Re: Wrong Ideas, or, Tradition and the Individual Talent

"Whiskey in the Jar," as it turns out, offers a specific instance of the general idea I was driving at in last week's post.

A brief look at Wikipedia reveals that the song is a traditional dating back to the 18th century and has been through an unknown, but vast, number of lyrical iterations.

The criteria we use to know that a song is "Whiskey" are less exacting than the ones we normally use to identify music. Each version of "Whiskey in the Jar pretty much must contain several narrative elements:

-Whiskey
-A Jar
-A Femme Fatale
-A Highwayman
-A Lawman

However, across different interpretations, the song's setting moves to different counties, the name of the treasonous woman changes, and the lawman serves different authorities. I haven't done the legwork, but I get the feeling the song has been performed in different keys. It certainly has been through different rhythmic tumblers and fallen all over the place, timbre-wise. All this adds up to mean that "Whiskey" stays "Whiskey" no matter what you do to these things.

This happens in jazz a ton and is not really that weird in most genres of music. Anyone who's sat through a jazz appreciation class knows that "Autumn Leaves" has been done about sixty million different ways. Taken together, the many versions might even demonstrate that there are very few aspects of "Autumn Leaves" that make it what it is.

Weirdly, pop songs ordinarily seem much more rigid, and maybe it's record-shop pedantry that keeps people jumping on somebody's case for singing the wrong words, but something has gone wrong with that. I mean really, who cares if you know whether Britney Spears is saying she's a professional learner or an exceptional earner? (It's the latter for anyone keeping score -- which you shouldn't be.)

What's cool about "Whiskey" is that it's not set up to be expanded musically, although it certainly could be. Because it has lyrics and sort of an obvious storyline, you'd know "Whiskey" from another song, even if the melody and the chord progressions changed.

So one upshot of this is that the line from Metallica's version, which I love, is not actually even technically wrong, given that the lyrics to "Whiskey in the Jar" are not actually known. I'd like to do one more and say that they are not knowable, but that seems a little pomo and I've slogged through enough theory articles to know that that's mostly a cutesy thing theorists do to pat themselves on the back.

But I will take one more shot before I go for a jog. It strikes me as an enormous strength when a song (or a work) demonstrates sufficient flexibility to have its words rearranged, its characters altered, its instruments of performance electrified. Whiskey in the Jar is good whether the Dubliners, Thin Lizzy, or Metallica perform it. I haven't heard the Peter Paul and Mary version but that's probably alright too.

Mistaken or lazy reinterpretation may not be as laudable, but it would be interesting to see if there are any masters out there who can take something fairly unappealing and retroactively turn it into something awesome via the same kind of dinkering we see in "Whiskey."

Sidenote: Sort of a similar thing, although not as broad in scope, is the decision by "The Wire" to include different versions Tom Waits' (or maybe someone else's) "Way Down in the Hole." For more spelunking on "The Wire," check out a recent post by a hazy Sulks.