I
didn’t need to tell you that. You expect this blog entry to be well-oiled, grammatically
sound and competently manufactured and so obviously revision is involved. That’s
the advantage of the printed word; it’s all tightened up. If I were to
physically perform this essay—unscripted that is—it would not work at all. Even
if everything I said was premeditated and written out on note cards it would not
be the same as it is in this written blog.
I
should add the disclaimer that I am not a great live storyteller. I don’t have
the comedic timing and the prowess of descending revelation in my stories. In
place of live storytelling I like to write stories out as if they are
being told by me in person. This technique is one employed by one of my
favorite songwriters, the great Bruce Springsteen, in one of his more recent
songs, “Silver Palomino.” In this essay I will critique storytelling elements in this song including
voice, language and expected audience. I will make judgments on whether or not
Springsteen’s strategies are successful in telling us a strong story in the character
he has created. And I promise you, no more of this essay will be about me.
Do
I even need to introduce Bruce Springsteen? No. Wiki him if you please. I will
introduce the album Devils and Dust, on which “Silver Palomino” appears. Devils
and Dust, released in 2005, is the thirteenth studio album and third “solo”
album of Springsteen’s career. “Solo” means that the album was recorded without
the E Street Band and features minimal instrumentation. Springsteen recorded
the album after a successful five year reunion run with the E Street Band that
included two high-profit tours and a successful studio album. Springsteen backs
down the rock and brings in the folk with this album and it saw success in its
own right. “Silver Palomino” is a song featuring Bruce on the acoustic guitar
with a gentle string arrangement backing him. The vocals are not over-dubbed and
they front all other sounds in the song and so mistakes and missed notes can be heard with
ease—not that there are many. It’s a quiet song and rather short. There is a
YouTube link to the song at the bottom of the page.
When
we are about to read a story, the first thing we may want to discover is who is
telling the story. In songs sometimes there is no actual storyteller; it’s just
lyrics and you pump your first as the music plays. Rarely is this the case in
Springsteen’s music. On the lyrics sheet, before the song begins, we receive a
snippet of background. “A mother dies, leaving her young son to come to terms
with the loss. In remembrance of Fiona Chappel, for her sons Tyler and Oliver.”
These
two sentences contradict each other, if only because one son is mentioned in
the first sentence. The sentences do not immediately give us evidence as to who
is telling the story, but the contradiction leads us to believe that the song
is not specifically about the two sons. The first line of the song, “I was
barely 13 years old,” describes a person, probably the son mentioned above, who
is aged an unknown amount of years past the age of 13. The grammar in the song
is off which could suggest that the storyteller is not that much older than 13,
but he could also be an adult with poor grammar.
Both
suggestions are logical and both may be partly true. I believe they are both true. I believe that this story is
being told by a man looking back upon his life at the time of his mother’s
death. He has adopted a child-like, nostalgic voice in the retelling of the
story and this voice reveals an absence of self-consciousness in the narrator.
The line “Me and my dad had to blowtorch the thorns off the prickly-pears”
serves as evidence. Poor grammar aside, how about the usage of “prickly-pears”?
Springsteen kindly defines “prickly pear” as being synonymous with “cactus” the
bottom of the page.
An adult may not wish a large amount of people know of his bad grammar and may be more conscious of the inclusion of Spanish words. There is much familiarity and the narrator does not seem to have a broad audience in mind for the tale. Who exactly is this story meant for?
That
is a tough question to answer considering the amount of ambiguity of this
piece. Even finding out where exactly this story takes place is tricky. We
receive hints such as “she came out of the Guadalupe’s on a night so cold” and
“Of the west Texas thunder roll” and many references to deserts. There is a Guadalupe
County in south central Texas but the narrator is probably not referring to
this.
The
setting is a beautiful sketch, a panoramic vista of mountains, deserts, clear
lakes of melted snow, and prairies. But even if we pinpoint that this story
takes place in Texas there is something about the language that suggests that
this is not a modern tale. There isn’t any concrete evidence to support this
theory; it’s just a feeling. The narrator creates a mood of nostalgia and
memory, almost to the point of stream-of-consciousness.
There is a blotting out a sense of time, doubtlessly created by Springsteen to make the piece universal and “lost in time” but the character of the narrator still seems to care little for providing background for us.
The
naïve yet observing and yearning voice is seen well is the following passage:
In my dreams bareback I ride
Over the pradera low and wide
And
a few lines later:
I’d give my riata and spurs
If I could be forever yours
Notice
the shift in tense. The narrator does not say “I would have given my riata and
spurs.” This narrator is clearly a man looking back at children, yes, as we
discussed, but now we have next-to-concrete evidence that this man has seeped
back into that mind of a child and is still yearning.
The
shift in tense happens several times throughout the piece, notably in this
line:
Tonight I wake early the sky is pearl, the stars aglow
I saddle up my red roan
...
I watch the silver palomino
The argument could be made that the man is now a ranger in adulthood and therefore he owns a riata or “rope” and I’ll oblige this argument, but the loss of a mother to a child is to freeze a part of that child in time forever. Even if the man is now in the present “[riding] deep into the mountains along a ridge of pale stone” it is still the child in him that yearns for his mother, the spirit of whom resides strong and living in the magnificent pale horse.
Perhaps
I seemed to glide over the significance that the mother of the narrator is
embodied or represented and reincarnated as a wild and beautiful horse, but
that is the most concrete detail of this piece—and it may not be concrete at
all—and the topic is beyond the scope of this essay.
The
main purpose of this blog was to answer one question; who is the audience of
this piece? Are we any closer to knowing this answer? No, it seems, but in that
answer we see another. This piece isn’t for anyone.
It’s a memory of a man, the tale of one who falls asleep in a memory returning
him to youth, to a time of deep strife and wide opens prairies. It’s not as if
we are not meant to hear the story, but it is so personal, perhaps too much so,
and we should consider ourselves lucky to be a part of this ethereal tale.
By Matthew T. Bauman
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