Awake, Awake
Dillard Chandler.
Photograph copyright Rob Amberg 2020. Photograph courtesy of the Photographer.
Awake, Awake (a.k.a. Arise Arise/ The Drowsy Sleeper/Silver Dagger/Waking Dreams);
How funny that this song is called Waking Dreams…because it has literally been dogging my thoughts, awake and asleep, since mother sang it for me in my front yard. I know that people get songs stuck in their head all the time…hell, there is even a SpongeBob episode dealing with this very phenomenon (I have a 14 year old son, ok?!), but have you ever gotten a BALLAD stuck in your head? It’s a little like reading too many Stephen King books in a row; you start to feel like you are living in some kind of alternate dimension where the rules are just a little bit different. Like at any moment you may start using words like ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ in regular speech and you start carrying a ‘little pen knife’ around everywhere just in case.
In fact, I am pretty much ballad-centric right now and they are the only songs I am really listening to or singing. Warning: this is not for the faint of heart! Poor Bobby McMillon, having, like, a million ballads in his head all the time. One very interesting and unexpected development has been that I am singing ballads when I am working. You might be thinking, “And?” Well, that is the natural habitat of the ballad. They have not always been sung on stage by homegrown mountain folk for public consumption. Having grown up during a time when ballads had become more performance and less community based, it was almost a surprise to greet them 1:1…just me and a song getting down to some very physical menial labor, the sun on my neck and sweat running like rivers down my body. Or hanging out clothes to the rhythm of the song of the day.
So let’s explore the ‘guts’ of this song, aka the story. A girl’s lover has come tapping on her window just before dawn, emphatically wanting to know how, exactly, she can sleep when her soul mate is about to be gone forever. You see, she has been betrothed to another, as evidenced by the paper her mother holds in her hand whilst ‘in her bed at rest.’ Dad is prepared to use a pistol to seal the deal. Many marriages were set up for political or financial gain with little thought to the happiness of the couple, especially the female part of the equation. My favorite stanza in Awake, Awake, the one that gave me that first spark of love is when he finally realizes that she is lost to him and he laments, saying, “I’ll go down in some lonesome valley,/I’ll spend my days, my months, my years,'/And I’ll eat nothing but green willow,/And I’ll drink nothing but my tears.” It made me wonder, “why green willow? Is it poisonous?” Actually, it isn’t because, after all, aspirin was traditionally made from willow bark, right?! The willow shows up quite often in ballads from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The willow symbolizes many different things, but in this song it is meant to represent the extreme sorrow of losing your true love. Arranged marriages were common in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales up until the first third of the 1700’s, when many girls made the decision to elope with their lovers, wanting a love match rather than an arranged one with a veritable stranger. Our girl in Awake, Awake makes that difficult decision. Awake, Awake would have been sung by travelling balladeers, telling the tale far and wide of a new way of thinking that was spreading across the realm.