All right, let's finish up Movement I (please note that footnote numbering picks up from previous section).
• Waiting for a Train
Consider, if you will, a tiny detail: the train-whistle effect that occurs twice in Movement I: once preceding the spoken "you're under arrest!" in "Heroes And Villains," and once at the transition from "Roll Plymouth Rock" to "Barnyard." A corny bit of business; a few seconds’ worth of wordless vocals. On the most obvious level, it echoes a remarkably similar effect: the spine-tingling vocals that begin Jimmie Rodgers's "Waiting for a Train."
Rodgers – whose work combined folk, blues and country into a unique genre-defying style – brought to his "railroad" songs an authenticity born of hard work and personal experience. Rodgers came to know the railroad life early on: his father held several railroad jobs, and young Jimmie accompanied him to work. In later life, Rodgers became a brakeman, earning his living by running atop the railroad car roofs to set their mechanical brakes. He came by his nickname – "The Singing Brakeman" – honestly.
If this vocal effect summons Rodgers's ghost, it also – taken together with the quotation, minutes later, of "I've Been Working on the Railroad," and the thundering rush of the "iron horse" section of "Cabin Essence" – invokes an entire tradition of railroad songs and railroad history. It's "The Ballad of Casey Jones" and it's "John Henry" and it's "Orange Blossom Special." It's Hank Williams, certainly ("Lonesome Whistle Blues"), and Robert Johnson ("Love in Vain"), and Leadbelly ("Midnight Special"), and even Elvis Aron Presley ("Mystery Train").
In a 2004 interview, Parks reflected on the importance of the railroad influences in the SMiLE music: "When I heard a railroad train in Brian Wilson's music," he said, "imagery appear[ed]." 5
• Old McDonald
No deep analysis required here. SMiLE is full of child-like images and childhood references. It does not seem too much of stretch to hear, in "Barnyard," an echo of this children's song (and its repeating animal sounds).
"Old McDonald" itself turns out to be a modern adaptation of an old English children's song, known, interestingly enough, as "The Barnyard":
With a baa! baa! here,
And a baa! baa! there,
Here a baa! There a baa!
Here a baa! There a baa!
Hey, little girl (or boy),
Will you come along with me,
To see the farmer's sheep?
With a moo! moo! here,
And a moo! moo! there,
Here a moo! There a moo!
Here a moo! There a moo!
Hey, little girl (or boy),
Will you come along with me,
To see the farmer's cows?
(The song continues with other animal sounds.)
• Barnyard Blues (Livery Stable Blues)
Known by both names, this song was recorded in 1917 by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band; went on to become the first million-selling record; and is regarded, in some quarters, as the very first jazz recording. That status alone would ensure its historical significance, but SMiLE fans may be more interested in the fact that the tune features the horn players doing barnyard animal imitations (!). Here’s one reviewer's description: "the trombone, clarinet and cornet imitat[e] various barnyard animals: the clarinet a rooster, the cornet a horse, and the trombone a cow." 6 Here's another: "The very first jazz recording, made by a white quintet from New Orleans. It may sound like a novelty item, but dancers found its cheeky energy irresistible.” 7
The authorship of the song is a matter of controversy, although musicians Alcide Nunez and Ray Lopez are usually awarded the honors. At one point the song was the subject of two competing copyright filings: one by Nunez and Lopez (under the title "Livery Stable Blues") and one by the band and its manager (under the title "Barnyard Blues"). The dispute lay at the heart of a Chicago legal proceeding; that lawsuit was ultimately thrown out, however, on the basis of the judge's belief that all blues compositions sounded essentially the same. (The judge had rejected a request to allow the musicians to play their instruments in court, the better to illustrate the subtleties of blues and jazz composition.) 8
"Barnyard Blues" also has an interesting connection to Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue – one of the acknowledged inspirations behind SMiLE.
