Word problems are the hardest to solve

 

Turkey pose

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Nanci Griffith's recording of a song titled Tecumseh Valley tells the story of Caroline, a miner's daughter. Listeners are not told if Caroline is blonde with blue eyes, or if she is a brunette, but we assume loveliness from the line about the sunshine walking beside her, which is my favorite line in the song. 

    Times were hard, Griffith sings, and Caroline's father sends her to the Valley to look for work. With a willing heart for decent labor, she finds few opportunities, so she tends bar at Gypsy Sally's, where she hopes to make enough dollars to take back home to her father. She receives word that he passed away, and after that, she makes a living by turning to the oldest profession.

    The song is written by Townes Van Zandt, and in great contrast to the poignant line about sunshine and Caroline, he inserts an ugly word that begins with a w, a word that describes her profession, and it mars the song. Back in the days when I played Griffith's CD, that word, in an otherwise lovely tune, bothered me. On my sing-a-longs with her rendition, I hummed over the w-word and rushed to the next one. A few days ago, when I heard the first few notes of Tecumseh Valley emanating from my radio, in a voice different from Griffith's, I winced at the unsavory word that would be floating through my kitchen, but my radio pulled a musical fast one.

    

    I was standing at the stove stirring melted butter, flour and broth for chicken pie, when a version I had never heard before started playing; a male voice I did not recognize. Joy and caution moved my musical bones. I liked the song, but I frowned upon the forthcoming expression regarding Caroline's vocation. While stirring with a wooden spoon, I listened. And then, great balls o fire! This version had been cleaned up, obviously for discriminative weirdos like me. In a shocking surprise, the singer substituted a different word for the distasteful one. When the melody ended, I learned that the artist was Van Zandt himself. My curiosity about the switcheroo surged, and after setting the chicken pie in the oven, I did some snooping.

    

    Van Zandt wrote the song in 1968, fifty-eight years ago, when voices were not as bold, and society was not as permissive as today. The nineteen-sixties held a gentler time, at least in the realms of verbal politeness and literary discretion. Back in 1968, bad words were said, but they were mostly whispered and withheld from print, unlike today when uglies are shouted from social media platforms and from pages behind innocent book covers. The producer of the record label, out of concern that some in Van Zandt's audience might be offended, urged him to change the w-word, and he complied. 

    For the cleaned-up version I heard on the radio, he changed two words in the song: he changed the w-word to "walking," and he substituted "walk" for the verb "lay."  The brilliant songwriter could have done better, and one must wonder if Van Zandt had been in a hurry to please a producer and spent little time on swapping out the words. After all, there is no correlation between walking and the meaning of the w-word in question. Walking does not even come close to depicting the lifestyle Caroline fell into. In settling on those substitutions, Van Zandt failed to retain the awfulness of Caroline's predicament, nor did he give listeners an understanding of the circumstances that led to her demise.

    If I were asked to sanitize this song, I would make the changes this way: I would use the word darkness for the original w-word, and I would substitute be for lay. 

So she turned to darkness 

... returned again to be right there beside her

    Darkness can indicate a lot of different things, but no one can dispute that Caroline lived a dark life. Granted, be is not a descriptive verb, but dancing around Caroline's profession while preserving the honesty of the song is challenging. This writing exercise is a tough one, but Van Zandt might have created an even more interesting portrayal if he had introduced an element of mystery, instead of being so blunt. 

    Looking back at the history of this song illustrates how times have changed. Most listeners today would waltz right over the ugly word, and if Van Zandt had written Tecumseh Valley last week, the conversation with his producer, more than likely, would not have taken place. 

    Writing can be complicated, and words play games like hide and seek. Finding the right one, at the right time, is the dream of writers. Those of us who remain faithful to the process, spend our time dredging memories, conjuring imaginations, and plowing through dictionaries and thesauruses. We climb towering mountains and crawl over sweltering deserts, for the sake of finding the right word, only to realize later that a selection misleads or misconstrues, so, we dredge and conjure and plow again, and we crawl and climb, searching for something that may or may not exist. Out of breath, we mince and wince; we wrangle and untangle. Like Caroline of Tecumseh Valley, we face critical decisions that affect the impressions we leave along our winding ways.

   

        

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