Re-imagining and Referencing: Depression Era Songs in new Compositions: “Spare a Candy Mountain Dime”.

There is a core element of each of these works that directly references a Depression Era Song.  In an earlier time (the classical period, for instance) the typical compositional process would have taken a theme from each of the songs and then transformed that theme progressively thoughout the new work.  However, this is not what I did here.  Rather, I wanted to reference the emotional core of the song, the genre of the original song (Tin Pan Alley, Hilly Billy, Blues and Humorous/Novelty) and melodic/lyrical content.  I have not reproduced large parts of the lyrical content, instead using fragments of the lyrics, sometimes more, sometimes, less and built a song around those fragments using my narrative guitar procedure, where all of the elements of the music are organized around story telling.

1.        Once I Built….        Referencing “Brother Can You Spare a Dime (Gorney/Harburg), a harmonically sophisticated Tin Pan Alley tune, it is the most melancholy, carrying with it a sense of societal collapse – all of these things we built, what do they add up to?  To capture that idea visually, the video is filmed in a tower-like crypt of the founder of the city of Melbourne.  Musically it employs new melodic themes on the guitar as well as musical fragments directly drawn from the melody of the song itself.

2.       Toil and Trouble.    This song references a hill billy tune from the Carter Family, “No Depression in Heaven”.  The only escape in this song is to leave the mortal realm and escape to the afterlife.  The lyrics of the original song build a picture of divine retribution – the Great Depression was a manifestation of divine intention:

For fear the hearts of men are failing,

For these are latter days we know

The Great Depression now is spreading,

God’s word declared it would be so

I’m going where there’s no depression,

               To the lovely land that’s free from care

               I’ll leave this world of toil and trouble,

               My home’s in Heaven, I’m going there

Musically the song references a child of hill billy music – hard rock - riff-heavy, driving and relentless.

3.       Not One Penny     Heavily drawing on Blues tropes for this song made famous by Bessie Smith (but credited to Jimmy Cox) this is blues but with unexpected harmonic structures – it features some of the recognizable features of blues like slides, switching the beat divisions from 2 to 3 beat, bending pitches.  This is a more personal take on the Great Depression, as the blues was known to do – the state of the world told through personal experience.  The melody of the original song is featured in lyrical fragments, but the harmonic structure is all new composed.

4.       Whiskey Lakes    Drawn from one of my father’s favourite songs (Whiskey was also his drink of choice), I first heard “Big Rock Candy Mountain” (Harry McClintock) on the soundtrack of O Brother Where Art Thou.  Out of the four songs in Spare a Candy Mountain Dime, this one uses the melodic material of the song itself more than any other, but with a harmonic twist and employing compositional tools like the round to mix and overlap the simple thematic building blocks of the song.  Sharp, bittersweet, a vision of heaven very much rooted in its time, lot’s of fun to play.