When Paul Whiteman planned his 1924 Aeolian Hall jazz concert – the concert at which the Rhapsody had its premiere – he decided to recapitulate, to the extent possible, the evolution of jazz music. He was basically trying to "sell" the notion of jazz as serious music; and so he sequenced the performances so as to demonstrate a progression from the earliest, most primitive jazz up to the latest, most serious and sophisticated compositions. Unsurprisingly, the Rhapsody was chosen as the final piece of the concert.
And the first piece? Why, "Barnyard Blues," of course. Whiteman hoped and expected that his audience would find the novelty piece laughable, particularly in comparison with the more highly developed jazz to follow. But (like the dancers of 1917) the concertgoers loved the "cheeky" little song.
Today’s SMiLE listeners may still struggle with the album's idiosyncratic combination of naive humor and intense seriousness. Like the Aeolian Hall concert, SMiLE makes room for the breathtaking beauty of “Surf’s Up” as well as the silliness of “Barnyard.” Ultimately, like Whiteman’s long-ago audience, we seem to be able – thankfully – to embrace both.
• The Old Master Painter
This song, written by Haven Gillespie and Beasley Smith, was a hit for Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme, Dick Haymes and four other recording artists…all in 1950. Although it appears in SMiLE only as a brief instrumental quotation, the original lyrics (sung by Wilson to the musicians during the original SMiLE sessions, presumably to give them a feeling for the song, and sporadically revived in concert performances during 2004) are worth reproducing here:
That old master painter from the faraway hills
Painted the violets and the daffodils
He put the purple in the twilight haze
then did a rainbow for the rainy days
Dreamed up the murals on the blue summer skies
Painted the devil in my darlin's eyes
Captured the dreamer with a thousand thrills
The old master painter from the faraway hills
Then came his masterpiece and when he was through
He smiled down from heaven and he gave me you
What a beautiful job on that wonderful day
That old master painter from the hills far away
The occurrence of the word "smile" raises an eyebrow, of course:
Then came his masterpiece and when he was through
He smiled down from heaven and he gave me you
The "Old Master Painter" is a sun-figure: he smiles "down from heaven"; he "paints" the world with light; and he creates a "rainbow for the rainy days." (One need look no further than the cover of the SMiLE CD package for proof of the importance of the sun motif.) It is entirely natural, then, that this song is paired with "You Are My Sunshine": they are both, in fact, "sun" songs.
Also of interest is the fact that this song imagines the creator as a sort of divine artist. This notion is not uncommon; in Aboriginal Australian myth, for example, the world is created by a group of "Ancients" who literally sing it into existence:
Each of the Ancients, now basking in the sunlight put his left foot forward and called out a second name. He put his right foot forward and called out a third name. He named the waterhole, the reedbeds, the gum trees – calling to right and left, calling all things into being and weaving their names into verses.
The Ancients sang their way all over the world. They sang the rivers and ranges, salt pans and sand dunes. They hunted, ate, made love, danced, killed, wherever their tracks led they left a trail of music.
They wrapped the whole world in a web of song; at last when the earth was sung, they felt tired. 9
Finally – a remarkable constellation of echoes gathered around a brief musical phrase! – the "Old Master Painter" may be a sly reference to Wilson himself: the "old master" offering his "masterpiece" to the world.
• You Are My Sunshine
Along with "Home on the Range," this popular campfire song is one of two official state songs to be incorporated into SMiLE. You may enjoy the following detour into American history:
"You Are My Sunshine" was written by Jimmie H. Davis and Charles Mitchell. Davis was the eldest of eleven children born to a sharecropper family in Quitman, Louisiana. Although his father had only a third-grade education, Jimmie went on to college, where he was lead tenor in the glee club (and where he supported himself by singing on street corners).
In 1928, Davis took a job as a criminal court clerk: his first taste of political life. In 1929, he was signed by a talent scout from RCA records. He enjoyed notable success in both careers – politics and music – and by the end of the 1930s he was a popular country-and-western recording artist…and Shreveport's Commissioner of Public Safety. In 1940 he recorded "You Are My Sunshine"; it became an international hit, eventually recorded by more than 350 artists.
