On Breaking Out Spontaneously In Song

Songs and the health of a people

Go for Gollum, stay for song. That summarises my first reading of Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings. For I went in to learn of and about a shrivelled creature and the object that caused him to be so. But soon afterwards, I forgot about the creature and was enchanted by song.

Not by any song per se, but by the spontaneous breaking out in song which occurs all over the place like random treats hidden in places all over the house, or like random fireworks popping and colouring the already starry night sky. As in Aragorn or Sam or Frodo breaking out suddenly in a song amidst a discussion or narration. Whether it is of memory of days past, wishes for Elves, a lament for the trees or the Rohirrim, or grieving the inability to save one’s master, the entirety of the book is decorated by song. A common unmissable feature of the book, one that causes me to wonder.

For although it is a fictional work, I get the impression that the impulse towards songs and the spontaneous breaking into it was a feature of the author. I imagine that if I sat with Mr. Tolkien in a private room discussing, he would, every ten paces of exchanging ideas, break out in a song. So now I twice wonder if it is a thing particular to the author or even to his age. Or maybe not to his age but as well to ages before him. Or maybe we in my time have lost the spirited spontaneity of breaking out in songs.

Source

I support this last ‘maybe’ with thoughts from and about Belloc’s On Song and Chesterton’s The Little Birds Who Won’t Sing. For the availability of these essays, among the more important and urgent topics and subjects treated in the world of letters; for all the life-changing tasks scholars and literary men have set their lives to, stir me to ask what it is about song and the spontaneous breaking into it that rouses such men of intellect and perspicacious perceptibility to consider the subject of song, those who sing them, and those who don’t—because they can’t, and write about them.

Of society, death, and song, Belloc says, “If you would ask what society is imperilled of death, go to one in which song is extinguished…but if you would discover where men are men, take for your test whether songs are always and loudly sung.”

And the test is true. That when we were most alive in Nigeria, we had tales by moonlight featuring many songs. My favourite song, of which I cannot now remember its preceding tale (neither did I know it then), goes like this:

Where is my husband,
Always going to the mortar,
Hmmm hmmm hmmm,
He is a palm wine tapper,
Hmm-ha hmmm,
He is a palm wine tapper.

This song, up until yesterday, remains a way of introducing extra vitality and a smiling face amidst a conversation with my sisters, transporting me in the moment to our upstairs flat in that house on a lonely bushy path opposite the Water corporation office over a decade and a half ago. What a blessing to be able to live in two worlds simultaneously: in my cheerful childhood and the present recollection of it. This is only one song. And I can only dimly hope that when time machines eventually get made, they will have a musical instrument's character.

Of folktales and songs, Tortoise seats chiefly in my childhood. With its devious, dubious character, it defrauded animals everywhere it went; whether on land and in the sky. But none sticks out like my wimpy parchy beard like Tortoise Had A Mysterious Pregnancy (Ijapa Loyun Oran).

The tale opens with a problem plaguing Tortoise and his wife —her inability to get pregnant. Tortoise then approaches a herbalist for a solution to this shameful problem. The kind herbalist gave Tortoise a bowl of porridge for his wife, promising that it will solve her problem. He gave Tortoise a warning as well: no matter how good the porridge smelled, Tortoise must not eat it. But we trust Mr. Tortoise to fall for the sweet-smelling porridge; for like Esau, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Tortoise ate all the porridge and he fell pregnant.

Becoming a laughing stock —pregnant husband (with no birth canal), infertile wife, — Tortoise returned to the herbalist for an antidote. (Technically that would be begging for an abortion. But he was a herbalist, not Planned Parenthood. However, this is no time for moralising). But of the antidote, the herbalist replied that he had none. And of the song Tortoise sings as he crawled to the herbalist’s clinic, this he sang:

Babaláwo mo wa bẹ̀bẹ̀, Alugbinrin
Babaláwo mo wa bẹ̀bẹ̀, Alugbinrin
Ogùn to ṣe fún mi lẹ́rẹkan, Alugbinrin
Tóní nma ma fọwọ́ kẹnu, Alugbinrin
Tóní nma ma fẹsẹ kẹnu,  Alugbinrin
Mo fọwọ kan ọbẹ̀, mo mú kẹnu, Alugbinrin
Mofẹsẹ kan lẹ mo mu kẹnu, Alugbinrin
Mobojú wo kùn o ri gbẹndu, Alugbinrin
Babaláwo mo wa bẹ̀bẹ̀, Alugbinrin 
Babaláwo mo wa bẹ̀bẹ̀, Alugbinrin

Which translates to this:

Herbalist, I have come to plead; gong-striker!
Herbalist, I have come to plead; gong-striker!
You prepared some medicine for me recently; gong-striker!
You warned me not to touch my mouth with my hands; gong-striker!
You warned me not to touch my mouth with my legs:; gong-striker!
I touched the soup with my hands and I put it to my mouth; gong-striker!
I touched it with my feet and I put it to my mouth; gong-striker!
I looked at my stomach and it was swollen; gong-striker!
Herbalist, I have come to plead; gong-striker!
Herbalist, I have come to plead; gong-striker!

