Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters is a breathtaking novel of home and identity.
The Waters is a novel about a family of rural women and their struggles in a world that wants to push them out or submerge them and their way of life, and so I’m creating a playlist that’s mostly a celebration of women on the outskirts and the edges of civilization. I write about rough stuff in my stories, about women getting in all kinds of trouble because of being themselves; in my music, I mostly prefer soft, organic folk or alt-country tunes with beautiful and confounding lyrics that I can’t figure out.
Some of these are story songs about interesting women, while many of them are love songs to people or places, or to wide-open spaces. And a surprising number of these songs are about people yearning to be home. This novel is as much about absence as presence, and so much of what we feel is about who or what is missing in our lives. A lot of these songs mean something slightly different after close inspection. Also, I’ll confess I have no musical training other than knowing what I like to listen to. My mother sang folk songs about murder and love when I was in the womb and that is the extent of my musical training.
“Highwomen,” by the band Highwomen: Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris, and Amanda Shires with assorted others for live performances, especially Yola Carter. There’s plenty to admire in the clever, manly, original “Highwaymen” song (performed by Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Kris Kristofferson), but there’s more to love in this revised version, which women might relate to better. While the original song celebrates outlaws and a spaceship captain, this song celebrates women who cared for their families and/or communities in heroic ways, including a refugee from Honduras traveling to America, a healer convicted of witchcraft, a female preacher, and a freedom rider. The writer of the original song, Jimmy Webb, helped write this new vision, which is an anthem to American women.
“God Loves a Drunk,” sung by Norma Waterston—when I first heard this song, I thought I’d come home! If you’ve read my work, you know all my alcoholics are unique individuals, not painted with any broad brush. Alcohol is a big part of American lives and American culture, and it’s silly to pretend that can be a simple matter. I grew up with people who drank too much, and I drank too much as a youth, and I’m very interested in why and how people drink. The song is written by Richard Thompson and sung philosophically by him, but Waterston’s version has a middle-aged woman’s gravity and centers the song right in her body. She asks if there will be bartenders in heaven, will there be hangovers? I sigh to acknowledge the truth of: “But a drunk’s only trying to get free of his body, and soar like an eagle high up there in heaven.” Indeed, drunks are trying to free themselves of the mess of this material world.
For a saint to go with that sinner, Jennifer Warnes sings Joan of Arc as a duo with Leonard Cohen, who wrote the song. The remastered version on Famous Blue Raincoat is probably the best, but I could listen to any of the versions of the song, especially with the two of them singing, but there’s also an impressive version of Jennifer Warnes singing with a symphony in Antwerp. The best line is, while Joan is being burned alive, she muses, “I want the kind of work I had before, a wedding dress or something white, to wear upon my swollen appetite.” Now that’s poetry!
Haroula Rose performs “Rachel’s Song,” a song she wrote while making the movie version of my previous novel, Once Upon a River, which she directed, and wrote the screenplay for. She wrote a handful of songs for the movie, and many people love, “Margo’s Song,” which she fashioned about the main character of the book and movie, a teenager who has run away from home, whom she refers to as “the river’s daughter.” This is a fast-paced story song that lets you know exactly who Margo is, her history, and her weaknesses. But it is “Rachel’s Song,” sung (by Margo) to Margo’s unborn daughter that gets me. It’s a song that acknowledges there will be trouble ahead but that she will survive it. The refrain is “Sorrow will come, and we’ll know joy again.” The music video with clips from the movie makes me cry even more.
One song I can’t stop listening to is Dar Williams’s “The Ocean,” which is a song to the ocean, also, a song to a town that sits on the ocean, and most importantly a song that gives the ocean its own voice, speaking to the woman sitting on the edge of the town on the edge of the ocean trying to make sense of it all. First, it speaks in the royal plural: “We’re not churches, not schools, not skating ponds, not swimming pools.” And then the gloves come off, and the ocean says, “I’m not kind/ I’ve bludgeoned your sailors/ I’ve spat out their keepsakes. Oh, it’s ashes to ashes/but always the ocean.” The ocean can wreak its havoc quickly, but what Dar Williams says about the ocean applies just as well to the swamp, given time. Water is a force of nature and it has its own agenda; while the town and the people sitting on the edge can be sentimental about the beauty, but beauty is not what the ocean or the swamp is about. It is about life and death, and water swallows up whatever it can.
Speaking of death, give a listen to Down Like Silver singing “Wolves.” Some folks in the world believe you should think about death a few (or even five) times a day. There’s even an app to remind you about death this way, called WeCroak. This song is about a woman announcing what should be done with her body after death, e.g., “Let the wolves enjoy my bones.” She is not asking for death to come in any hurry, but she is greeting it and acknowledging it, and she even sees there is a kind of peace in her body returning to nature. Caitlin Canty, the female half of the duo, also has a solo career—just learned this!
