Single Song Sunday: You Are My Sunshine
(On revisiting – and rethinking – a childhood favorite)
November 17th, 2012 — 07:50 pm
There’s a special place in my heart for You Are My Sunshine. As I noted in our very first Covered in Kidfolk feature way back in 2007, my wife and I have often sung it to our children, as my parents sung this song to me; as such, the song represents a family tradition, and its generational incidences the very heart of family life, two parents harmonizing at the bedside of their precious progeny, voices and bodies huddled close and protective in the dark, leaning into each other as their child leans into sleep.
And there is probably a place for it in your heart, as well. After Happy Birthday and White Christmas, the song is popularly considered the most widely-known song in the world. Country music giant George Jones once called it the most perfect song ever written. The odds are excellent that you know the words, and that – whether you have your own children or not – you have sung it, too.
The lingering affection so many of us feel for our subject is easy to trace. You Are My Sunshine has strong mnemonic markers – its repetitive tropes make it easy to remember; its simple melody makes it easy to sing. The bulk of the chorus is sweet and innocent, lending itself to bedtime comfort. Its incidence in popular culture crosses multiple genres, making it familiar to fans of folk, country, pop, rock, blues, and jazz. On the surface, at least, it seems prototypical of the sentimental childhood favorite.
The two covers which I have repeatedly posted in our Kidfolk features over the years reflect both my subjective history with the song, and our common collective notion of the song as a vehicle for such sentiment: though Elizabeth Mitchell‘s kidfolk version sounds more like my parents, the simple, sweet plaintive harmony from “organic country slowgrass” folkies Gray Sky Girls best parallels that which I hear in my head and heart.
But despite the ongoing inclusion of the song on for-children collections from kindie to kidpap, to consider You Are My Sunshine as a song innately suited to such childhood sentiment is to mistake popular performance for the true heart of a song. As Michael Connolly of Coyote Grace noted at a recent concert in introducing his slow, rich new arrangement of the classic song, the song is quite dark and depressing, from its surface on down. And the deeper one delves into its lyrics, the less appropriate the song becomes as a representative of parent-child love.
In its most popular verse, our narrative persona dreams of holding his subject in his arms, but holds his head and cries upon awakening to find himself mistaken. Other verses speak of broken promises; desertion and even domestic violence lurk in other verses still. In this context, the chorus is no sweet claim of familial love so deep its subject will never know how much he or she is loved. It is, instead, a mournful refrain: of loss, of loneliness, of impermanence, and of the desperation of eternal hope.
(As an aside: the song’s history is no brighter. At least two formal recordings exist from before Louisiana Governor-to-be Jimmie Davis bought the “rights” to the song from Paul Rice for $35 in late 1939 – an action which likely netted him millions of royalty dollars in his lifetime. And although Rice claimed throughout his life to have written the song, some ethnographers believe that it was actually stolen from Oliver Hood of LaGrange, Georgia, a softspoken musician with whom Rice played in the early 1930′s, and whose legacy includes over 20 verses for the song written on the back of a brown paper sack, which his children still posses.)
Darkness is no stranger to our sleepsongs: to take just one example, we need note only that Rock A Bye Baby is actually a cautionary tale of life’s inherent fragility and danger, in which an abandoned child’s cradle plummets from a treetop when the wind – which had heretofore offered solace and comfort through its gentle rocking – grows strong enough to break the bough upon which that cradle rests.
And although for much of my lifetime and yours, You Are My Sunshine has been seen and recorded popularly as an affectionate lovesong, as deeper ownership of song and ethnographic sentiment become normative in a world where transmission, ownership, and attribution become the aegis of the common man, the sinister underbelly of this childhood favorite has becomes more and more evident through versioning.
Coyote Grace has yet to record their own powerful-yet-weary Americana take, though they have promised me in person that it is forthcoming. But a sparse, haunting album-closing cover from recently-featured duo Shannon Whitworth and Barrett Smith rings of similar sentiment. Minor key transformations from indiefolkers The Civil Wars and Chicago-based acoustic quartet Birdy come off as equally mournful, with the former raw and distraught, and the latter oddly reminiscent of a plaintive Jewish spiritual. Samantha Martin & the Haggard go for field blues and ragged holler, evoking the stark, angry bluesfolk underbelly of the song.
Vintage acoustic band Leftover Cuties explore the gritty side of the song with wah-wah trumpet and some dirty uke-and-drum-driven swing. Freakfolkers Wooden Indian Burial Ground come on all deep and psychedelic with banjo and bass and a manic high-vibrato vocalist. Sparse experimental NYC duo The Great Republic of Rough and Ready break the tune down past its melodic core, scattering its elements to smother, like fire and ice. Julie Dawn uses tambourine, piano and fiddle to create a neo-traditional dirge, its triplets strained and subdued. And Peter Broderick‘s and Chelsea Wolfe‘s 2010 gothic dronefolk takes on the song drown us in despair and confusion even as they obscure the narrative voice under low bowed strings, bells, found noise, and eerie reverb echoes.
And once these covers become embedded in the brain, our newly-framed ears cannot help but hear an echo of that same darkness in the song as a whole, even in post-millennial versions once thought of as ultimately gentle and sweet, such as those provided by YouTube up-and-comer Patrick Dansereau, lighthearted folk couple Paul Curreri and Devon Sproule, political anti-folkster Frank Turner, Dutch-American expat singer-songwriter Signe Tollefsen, weary hushfolk picker Justin Ewart, popfolk darling Lissie, and oft-acoustic country singer Caitlin Rose.
Here, then, such takes stand as a benchmark of breadth against a curated selection of modern covers, from folk lullabies and countrified crooners to old-timey rabble-rousers and acoustic swingers, organized with the newest first, and ending with bluegrass legend Norman Blake‘s famous version from turn-of-the-century art-house-gone-mainstream film O Brother, Where Art Thou – and two bonus medley tracks: a fun gypsy swingfolk combination of Singing In The Rain and our feature song from Caravan of Thieves, and a brand new kidfolk cover of Anne Murray’s famous (and verse-less) mid-seventies mashup of the song with 1954 composition Open Up Your Heart (And Let the Sunshine In) from Americana folk/pop husband-and-wife duo Martha’s Trouble. Taken in sequence, the set stands as an apt demonstration of the myriad of ways in which songs become weighted down with their histories of performance, reminding us that there is always room to reconsider the classics.
Bonus Mashups:
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