Alex Bledsoe - The Ambiguous Magic of "Shady Grove" + Contest

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THE AMBIGUOUS MAGIC OF “SHADY GROVE”
by Alex Bledsoe

It's a bit embarrassing, but even though I'm from the South, we never embraced music in my house.  We sang in church, but not at home.  My parents didn’t even have favorite songs.  Which in retrospect makes my fascination with music as much of an anomaly as my desire to be a writer.  And I do love music, which is one reason it features so strongly in my “gravel-road fantasy” novel, The Hum and the Shiver.

Since the novel is set in East Tennessee, the music is that of Appalachia.  Many of the songs from that region originally came over with the Scotch-Irish settlers: "Barbara Allen," for example, was first mentioned by Samuel Pepys in 1666.  The ballad "Shady Grove" has an equally long history, but a unique ambiguity: although the title implies a place, Shady Grove is usually a person.  And this enigma was a big reason I used it in my novel.

Three versions of the song influenced me.  The first came from Appalachian singer-songwriter Jennifer Goree, who closes her first self-titled album with an a capella version that implies Shady Grove is a child, a little girl with "flowers and braids all in her hair and little bare feet on the floor."

Veteran folk musician Doc Watson sings about an adult Shady Grove.  He describes seeing her with "shoes and stockings in her hand and her little bare feet on the floor," implying that he's surprised her.  He says that as a boy he wanted a "Barlow knife," but now that he's grown he wants Shady Grove to "say she'll be my wife.”

But the version by Michael Johnathon (writer, musician and host of the Woodsongs Oldtime Radio Hour) is considerably darker.  Here the "shoes and stockings in her hand" imply that she hasn't finished dressing after an intimate encounter.  Instead of a knife, the singer mentions that he used to drink water as a boy, but now that he's a "big strong man, all I want is wine."  There's an edge of possessive violence, from the ghostly backup voices to the the way the singer wants to literally sew Shady Grove to his back "and down the road I'd go."  And the final line warns her, "don't wait for the judgment day."

In The Hum and the Shiver, the character Don Swayback is a reporter bored with his life, job and marriage.  However, he finds a new spark when he visits a barn dance given by the mysterious, possibly magical Tufa.  And what better way to show how jamming with the Tufa was different and extraordinary than to have the song conjure up the actual Shady Grove herself:

His eye was drawn to a young woman who stood in one of the open side doors, dancing by herself in slow, swaying contrast to the elaborate contra dancing around her. She looked familiar somehow, as if he’d know her once, long ago in his youth. But that wasn’t possible, since she couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen now.

Suddenly he got chills as Bliss sang:

“Well, I went to see my Shady Grove

She was standing in the door,

Flowers and braids all in her hair

And little bare feet on the floor . . . .”

The lyric described the girl in the doorway precisely. She caught his eye and winked before turning away and fading into the night outside.

(The Hum and the Shiver, p. 225)

Like many classic songs, each version of “Shady Grove” provides its own meaning, and its own definition of who or what “Shady Grove” truly is.  And within that ambiguity, I believe, lurks its magic.

Alex Bledsoe
http://alexbledsoe.com

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