To lighten the tone, at least a little bit, listen to “Front Porch” by Joy Williams. I love front porches,especially front screen porches. The screen porch is an important part of The Waters, a room between the indoors and the outdoors, rendering it a magical space. This song says there is much heartache in the world, which is going to kick your ass, but she invites you back home. “If you never find what you’re looking for/come on back to the front porch/say my name through the screen door.” There is something to be gained by returning home to the porch, even if it is (necessarily) bittersweet.
Thematically, we need a math song, and since math is timeless, what could be better than the old standby, “New Math,” by comedian Tom Lehrer? Enjoy his hilarious musical critique about newfangled problem-solving techniques (long since abandoned by public schools). As a kid, I lived for this kind of comedy. Lehrer managed to be funny even on the challenging issue of drug peddlers and nuclear weapons. It was a simpler time, maybe because we thought then that we might actually solve these problems, the way we might—just might—solve math problems.
Also, we need a song about an important swamp inhabitant in this book, and so here is Townes van Zandt singing “Snake Song.” Thank you, Heidi Bell, for sending me this one, about a snake that seems fine but has the potential to be trouble. I have always enjoyed writing about snakes because they represent so many things to readers. They can be symbols of men (they are phallic),or women, or evil (the Bible,) or healing (the Caduceus with two snakes or the Staff of Aesculapius with one). But in the end, I always want to show the snake as a part of nature. Though we have fanciful ideas about them, they are the most grounded of all creatures.
“Jolene,” written by Dolly Parton, has been sung by a lot of people but take a listen to the soulful version by Yola Carter, with backup by Della Mae and the McCrary Sisters. which adds electricity to the lines about her man leaving her for Jolene and her “ivory skin.” Dolly Parton is on record saying it’s a true song, that Jolene was a bank teller who wanted Dolly’s husband and Dolly beat her up. And then Dolly beat up her husband, for good measure. I don’t want to give away the plot points of The Waters, but there is a woman who must suffer the indignity of her husband calling out another woman’s name.
“Stolen Car,” by Beth Orton This song and voice are just perfect. “You walked into my house last night/I couldn’t help but notice/A light that was long gone, still burning bright.” It’s a song about an old lover showing up and bringing his old grievances. There’s still a spark between them, a fire, even, but she/the singer has grown, and he has not. I’m not sure why, logically, she describes her ex-boyfriend’s face as a “stolen car,” but I guess because it’s something out of control or threatens to put her out of control, and it seems just right.
Natalie Merchant’s “Motherland, the title song from that album, is an ode to wild spaces beyond the creeping “sprawl of concrete/that keeps crawling its way/about a thousand miles a day?” It is a love song to nature and wild spaces, reminding us they are the antidote to so much of what ails us. And it is a haunting warning about who we will be if we let our wilderness disappear.
Another Natalie Merchant song that stuck in my head during the years of writing The Waters is “Beloved Wife,” a lament by a person who has lost their wife of fifty years. The spare lyrics are wrenching, reflecting the depth of the pain of the survivor. Readers passing through The Waters a single time may not see the importance I attach to marriage, but after living inside the book for all these years, I see the marriages in the book as profound and never-ending, though the partners may be far-flung. The marriage between Wild Will, the town’s outrageous patriarch, and Hermine, the queen of the swamp seems to me the most profound relationship in the book and sits alongside what I consider the unofficial marriage of Titus and Rose Thorn. Some see both marriages as tragic or unfulfilled, but I see both as profound and rich and life-giving, more so than most ordinary couplings.
“Blue Caravan” by Vienna Teng is a romantic, mysterious ode to a loverthe singer has let go, based on his promise that he would come back. Of course, he would come back. Of course, he didn’t come back. The line, “Oh, he was a beautiful fiction,” reminds us that we often don’t even love real people but rather our conception of them.
Gregory Alan Isakov gives us “The Stable Song.” Such a pretty song, a Midwestern song, a masculine song that hearkens to a simpler time (as masculinity tends to want to do). “I’ve gone crazy, couldn’t you tell? “I threw stones at the stars but the whole sky fell.” Seems to be a song about a man admitting he was a jerk way back when. At the end, he longs to be able to turn his diamonds back into coal.
In brief, I want to shout out to Hem for “Half Acre” about leaving Michigan and about carrying your sadness of (necessary) leaving with you. “I am holding half an acre/torn from a map of Michigan/and folded in this scrap of paper/is a land I grew in.” And another sinner-saint song is Joan Osborne’s “St. Teresa,” about a sex worker just trying to get by. And as a remedy to everything else, Brandi Carlisle sings about the pure joy of being her daughter Evangeline’s mother in “The Mother.”
also at Largehearted Boy:
Bonnie Jo Campbell’s playlist for her story collection Mothers, Tell Your Daughters