Making Sense 1
Running Head: Making Sense
English 310, Essay #1: Literary Analysis
Making Sense of It All: Reading, Interpreting, and Understanding Difficult Lyrics
Professor M. Woodman
Whistlin' Past t he Graveyard
(Tom Waits, Blue Valentine studio version, 1978)
I come in on a night train with an arm full of boxcars
On the wings of a magpie, cross a hooligan night
And I busted up a chifforobe way out by the Kokomo
Cooked up a mess of mulligan and got into a fight
Whistlin' past the graveyard, steppin' on a crack
Mean motherhubbard, Papa one eyed Jack
You probably seen me sleepin' out by the railroad tracks
Go on and ask the Prince of darkness,
what about all that smoke come from the stack
Sometimes I kill myself a jackal, suck out all the blood
Steal myself a station wagon, drivin' through the mud
I'm gonna be whistlin past the graveyard, steppin' on a crack
Mean motherhubbard, Papa one eyed Jack
I know you seen my headlights, and the honkin' of my horn
I'm callin' out my bloodhounds, chase the Devil through the corn
Last night I chugged the Mississippi, now that sucker's dry as a bone
I was born in a taxi cab, I'm never goin' home
Whistlin past the graveyard, steppin' on a crack
Mean motherhubbard, Papa one eyed Jack
My eyes have seen the glory of the draining of the ditch
I only come to Baton Rouge I gotta find myself a witch
I'm gonna snatch me up a couple of 'em every time it rains
You'll see a locomotive, probably thinkin' its a train
Whistlin past the graveyard, steppin' on a crack
Mean motherhubbard, Papa one eyed Jack
What you think is the sunshine is just a twinkle in my eye
That ring around my finger's called the 4th of July
When I get a little bit lonesome and a tear falls from my cheek
There's gonna be an ocean in the middle of the week
Whistlin past the graveyard, steppin' on a crack
Mean motherhubbard, Papa one eyed Jack
I come into town on a night train, with an arm full of boxcars
On the wings of a magpie, cross a hooligan night
I'm gonna tear me off a rainbow and wear it for a tie
I never told the truth so I can never tell a lie
Whistlin past the graveyard, steppin' on a crack
A mean motherhubbard, Papa one eyed Jack
Notes:
(1) Boxcar, an armful of: Grab an armful of boxcars. To Jump on a moving freight train in order to get free transportation c1915. Hobo use (Source: Dictionary Of American Slang, Wentworth/ Flexner)
(2) Hooligan n.: A hoodlum; a ruffian; a tough guy (Source: Dictionary of American Slang, Wentworth/ Flexner)
(3) Chifforobe n.: A tall piece of furniture typically having drawers on one side and space for hanging clothes on the other (Source: The American Heritage? Dictionary of the English Language, Houghton Mifflin - Third Edition)
(4) Mulligan stew n.:
- A stew made of any available meat(s) or vegetable(s). Orig. hobo use, perhaps from "salmagrundi". Often used facetiously about any stewlike food, however excellent (Source: Dictionary Of American Slang, Wentworth/ Flexner).
- A hobo dish containing just about anything you have handy. How to make just like they make it at the yearly hobo convention in Britt. Iowa. "Britt Mulligan Stew" = 450 lbs. of Beef, 900 lbs. of Potatoes, 250 lbs. of carrots, 35 lbs. of green peppers, 300 lbs. of cabbage, 100 lbs. of turnips, 10 lbs. of parsnips, 150 lbs. of tomatoes, 20 lbs. of chili peppers, 25 lbs. of rice, 60 lbs. of celery, 1 lb bay leaves, 24 gallon of mixed vegetables, 10 lbs. of kitchen bouquet flavoring, about 400 loaves of bread are served, a total of 5000, 8 oz. cups ordered to serve the stew. (Submitted by Ulf Berggren. eGroups Tom Waits Discussionlist. March, 2000).
(5) Mother Hubbard:
- Phrase comes from the nursery rhyme: "Old Mother Hubbard. Went to the cupboard. To get her poor dog a bone; But when she got there, The cupboard was bare, And so the poor dog had none. But when she got there, The cupboard was bare, And so the poor doggie had none." (Source: Dictionary Of American Slang, Wentworth/ Flexner).