In 1944, Davis ran for Governor of Louisiana, opposing the corrupt machine of Huey Long. Davis used "You Are My Sunshine" as his campaign song. (The election was a sort of battle between songwriters; Randy Newman covered Long's "Every Man a King" on his Good Old Boys album.) Davis was elected Governor a second time in 1960; in 1998, at the age of 99, he recorded a new version of "You Are My Sunshine." He died in 2000, at the age of 101. "You Are My Sunshine" (with an extra verse celebrating crawfish and sugar cane) was designated Louisiana's state song in 1977.
When Brian recorded the song for SMiLE, he played around a bit with the tenses, singing the lyric as "you were my sunshine." There was warrant for this decision: the original song, too, is somewhat eccentric in the matter of tenses. Consider these lines:
The other night, dear
As I lay sleeping
I dreamed I held you in my arms.
When I awoke, dear
I was mistaken
And I hung my head and cried
You are my sunshine
My only sunshine
You make me happy
When skies are grey
You'll never know dear
How much I love you
Please don't take my sunshine away.
I'll always love you
And make you happy
If you will only say the same
But if you leave me
To love another
You'll regret it all some day
The first verse is sung in the past tense (telling the tale of a sweetheart who has already left); the chorus in the present tense (begging that same sweetheart not to go); and the second verse in the future tense (warning of heartbreak to come). This kind of inconsistency is not at all uncommon in so-called "roots" music; it often occurs, for example, in blues songs. Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue" is a contemporary – and quite sophisticated – adaptation of this technique.
Like "Gee," this song has been sonically "antiqued" in order to identify it as a quotation. Here, the effect approximates the sound of an old gramophone.
• Home on the Range
In 1977 – when "You Are My Sunshine" was adopted as Louisiana's state song – "Home on the Range" had been the Kansas state song for some thirty years. The words were written (in the form of a poem called "Oh Give Me a Home") by Dr. Brewster M. Higley, an early Kansas pioneer. The music was supplied by one Dan Kelley, a former bugler in the Union army.
The phrase "home on the range" appears twice in "Cabin Essence," acting as a sort of coda to each verse:
Light the lamp and fire mellow cabin essence;
timely hello welcomes the time for a change.
Lost and found, you still remain there.
You’ll find a meadow filled with rain there.
I’ll give you a home on the range.
and
I want to watch you, windblown, facing waves of wheat
for your embracing. Folks sing a song of the grange.
Nestle in a kiss below there, the constellations ebb
and flow there and witness our home on the range.
The seldom-heard fourth verse of the song suggests a connection to one of the central themes of the first movement of SMiLE:
The red man was pressed from this part of the West,
He's likely no more to return
To the banks of Red River where seldom if ever
Their flickering campfires burn
While the other verses of the song extol the virtues of the range, its flora and fauna, this verse reminds us that the "giving" of a home on the range was contingent upon the "taking" of that range from its prior inhabitants. (It's noteworthy that the singer wants nothing better than to live among the indigenous animals of the range – the buffalo, deer and antelope – but that there is no room there for the indigenous humans.) "Home on the Range" does not, after all, aspire to address the moral ambiguities of the conquest of the West. Nevertheless, this verse records the driving-out of "the red man" in a tone we might describe as sorrowful resignation. While there is a true sense of loss in these lines, the lyrics do not question the inevitability of the events they document.
Compare this verse with these lines from "Roll Plymouth Rock":
Ribbon of concrete – just see what you done –
done to the church of the American Indian!
While the tone of this couplet is not fundamentally unlike that of the "Home on the Range" verse quoted above, the intent is altogether different. While Parks clearly means to condemn the despoiling of the sacred lands that serve as the Indians' "church," he is too careful a craftsman to indulge in heavy-handed "protest." The feeling here is also one of resignation: a more enlightened sort of resignation, but resignation all the same. The song confronts misdeeds even as it acknowledges their inevitability. Human failings are part of the fabric of human history, and it is vain to seek redress within the limits of that history (SMiLE has its second and third movements for that). Better, perhaps, to bear witness: "witness our home on the range."
