Shenandoah

 Hey Sabi!

I'm writing this over dinner (nothing fancy, just leftover Mexican food), so I'm hoping my fingers don't grease my keyboard too much. It's sort of gross how you can tell which keys I hit more frequently based on the degree that the matte finish has been smoothed over by oils. The WASD junction in particular has long been sleek from years of playing video games.

It's sort of a stretch, but the only way I can conceive of tying that into the main topic is via the concept that rivers also become prominent by treading the same ground many times. New water or new keystrokes will tend to follow the narrative already set, or if not, typically only deviate enough to make slow, gradual changes in pattern. In this way, my nasty keyboard and nature are also like folk songs.

Earlier today I got a YouTube notification from one of our favorite chiptune, jazz, and film score artists, Disasterpeace. He had uploaded an old track from around 2008 titled "Shenandoah." It's a haunting piece, with distorted piano and keyboard driving the instrumentation and shifting meter. The way it wanders and then fades out within ninety seconds gives it an ethereal and ephemeral quality, as if the song itself is a passing memory that dances for a moment and fades away again. That nostalgic feeling, combined with the familiar title, prompted me to look up the name "Shenandoah." It turned out to be an American folk song.

There are many things about folk music I could discuss through this encounter, from its adaptability to different instrumentations to its extraordinary capacity to capture local culture (temporal or proximal), but I would like to emphasize today the persistence and mutability of folk music. True folk music is unique in that it has no owner. It is a democratic art, or perhaps more appropriately, an anarchic art, traits that align folk with outsider music (which is a topic for another time). Though the song "Shenandoah" has existed since the 1800s, even then versions varied. Like a Greek myth, or a Spanish tale from the middle ages, or the universe of the SCP Wiki, there is not, has not been, and will never be a canonized version; that is intrinsic to the nature of a project that emerged only because of a collection of people. 

Though Disasterpeace's version is so abstracted that it is without lyric, and though I'm not even certain the sonic motifs are present, through title it joins a history, and the emotions Disasterpeace draws out will perpetuate the thread of culture that once inspired river boaters on the Mississippi.

A wonderful version by Paul Robeson: YouTube

The rendition that likely caused me to remember the name, as I own this record by Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott: YouTube

Shenandoah River