- Mother-hubba/ -hubbard n. [20C] euph. for motherf****** (Source: "Cassell's Dictionary Of Slang". Jonathon Green. Cassel & Co., 1998. ISBN: 0-304-35167-9)
(6) One eyed Jack: 1. adj. [1960s+] (US) in poker, used of a king or jack, esp. as wild cards. [the design of the face depicted in profile on cards] 2a. adj. [early-mid-19C] (US) crooked, dishonest. 2b. adj. [late 19C+] (orig. US) inferior, inadequate, unimportant] (Source: "Cassell's Dictionary Of Slang". Jonathon Green. Cassel & Co., 1998. ISBN: 0-304-35167-9).
Making Sense of It All: Reading, Interpreting, and Understanding Difficult Lyrics
“I come in on a night train with an arm full of boxcars” is the opening line of Tom Waits’s song “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard” from his Blue Valentine album (1978). What does it mean to “come in on a night train,” and just how can one have “an arm full of boxcars”?
It is no coincidence that the lyrics to your favorite song probably sound like poetry, for poetry’s origins lie in song, where the music originally functioned as a mnemonic device to trigger the singer’s memory. Only with the advent of the written word (and the printing press) did people cleave poetry and music into two separate categories. One clue to deciphering a song’s meaning is to begin with its sound. What is the tempo? Is the song slow or fast? What instruments does the song employ? Does the singer emphasize certain words over others? Are there any changes in rhythm or melody?
From an auditory standpoint, “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard” sounds like a blues or early rock song. It has a repeated blues riff in the verse, and an upbeat, walking blues line in the chorus. Tom Waits takes these simple musical forms and composes a tune reminiscent of early eclectic and electric blues, like songs that came out of the Midwest in the 1940s and 1950s. This repeated riff gives the song a rhythm that propels the song forward in a sinister, lurching stutter-step. Furthermore, Waits begins the song by singing in a wordless “scat” style singing in which a person uses his or her voice in a non-verbal style reminiscent of a musical instrument. This style of singing was popular in the jazz and blues clubs of the 1930s and 1940s, so even though Waits wrote and recorded “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard” in 1978, its retrospective style hearkens back to earlier era with its own connotations of dark, smoky nightclubs. Finally, Waits’s guttural voice lends further credence to the spooky, criminal vibe.
Do these auditory characteristics have any parallels to the lyrics? To examine the song as a text, start by reading the song’s title, which often provides clues to the song’s meaning. When we look at individual words and phrases, we should take note of both their denotative and connotative meanings. Denotation refers to what the word literally signifies. If you look up a word in a dictionary, you will find its denotative meaning. Connotation refers to what the word implies based on context and cultural associations. For example, from a denotative position, an “icy” heart is one that is below the freezing point; from a connotative position, an “icy” heart is one that lacks compassion or sympathy. From a denotative position, “whistlin’ past the graveyard” is clear: a person (probably a man) whistles as he passes a cemetery. From a connotative position, “graveyard” gives us images of death, mortality, and stasis, which contrasts the “whistlin’” that usually indicates lightheartedness and joy. Furthermore, Tom Waits has elected to remove the “g” from “whistling,” which makes the word, and thus the tone, less formal and morose than one would expect in a song about death. Therefore, from the title alone, we have a setting—the graveyard—and a tone (or attitude of the writer) that opposes or contradicts the traditional mood of the setting (carefree rather than worrisome).
We can also look at other literary devices, such as persona, symbolism, metaphor and simile, allusion, parallelism, and antithesis. Persona refers to the speaker of the lyrics and the mask one wears or presents to the world. When Tom Waits sings “I come in on a night train with an arm full of box cars” (1), we do not look behind the singer Tom Waits to see where the train is parked or to see where he set his box cars down. Rather, we see Tom Waits as signing from the perspective or point-of-view of a character who has stolen a ride on a freight train. One fallacy beginning writers often commit is in assuming every song (or poem) is autobiographical and that the poem or song is about something that specifically happened to this person. While some songs (and poems) are indeed autobiographical, the vast majority are not (though they may have an autobiographical foundation). The persona is important in that it will give us clues as to the song’s meaning, so when we see an “I,” we should ask ourselves, “Who is this person talking? What assumptions can I make about him or her based on what he or she is saying?” In “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard,” the persona makes claims such as “When I get a little bit lonesome and a tear falls from my cheek / There’s gonna be an ocean in the middle of the week” (28-29) and “I’m gonna tear me off a rainbow and wear it for a tie” (34). From a literary viewpoint, these exaggerations are called hyperbole, and this hyperbolic braggadocio indicates the persona is wearing the mask of a supremely confident individual, one capable of “impossible” tasks. Furthermore, the persona claims, “I was born in a taxi cab, I’m never goin’ home” (17), which implies a transient personality, one who refuses (or is unable) to find the stability a home would provide. The persona also makes use of a specific vocabulary and dialect when he refers to an “armful of boxcars” (1), which is hobo slang for stealing a ride on a moving freight train. Therefore, we can make the following conclusions about the persona: the speaker is a solitary individual who seems to be constantly on the move, and he seems to operate outside the boundaries of polite, legal society.
