Country Music

Helena Iara has a new favorite song, and it isn't kiddie music:

 

She started hearing the song more than a month ago, when her aunt was driving in the car without the stereo, and started to sing it to her, and now Helena wants to hear and sing it all the time (on the way to the farmers' market this morning, we heard it three times).  She's also proud to know all of the words, no mean feat for a two year old (after singing along this morning, she declared proudly, and almost with surprise, "I know it all!").

Though I don't have any memories of when I was two, I do know that when I was little, I also liked country music; it is a little different in the United States, but many of the chord progressions and the harmonies are similar.  And ethnomusicologists say that country music exists in almost every part of the world these days, identified by a certain twangy-ness in the instruments, rhythms reminiscent of country life, and breaks in a singer's voice.

Those same ethnomusicologists say that what brings country music together as a world phenomenon is nostalgia, a sadness for a lost past (the horse, the smells of the country, the memory of a simpler time).  In English we don't have a word for that complex sentiment, but in Portuguese they do: saudade.  One of the other songs on the disk that has Helena's favorite, "Chalana", has the following verse, which seems to manifest this idea: "Every chord that I play represents a saudade."  Similarly, the song I remember loving when I was little was Roger Whittaker's "Durham Town" also a song about nostalgia and loss.

Here's the question, though: what has a two year old lost?  My father-in-law, with whom Helena listens to country music, lived the first thirty-five years of his life as a peasant, and when he was forced off the land, he always longed to go back to a life of herding cattle and planting manioc.  It makes sense for him to love the saudade in the music.  But Helena? Or me?

Freud or Lacan could give a psychoanalytic explanation of loss in a small child: they lose the intimate connection to the mother, the one-ness of the womb and the first months of infancy.  Maybe.  And as I wrote last week, the peripatetic life that Rita and I lead means that Helena is always losing a friend, a place she has come to love, a toy.  

But I think that something else is going on: though country music may represent loss, its practice is often the opposite.  Here in Brazil, country music concerts are amazing events, including rodeos, dozens of warm-up bands, and hundreds of thousands of people in small cities in farming areas.  Where Rita's family lives, it is the music of dance, the songs that everyone sings together.  These songs fear and lament loss, but as they do, they bring people together in a shared experience.  As Helena sings "Chalana" with her aunt or her grandfather, that's what matters, a process of coming-into-relationship with them, just like I loved singing Roger Whittaker with my dad as we played on the floor of our suburban house in Denver.