In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, my favorite staff writer Adam Gopnik wrote a review of a number of books, but mainly this one book, "Love Songs: The Hidden History" by Ted Gioia.
The article traces the history of love poetry from troubadour poets through modern pop songs, but spends a great deal of time on Shakespeare's Sonnets.
I read this article at a time when I have been pondering the Love Song generally.
I remember noticing back in college when I was making mix tapes that most love songs are songs about love unrequited. Longing and lack and frustration drive people to write songs. Heartbreak and loss and disappointment drive people to write songs. Hardly anyone ever writes a song when they are happy, and in a fulfilling and mutual relationship. Probably they don't have time, was the theory I developed at the time. Or they have nothing to say - happiness just kind of sits inarticulately, centered within itself, but pain and loss and longing generate a storm of words in the mind.
This week we have been immersed in the musical tradition of the American South, between about 1905 and 1950, the rise and dispersion of Blues music, through the migration of Black (African-American) people to rural areas in the South, and then on to urban areas in South and North.
The tradition develops alongside a Gospel tradition, but in parallel and separate - one voice in a documentary on Blind Willie McTell says that when his sister brought Blind Willie home to meet her family, he, her brother, was afraid they were all going to Hell from knowing this man. Blues music was not accepted by those who used Gospel music to glorify God (although the story went on to tell how McTell learned Gospel songs as well, which ingratiated him into his wife's family, and made him one of the rare musicians of the time to play in both traditions).
If you listen to lots of recordings of Blues music from this period, there are no love songs. There are lots of descriptions of life itself, and locations, and travelling, and work. There are descriptions of fights and disagreements and misunderstandings. There are testaments of hard luck and loss of hope and weariness. There are a lot of songs about sex. But nothing that would sound like a Romantic Poet's words to the object of his affection. No descriptions of otherworldly beauty, comparing one's love to the stars or the sun or to Heaven, no threats that one will die without the return of his beloved's affections.
There isn't even this same kind of tenor in the Gospel music. The stories they pick from the Bible to turn into songs, the ones that come to mind to me most quickly although I'll be the first to admit I haven't studied this tradition at all, but to the outsider the first ones that come to mind are all about places, and journeys - the River Jordan, Jacob's Ladder. Journeying, getting to a good place, going Home. Not having your soul rapt in transcendent euphoria. That is a white, European tradition.
It's the one I grew up with, though. The theme through all the sad songs of longing on those mix tapes. I grew up immersed in a particular cultural understand of Love, and attraction (and longing and need and lust and all the rest).
I understand that, and understand that not everyone grew up in the same one, in fact almost no one really, except maybe other girls who grew up about that same time, which doesn't help me at all.
But the act of interacting outside that culture, and expecting more matter of fact approaches to living and to each other, I can get my brain to go along with it as a project, but my heart is lagging behind.
June, moon, spoon.