While persona refers to the personality of the speaker, symbolism refers to the abstract, implied characteristics of the objects that surround the speaker. For something to be a symbol, there must be two components: one tangible, physical thing, and the intangible emotions or concepts the thing represents. Symbols can exist on two separate levels: the archetypal or the context-specific. Archetypes, a concept codified by the psychologist Carl Jung, refer to symbols that operate across cultures; in other words, “An archetype is an idealized form or model of a person, object, or place, from which derive individual examples and permutations” (Woodman, 2010, slide 4). Thus, Child would be an archetypal symbol of dependency. Context-specific symbols refer to symbols that have meaning for a particular culture or sub-culture. Thus, a snowman would have no symbolic significance for a desert culture. One example of a context-specific symbol is the use of colors; in Western culture, black is the color associated with mourning and funerals, but in many Eastern cultures, white carries this symbolic meaning. Thus, a symbol that uses the color black would not carry the same symbolic meaning for a person from America as it would for a person from Japan.
“Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard” has any number of archetypes and symbols, but the ones that seem to be most important (in that they are repeated) have to do with a graveyard, a train, night, and water. What do these concrete things represent?
The graveyard in this song represents, in locomotive terms, the end of the line: death. A train, on the other hand, represents movement, travel, and the spaces between places. The train is significant in that “the kind of transport used […] can say much about the [individual’s] subjective sense of attractiveness, self-esteem, social status, personality integration, and mode of adjustment to life” (Stevens, 1998, p. 291). In this case, the train carries not passengers but freight, which signifies that the individual operates in an isolated manner on the fringes of society: a psychologist might label him socially maladjusted. Likewise, the train tracks symbolize a path, a road by which the persona may be seeking his center: “The road leading to the center is a ‘difficult road’ [….] because it is, in fact, a rite of the passage from the profane to the sacred, from the ephemeral and illusory to reality and eternity, from death to life, from man to the divinity” (Eliade, 1954, p. 18). Thus, the persona finds himself on a path to the center, though it is ambiguous as to whether that center is the town, the chaos the town can never provide, or death itself. In the song, though, the persona celebrates this ambiguity and disconnect.
Continuing this obscurity, images of night and darkness represent death, danger, and a lack of clarity. In the song, however, the persona contrasts these ideas with symbols of light and vision: headlights, a twinkle in his eye, and the rainbow. This dichotomy is not unique, for “light and darkness symbolism has shaped the mythologies, cosmologies, and religions of all peoples of the earth, darkness being equated with an original chaos, light with the bringing of order” (Stevens, 1998, p. 142). In this song, the persona seems to represent both the dark and the light: he travels in darkness and chaos, but he carries (or claims to carry) symbols of light and order.
Finally, the song has a number of images of water: rain, tears, mud, rivers, and blood. While a train is a fairly context-specific symbol, water is an archetypal symbol of purification, life, and eternity. However, the song plays with these symbols, so instead of a flowing river, “that sucker’s dry as a bone” (16), and instead of a healthy canal, there is the “draining of the ditch” (20). As Stevens (1998) writes, “Just as water is indispensible to life, it can also be devastating in its effects,” and water “determines a cosmic rhythm of annihilation and renewal which forms the background to all mythic cataclysms and apocalypses” (p. 130-1). In the song, there is both flood—“There’s gonna be an ocean in the middle of the week” (29)—and drought (of the dry Mississippi), which implies devastation through both an excess and deficiency of water. This dichotomy could relate to “the symbolic identity of water with the unconscious psyche” (Stevens, 1998, p. 132) in that the speaker himself seems to be too full (of claims, of confidence) and too empty (of substance, of connection to other people).