Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2011

Between the Changes  
Alex Quinlan

I began my apprenticeship to poetry about the same time as I became aware of music in a serious way, and the way I relate to each is inflected by my engagement with the other. I suspect this is the case with many writers, and with most poets. I offer the bloodline between Miller and Lucinda Williams as well as the lost musical notation to Pindar’s odes as scraps of circumstantial evidence in support of this felt connection. Once, in those early days, the days when I’d stay up until dawn to finish a book, then write all morning with the stereo on, I remember spending a cold November evening in the warmth and soft light of a chapel in Sewanee, Tennessee, reading Philip Levine poems and playing banjo with a friend from Carolina whose fingers would gnaw at any instrument that was handy, coaxing an agreeable sound from it out of habit and hunger for the resolution of the tonic chord and the tension of the minor third. In those days, I wrote odes to Gram Parsons and fit Dylan Thomas to my guitar and voice. I was feverish to understand the lyric; I wanted a way to make the language strange; I wanted a way to tell a story without giving away the names.

~

Way out in a wasteland, a Wyoming, amid singing of radio voices and the voices of the mother and father inside the car, the thunking of windmills outside, where the wedge-headed thrasher roosts in sage and sheep wander the hills, matted deep in woolen fibers that are unique in the world, having evolved over the millennia until they could withstand the weather’s ceaseless lashings; way out in a moon place where the land yielded to the wind, they stood at the edge of the rest area parking lot, and they all felt the wind might scrape them right up off the land and hurl them off in the direction of the deep shadows looming at the horizon; way out in a place as far as remembering, the girl-child asked her mother, “Mama, why don’t you teach us to sing like you and Daddy?”

“How do me and Daddy sing?”

“Sideways to each other. We wanna sing sideways, too.”

“I’ll teach you, but one of you has to sing straight; otherwise there’s nothin to be sideways from.”

~

Here was a man who could sing sideways by himself. Jimmie Rodgers came up a guitar-strumming waterboy on the Mobile-Ohio line in Meridian, Mississippi. He sang hollers with the gandy dancers and picked blues shuffles with Delta hobos coming through from Jackson or Memphis on the way to Mobile. He learned the feel of Scott Joplin’s ragtime-piano feel from hustlers who rode the line down from St Louis. He graduated to brakeman and rode through those same places, easing the pace of his brother’s conducting all through the South. The rumble of the train wheels over the track, clanking across the seams where sections of shining rail meet, gave way to the screeching of the brake. They watched the paddleboats out on the Mississippi at Memphis, the brass in the band playing the top deck glimmering in the river-light; they snuck out to the juke joints on the edge of Vicksburg. Most of these men were black, traveling the lines to ply their trade in roadhouses with detuned pianos and rotgut gin, shut out from radio. It’s enough to make a man so wish he were deaf that he drinks himself blind. Jimmie Rodgers put it on wax by coming in the side door: Tennessee hustler, collagiste, riding the caboose of culture, picking up a little something everywhere he went, giving more than he took.

The radio men didn’t know what to do with him. When they didn’t want him playing the “Yodeling Cowboy” in chaps, gauntlets, and a big white Stetson, they had him in his old work clothes as the “Singing Brakeman.” It’s likely that this had a lot to do with the racial implications of a white man playing blues music. Historian Chris Quispel observes that Rodgers “lived his entire life outside the musical 'establishment'. His performances were not broadcast by big radio stations.” Even as “his popularity assumed enormous proportions” he mostly played to small radio audiences spread across the country, and never for Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry.¹ They couldn’t come up with a stable identity to explain the range of music he made; they had no way to conceive of someone who could straddle the divide.

~

In a certain kind of poem there are two basic elements: a pattern, an idea of order, a center of gravity around which the poem’s language accrues; and there is the breaking of the pattern, the tremor of disarray. John Keats’s “This Living Hand, Now Warm and Capable,” stands as a cunningly made example.² In the poem, the speaker, frustrated in love, addresses the one who has engendered his affection in steady, though not metronomic, blank verse. It is not hard to imagine that the speaker is Keats himself. In this reading, the poet, dying of tuberculosis, addresses Fanny Brawne, whose hand in marriage he wants but cannot have, confronting her with the regret she will feel upon his death for not having chanced their love:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

The poem moves forward in this vein for another two lines, developing the image of the haunting the spurned lover will inflict on his beloved, maintaining the steady thud of the pentameter apace. In the following line the iambic heartbeat starts slamming harder, then gives way to a trochaic double-thump as the speaker draws attention back to the “living hand” of the poem’s opening: “see here it is.” The voice rushes along, squeezing three beats into four syllables. As the poem makes the turn to the final line, the form collapses altogether: “I hold it towards you” is only half a line in the poem’s measure.

~

In 1930 Los Angeles, on a hot July day, three years before he succumbed to tuberculosis, Jimmie Rodgers recorded a session with Louis and Lillian Armstrong. From the opening, Lillian’s piano churns along, splashy and syncopated, but keenly precise, on the leading edge of the rhythm. Louis Armstrong’s trumpet, straight mute twisted into the bell, establishes the melody, sliding between notes that swell from a whisper to a blare, and trail off weepingly and bluster like drunks on Tchapitoulas. When Jimmie enters in with his vocal, bell clear and twanging like a guitar string, he comes as a Beale Street hustler, the kind of character river towns draw in and refine.

Standin on the corner, I didn’t mean no harm,
Along come a po-lice, he took me by the arm;
It was down in Memphis, corner of Beale and Main,
He said, “Boy, you’ll have to tell me your name.”

When he breaks into a yodel, the stylistic geography of the trio begins to tug at the seams of the song’s rhythm. Increasingly, as the song unfolds, Armstrong’s trumpet and Rodgers’ voice tussle over the melody, held together by the diplomatically neutral riffs of Lillian’s the piano. The two voices settle into the tension, making spaces between the changes, places where the lilt of the voice, Jimmie’s high tenor, slips in and out of falsetto, a quavering yodel; places where his cadence seems driven by a hit-and-miss engine—getting half a beat behind, then racing ahead to catch up; pushing a swap in the progression on the piano, leaving Armstrong to chuckle his way through the shifting changes—there are crossouts and addenda folded into the measures on the pages in the players’ minds; everything adds up until it doesn’t.

Remarkably, like the hustler whose persona Rodgers has found convenient to his purposes, they keep it together. “My good gal loves me,” he says, “everybody knows. / She paid a hundred cash dollars, just for me a suit of clothes.” He wears a mask because it’s a way of singing sideways by himself.

 

¹Kloosterman, Robert C and Chris Quispel. “Not Just the Same Old Show on My Radio: An Analysis of the Role of Radio in the Diffusion of Black Music among Whites in the South of the United States of America, 1920 to1960.” Popular Music, Vol. 9, No. 2 (April, 1990), p.151-164.
²I remember hearing Mary Ruefle read this poem in a breezy, mostly empty, chapel one Pennsylvania summer, and thinking—“yes, this is what it means to enter the mystery.”

Alex Quinlan lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His poems have appeared in several journals, including Bat City Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Tampa Review and Tusculum Review, where he is a contributing editor. He teaches creative writing at UTC and is a visiting professor of English at Berry College.