the black keys on a piano starting from F-sharp, you'll be playing a pentatonic scale. It has, as you may have guessed, five notes.
Most of the music that we think of as traditional American music is done with the pentatonic scale. Brethren, We Have Met to Worship can be played on only black keys. So can Amazing Grace. (Later songs that aren't real folk songs, like Stephen Foster's Oh Susannah, can be spotted by their telltale fourth-degree note. You have to hit a white key.) Chinese folk tunes are also pentatonic. Once in college I played a country tune for a Chinese foreign exchange student, and his eyes brightened with recognition, not of the individual tune, but of its sound. He was thunderstruck that there was this much musical common ground between his country and mine.
I say all this because Denver very skillfully uses the way these sounds work on our hearts. Every verse of "Country Roads" is entirely pentatonic. So is the chorus. The song could almost have been written back in the seventeen-hundreds. I say almost, because there's the bridge. The bridge is the clencher. The first verse is all principle and fact; the second verse introduces the "I" —– all my memories, a teardrop in my eye —– but the bridge is when it gets really personal. The speaker says "I hear her voice," and on the word "voice" descends to the seventh degree of the scale, piercing the song's pentatonic purity. When the radio that "reminds me of my home far away" is mentioned, the word "radio" falls on that other taboo note, the fourth. As long as the song centers on "the place I belong," the great homeland, it remains in the mode of the great American folk sound. The only time we hear the modern scale, it's connected to the anguish of exile.
There's gold in them thar songwriters.
Comments