It's Billie Joe McCallister Day 2017

[LicketySplit]

@Balance

Perhaps the fact that it’s a song about death and dashed dreams?

I’m pretty sure everyone gets that it’s a depressing song. However, people sometimes like listening to depressing songs (which goes far to explain, say, Mellencamp’s career). My personal theory is that melancholy songs appeal to people who are already a little down, suffering from a touch of free-floating sadness, because it gives a focus to that feeling, then releases it when the song is over. It’s cathartic. (Depressing songs can also be musically beautiful, and appeal to people for that reason alone. I can’t really say that applies in this case, though.)

Of course, that means it’s probably not the best song to listen to when you’re feeling cheerful. (Unless you enjoy a darkly comic take on it, like this thread.)

Oh…yeah…I love the Blues. I get how sometimes listening to another person talk about his misfortunes and life’s vicissitudes can actually be cathartic and make you feel a bit better. TO know that you are not alone in your pain. I get all that. It’s just that particular song. I was thinking about it yesterday after the OP I made and I thought it might be the voice of the singer. That croaky, hillbilly tone. I always picture a grey cloudy rainy bleak day in someplace like Appalachia. I picture little kids running around naked and playing in dog shit while daddy sits on the front porch in his wife beater and swigs from a jug of bust-head moonshine and farts.

Eww. Just thinking about that song depresses me. Very weird, indeed.

[Two_Many_Cats]

@Ulf_the_Unwashed

I probably asked this in another of these threads, but don’t believe I ever got answered (probably because there is no answer):

The narrator says in the last verse that “a year has come and gone” and then that Papa “died last spring.”

Now, it’s June 3rd, 2017, and if I said (today) that something happened “last spring” I’d mean spring of 2016. The spring a year ago.

But clearly the narrator doesn;t mean “the spring a year ago” because at that point Papa was very much alive, plowing the lower forty and passing around black-eyed peas.

So doesn’t she mean “Papa caught it and he died this spring”? Why doesn’t she say so?

Okay, it doesn’t keep me awake nights, I have other things to take care of that, but still, inquiring minds want to know!

I figure she’s singing the song in the year after it happened, and that June third has come and gone meaning it’s something like August of a year later. Saying Papa died last spring would mean the spring that just passed. Sure, she could say this spring, but I don’t think anyone would think she meant the spring of the year before. If I say “last spring” in October or something, I would probably mean the most recent spring.

[aceplace57]

Roseanne Cash & John Leventhal, producer/musician (husband) took a car trip through the delta. They stopped at the Tallahatchie bridge. The photo of her is on the new album.

The trip inspired Rosanne’s songwriting for her album, The River and the Thread. The album won 3 Grammy’s, Best Americana Album, the song “A Feather’s Not A Bird,” , won for both Best American Roots Performance and Best American Roots Song.

There’s something about the harshness of the Arkansas/Mississippi Delta that inspires great music.
Rosanne Cash Talks New Album ‘The River and the Thread’ – Rolling Stone

[Mangosteen]

@aceplace57

Roseanne Cash & John Leventhal, producer/musician (husband) took a car trip through the delta. They stopped at the Tallahatchie bridge. The photo of her is on the new album.

Bridge ain’t there no more. Demolished in 1987. Cement bridge is there now, but original wooden one is long gone.

https://bridgehunter.com/ms/leflore/bh37512/

[aceplace57]

I wonder if anybody told told Rosanne that wasn’t the original bridge?

She seemed very excited by that trip.

The entire Cash family donated items to the Johnny Cash house in Dyess AR. The home has been restored and furnished like it was during Johnny’s childhood. Museum interviewed surviving family to get it right

That was the spark for Rosanne’s trip through the Delta region and the album.

Bobbie Gentry grew up in a very similar culture and not that far from Dyess. The Arkansas delta and Mississippi delta are very similar. I’ve drive through that area several times. Sparsely populated, and mostly farmland.