Last Thursday, acclaimed music scholar Greil Marcus stopped in at the Nasher Museum of Art to give a talk entitled “Our Old, Weird America: The Mole In the Ground.” Prior to attending, I described the talk to friends as “something that should be really cool about American culture and folk music and maybe Bob Dylan.”
I knew that my predicted summary, though enthusiastic, was reductive, and accordingly expected to sit sponge-like at the talk. I would absorb everything Marcus said, but I knew that I would probably hone in on any possible allusions to Dylan’s music, with which I am moderately obsessed.
As it turned out, obsession was the underlying theme of Marcus’s talk. From the beginning, he made clear that his lecture would focus on a song he’d “been obsessed with for more than forty years.” However, as Marcus later revealed, obsession (at least in his case) is never something completely one-sided. It entails an evolving engagement with the material that, if turned static and merely declaratory, loses its potency.
The song of Marcus’s long-term infatuation, “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” was originally recorded by North Carolina folk musician Bascom Lamar Lunsford in the 1920s. Since then, it has been anthologized, sampled and placed in other songs, and covered in its entirety. Such artistic transference, as Marcus discussed, demonstrates the ways in which music classified as “folk” invites diverse interpretation and application. The very nature of its genre connotes accessibility, but, according to Marcus, not simplicity.
“Folk music is not simple,” Marcus said early in his lecture. “It’s weird.”
He went on to explicate this weirdness, this element of the “other,” in an impressively meticulous analysis of Lunsford’s lyricism. This analysis, however, came only after an anxious strain of technical difficulties involving the auditorium’s sound system. As the very premise of his talk necessitated sharing music with the audience, I became concerned when the lack of communication between the sound technician and Marcus continued for several minutes. The gentleman seated in front of me quietly importuned Marcus, “maybe we could sing the song?” I feared that Marcus, ostensibly a professional, would offer a derogatory rejoinder. At the same time, I envisioned the audience, led by Marcus, joining together in some collective warbling (read: my romanticized idea of a folk-fueled peaceful protest, circa 1964) of Lunsford’s piece. Neither happened, and the song eventually played—as did pieces by artists such as The Tallest Man on Earth, Bob Neuwirth, and Bob Dylan, who had each incorporated snippets of Lunsford’s song into their own.
I gradually realized that my twofold reaction to the evening’s audio difficulties tended toward both the absurd and the legitimate. Perhaps a spontaneous singsong togetherness seems absurd. Perhaps even the thought of Marcus’s response to my front-row neighbor seems odd, because Marcus appeared more humored than not by the technical mishaps. Yet each response reaffirmed my consciousness of connection that evening—to Marcus, to the music, to the others alongside me who were engaged in the lecture. Above all, I felt connected to the variation in human experience that implies something both weird and beautiful. And, as Marcus suggested, this coexistence produces the type of great, long-lasting folk music exemplified by “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground.”
The song, in its standalone complexity and temporal iterations, encourages (and even mandates) self-reflection. As Marcus said, “the song, and the way of singing the song, could call everything into question.” The ways in which we interpret the song on an individual and collective level actually call into question what it means, and what it could mean, to even be an individual or to be a collective. When we sing (or think) along with Lunsford, what do we leverage when we “wish [we were] a mole in the ground”? According to Marcus, we enter into a politics of not only music and lyrics, but also of decision-making and self-affirmation in the context of all humanity.
And what else, besides this perpetual politics, defines our existence? It seems only right to obsess over it.
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