Category Archives: Culture & Arts

Some of the common wisdom about music’s ability to evoke emotions is that it’s highly associated with our personal lives. So, it has always been somewhat surprising to me how moved I’ve been over the years by Joni Mitchell’s “Little Green.” I’ve never had a baby, much less given one up for adoption. I suppose I have been left in the lurch by numerous “non-conformers,” but this song also gives us access to a more general sense of regret. There’s the inevitability of sorrow, even if there will also be crocuses, icicles, and birthday clothes. It demonstrates for me, too, the difficulty of social change and upheaval. We usually think of the sixties as this great time, but there were many forgotten individual traumas in all of that.

Joni Mitchell’s song is autobiographical–she gave a daughter up for adoption in 1965 before her career got off the ground. They were reunited in 1997.

I’m not going to outline all the possible comparisons between Joni Mitchell’s out-of-wedlock child and Casey Anthony’s. It’s perhaps grotesque just to mention them in the same post. But I suppose we now all wish that Caylee’s mother had put her up for adoption as she at one point told a friend she wanted to do. There are different kinds of griefs.

Why do you weep, dear willow? Your branch it hangs so low.
Could it be you know a secret that other trees don’t know?

“Why Do You Weep Dear Willow,” written by Lynn Davis and Gona Blakenship, and recorded by the Carter Sisters and Chet Atkins in 1949, is a country-bluegrass ballad about a dead mother. It warns of the mistake of taking one’s mother’s love for granted. So, it seems appropriate coming right after Mother’s Day.

In the song, the willow, rooted to the ground and protective of the mother’s grave, understands things that the roaming child has missed. It always makes me think about lost relationships, not so much with my mother, as she’s too tenacious for that (!), but others who have gone missing in my life over the years.

It also makes me think about the relationship between knowledge and empathy. We often turn away from bad news because… well, we can, and it is often unpleasant. Sometimes the griefs of the world can seem overwhelming, and since Adam and Eve, we have had an ambivalent attitude about knowledge. Yet without it, we cannot connect to other humans for we cannot empathize.

It has often been pointed out to me that the music that I like tends toward the rough and ready, and I guess that has to do with my desire for the genuine, and it’s true that most packaged singers create in me not admiration, but revulsion. Still, I’ll get to the arias eventually.

Here’s an available version of “Why Do You Weep Dear Willow” by Carl Story and the Rambling Mountaineers. Be forewarned: this is hardcore bluegrass, and you shouldn’t listen unless you can abide the wailing. Sometimes, though, some wailing does the heart good.

The term “crybaby” is usually an insult. But over the past few months I have been thinking about the joys of crying, about my own desire for a full range of emotions in my life, about how maturity sometimes emphasizes control over sincerity. Our current cultural obsession with “happiness” also confuses us about how we really feel in any given moment. I don’t want to dis “happiness,” but it isn’t the whole story by itself, and it’s too easy to fake in a world where vulnerability is considered a sign of weakness and image too often is all that matters.

I am a child of the sixties and seventies, and I’d therefore like to begin with an anthem from Janis Joplin, who in this song invited her wayward lover to “Cry, Baby.” I also love this because the first comment notes that “They don’t sing like this anymore no… they got no soul… no heart… only managers with plans and contracts.”  Janis provides a symbol for my search in more than one way.