• America the Beautiful
First published as a poem, the lyrics of this pan-patriotic song were written by Katherine Lee Bates, a professor of English at Wellesley College, during an 1893 train trip from Massachusetts to Colorado Springs. It was the wheatfields of Kansas – see "Home on the Range," above – that inspired this memorable image:
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain
It is not at all unlikely that "Cabin Essence," with its sky full of circling crows, is acknowledging this image in these lines:
I want to watch you, windblown, facing waves of wheat
for your embracing
In the years immediately following publication of Bates's poem, the words were sung to a variety of popular tunes, including "Auld Lang Syne" (quoted, of course, in "Surf's Up"). The music with which we now associate the lyrics was not paired with the poem until 1910; it comes from a hymn called "Materna," written by Samuel Ward, of Newark, New Jersey. The melody came to him on his way back from a day trip to Brooklyn's Coney Island: a reality different from Kansas, but no less indelibly American.
• Working on the Railroad
This traditional sing-along song is thought to derive from an African-American "Louisiana Levee" song and/or an Irish work-gang song of the Old West. In its new "Cabin Essence" context, it adds a distinct historical resonance:
I've been workin' on the railroad,
All the live long day
I've been workin' on the railroad,
Just to pass the time away
compared with:
Have you seen the Grand Coulee workin’ on the railroad?
"Coulee," here, is clearly a pun on "coolie." The "coolies" who helped to build the railroads did indeed work all the day: a twelve-hour workday, six days a week. At one point over 12,000 of the 13,500 Central Pacific Railroad workers were Chinese immigrants. Sadly, many of them did not "live long": an estimated 1200 Chinese workers died from disease, cold and accidents. The description of their labor as nothing more than a way "to pass the time away" is a grim irony.
It is generally accepted that the "Dinah" and "Someone's in the kitchen" verses are later additions to the song. "Dinah" herself is not necessarily a flesh-and-blood woman; "Dinah" may be the name of a locomotive. The "horn" was the signal for the workers' lunch break.
Interestingly, the question asked in "Cabin Essence" – "have you seen…?" – echoes the question asked in "Working on the Railroad": "can't you hear…?" Elsewhere in Movement I, of course, we can hear the whistle blowing…in the train-whistle vocal effect that occurs in "Heroes and Villains" and at the segue from "Roll Plymouth Rock" to "Barnyard" (and, maybe, in the rising-and-falling background vocals of the "over and over" section of "Cabin Essence" as well).
• The Grand Coulee Dam
The Grand Coulee is an ancient river bed in Washington state; the "Cabin Essence" coolie/coulee pun may reference this geological feature, or it may reference the monumental Grand Coulee Dam itself, or it may reference (at least in part) this Woody Guthrie song. "The Grand Coulee Dam" was written in 1941, under the sponsorship of the Bonneville Power Administration, for eventual use in a documentary about the Columbia River. Guthrie originally set his lyrics to the tune of the old train song "Wabash Cannonball"; after a copyright dispute, he adopted a modified tune. Here's the first verse:
Now the world holds seven wonders that the travelers always tell
Some gardens and some towers, I guess you know them well.
But now the greatest wonder is in Uncle Sam's fair land
It's the big Columbia River and the big Grand Coulee dam.
Written to order, this Guthrie song celebrates American drive and achievement; other Guthrie songs would treat these subjects more equivocally. SMiLE, too, endeavors to celebrate the American spirit while remaining mindful of American faults. "We just thought," Parks has said, "it was important to do something American that was not ashamed…." 10
Footnotes
5 Van Dyke Parks, Boston Globe interview, 2004 (link unavailable)
6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livery_Stable_Blues
7 [Source unavailable]
8 https://web.archive.org/web/20041025220907/http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/5135/NuChi.html
9 https://allaboutheaven.org/observations/bruce-chatwin-australian-aboriginal-the-first-morning-003082/221
10https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/how-brian-wilson-found-his-smile/article655763/
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