'he don't even break the branches where he' s been and gone'

so horsemouth has listened to a documentary on the critics group a ewan macoll attempt to raise standards of folk song performance by means of the theories of stanislavsky and laban, by considering the meaning of the song and the position from which the song is sung, and how the singer can connect the words with his or her own experiences to change the emotion with which the song is sung (and have the conscious technique to be able to alter and control the singing voice to match this). of course the primary technique of the group is workshopping, performance and critique, and of course it become a cult, ending badly and explosively with accusations of theft of the equipment and the tapes of the crit sessions.

so howard asked, how would horsemouth think about this in terms his recent recordings for the musicians of bremen?

neither the werewolf nor silver raven are sung from the perspective of anyone in the drama - the singer of the werewolf is neither the werewolf, nor his human counterpart, nor someone who merely suspects he might be the werewolf, nor an assistant of the werewolf, but merely an average countryperson noting the phenomena - the critical line is 'he don't even break the branches where he' s been and gone' , (well ok his absence from the narrative must give rise to suspicions that he is the werewolf but it's no more than that). it is less stanislavsky and more tarkovsky, it's an experience of being in the woods, of a slight dissociation. cat power's version is in there, she is the werwolf 'tear(ing) off his clothes' (but not really), this is obviously her motive line, so is michael hurley's (but being a boy it's a bit less PC). horsemouth does not feel comfortable with this conflation of sex and violence and so has cut this line, though it remains the motivating pleasure in listening to the song. he sang it first in the projecting style of a first person actor (think johnny cash), then in a slightly more impressionistic 'dab' style (if we are thinking about the voice as gesture) - it is melodrama (in a term that macoll would use as a term of abuse). it's more mack the knife brecht and cabaret than method acting- certainly gentleman john is more this, a character sketch of a miscreant with no moral improvement intended.

silver raven is even more problematic - from what perspective could you see the silver raven flying beyond your dreams? the song is about exceeding a merely human point of view and yet the song repeatedly asks have you seen the silver raven like a sideshow barker (it's kind of have you ever been experienced an invitation to a carlos castaneda ethnomethodological glory). the only perspective it make sense to sing it from is a gods-eye-view one. (it's kind of a jonathan livingstone seagull cosmic country song). just as the scene was the forest, the scene is now the desert.

in blue crystal fire however we are directly the celebrant of the mystery, the song takes us into the soul of robbie basho dancing with deer with silver antlers.

none of these songs is strictly a folk song - none tells a tale, there is no protagonist within the drama who could sings it really, there is no 'I' who is 'drawing water from the well' noticing (distractedly) that it's spilling over on the grass. melodrama is a perfectly acceptable form of drama (practically all johnny cash's songs are of this sort - I taught the weeping willow how to cry- there's a man in black persona that is performed, and it is accepted as such.

father death blues at least is clearly sung from the perspective of (ginsberg) the son - he has a message for his father that death is not to be feared, we are surrounded and united in the family of death, dead mothers, aunts and uncles rising up out of the floor and getting on with everyday tasks in a strange combination of buddhism and the mexican day of the dead. everything is beautiful despite and because it already has death in it. ginsberg moves it further out into abstractions teacher death, genius death, suffering, ignorance until he returns to his father and to himself pronouncing himself cured of grief. (secretly horsemouth is horrified at the cold-bloodedness of his treatment of his father, the oedipidal revenge in this).

in singng bright phoebus horsemouth is simply the lover who is in love for the very first time precisely at that suspended moment when language turns into poetry. horsemouth likes this game.