It is rather melodious to hear, and it sticks. And it makes the heart alive even as it causes the stomach to spread with laughter. Such is the power of song. And the power of songs well sung.

There is something about song: everyone understands it. From the baby in the womb to the old man returning in a minute to the womb of the earth. The baby in the womb kicks to song. The old man rests in it as he passes. When we are happy we look for a song. When we are sad, and clear words don’t do, song. As that twelve-year-old had his heart crushed for the first time, he seeks out a song. At the first flutter of love in the stomach, he recourses back to song.

Oppressed people sing. Slaves compose songs to give their spiritsfans some air from below the yoke they suffer. Exiles sing, “By the river of Babylon, yea we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.”

Sports fan sing: “You will never walk alone.” Oh, when the Uefa Champions League song comes on and all borders are melted as bad baritone voices sing heartily. I remember the Argentina football team’s locker room songs as they progressed step after step to World Cup victory.

Boys singing in dark nights, cold mornings. Girls singing with buckets of water on their heads. We are singing animals even when we pause being rational ones. Mobs sing. In fact, mobs are most powerful when they sing spiritedly and are faint and dusty when all they have is rage without songs.

In church, we are most alive when we sing together. God made it so. For Paul the apostle, writing, telling the Ephesians to avoid the shameful and unfruitful works of darkness, tell them to avoid drinking to debauchery. That rather they should be filled with the Spirit. To what end? That they might “speak to one another in Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs; sing and make melodies in their hearts to the Lord.” Even the Spirit is a songmaker. Therefore, where songs are not always and loudly sung, one must start a diagnostic work.

So I turn my eye to my everyday conversation. Once I naively lamented that “deep” conversations are scarce and non-staple. That we don’t have them as often as possible. But boy was I wrong. For here is a greater lament: we don’t break out into songs often and spontaneously in our everyday conversation. Certainly, we are all unhealthy if, being huddled up together in a room for more than two hours at business or whatever thing, no one breaks into a chorus that we can all join in. We are perhaps sick and we don’t know it. Even worse, no one leaves that room with the thought of going home or his private room to write a song that we might all sing the next day.

Surely this is Mr. Chesterton’s lament. That some professions do not allow for singing. For sailors break into song even as water breaks out on them. Pirates used to sing as they plundered —sea shanties let us know this. Mr. Chesterton ponders this way, “How did people come to chant rude poems while pulling certain ropes or gathering certain fruit, and why did nobody do anything of the kind while producing any of the modern things? Why is a modern newspaper never printed by people singing in chorus? Why do shopmen seldom, if ever, sing?”

I wonder with him. But even more closely, why a dialogue between two friends on a hot afternoon cannot tolerate one or two spontaneous singing. Although I have done so a few times: when a friend utters some nice phrase, a song wells in my heart that tallys with the phrase. I sometimes sing it out loud. But it is always in those lighthearted moments. Not in those other moments where I am heatedly debating if someone is anathema or not (there is no singing about anathema). We don’t sing in very serious moments.

I cannot recall a religious debate or any debate of whatever sort where one of the debaters broke out in song. But I can still sing songs sung at stand-up shows. Can we then diagnose that we are too serious? Too serious to do the most serious thing that all of creation can join in—breaking out in song? Then surely we are unwell and we merely mask it. But sometimes, even masquerades sing.

If we are then too serious to sing, we are too serious to live. There is no point in speaking of ‘humanity’ any longer if we refuse to break out spontaneously in song. For no other reason than our spirits seeking to breathe. Two souls in close contact through talk may endeavour to breathe together. They may do so with a song. To extol humanity while refusing to uphold song is to be stupidly sentimental.

Having lost all that you have, and can no longer do business, if you still have a voice, do the business of song. You need not be good, only human, to do the business of song. According to Belloc, “It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them.” Valete my friends.