Shenandoah

I first heard this truly exquisite version of one of my favorite folk tunes many years ago on the radio, and tried to track it down for years. Finding it again was one of those VERY rare occasions of joyful rediscovery that happen on the internet. It is like a distillation of all the finest movie scores from those classic Westerns which idealized everything about America's tawdry, bloody, unforgiveable history. The music has a golden, shimmering translucence, and holds up a lens to view an America that never was, but which Americans still yearn for as "what might have been". But in itself, it is stunning and unabashedly glorious, and I get prickles and goose-bumps and my hair stands on end whenever I hear it. So I share it here. I'm trying my best now to put out a certain energy which runs counter to everything I feel, because I do not want to feed a dragon which could all too easily defeat me for good.

GIF me some more!

 

 

Making gifs is like magic to me. I used to think they were WAY hard to make, that I'd have to have some sort of Frankensteinian lab or a degree in computerivity, but now I realize they are idiot simple. Just go on Gifninja and enter your file numbers.  I don't have too many videos that are short enough however, so most of them are pictures flashing back and forth. This is a work in progress.

 

 

These images are from an old Polaroid ad for the Swinger camera, featuring a very young Ali McGraw. Somewhat altered. "Hey, meet the Swinger, Polaroid Swinger" (it's more than a camera, it's almost alive, it's only nineteen dollars and ninety-five)

 

 

 

The fine line, erased. Oscar Levant has haunted my consciousness for far longer than I ever wanted. Out, out, damned spot.

 

 

There are certain problems with speed of animation that Gifninja can't seem to help me with. This shows Ryan driving his first Pepsi truck, very slowly.

 

 

 

 

I call this one Shenandoah Woman. Almost three-dimensional.

 

Across the wide Missouri

This is without a doubt one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard. I was casting around YouTube to try to find an orchestral version of one of my favorite melodies, the haunting folk song Shenandoah. I couldn't find it, of course. Instead there were some awful versions by high school bands, and innumerable overblown abuses by (mostly) opera singers trying to make it sound Dramatic, Rich and Bold.

This just somehow came to me, sung by one Randy Granger, someone I'd never heard of. He has one album out which is mostly Native American flute music. After hearing this, I wish he would play flute less, sing more.

I can't describe his voice, and describing it at all would be desecration, but I must try. It has a warmth and a complexity, a richness of shivering overtones, and that incredible, nearly impossible stone-skipping (I can't think of the technical term, but it's those tiny, rapid steps up and down between tones - somewhere between a trill and a yodel - can you hear it?). But it's the tenderness, the longing and the caressing of the deceptively simple lyric that I love the most.

I may never find that passionate, roiling orchestral version that caught me up like a dangerous current all those years ago. Instead I found this. A human voice displayed naked, so that every nuance is exposed.