Listen Up: The Whores of my Youth
Sometime in the late 1960s, Townes Van Zandt wrote a song called “Tecumseh Valley.” Singer/songwriter Nanci Griffith says she first heard the song around the same time, when she was fourteen; thirty-something years later, in 1993, she covered it on her album Other Voices, Other Rooms. And about a year after that, I heard the song for the first time and was introduced to my very first whore.
Griffith almost always records original material, but Other Voices was a covers album, all old folk and country songs that she grew up loving—stuff by John Prine and Woodie Guthrie and Bob Dylan, but a lot of lesser-known songs, too. She meant it as a tribute to the songwriters that made her a songwriter, but for me, at age nine or so, it became a kind of ad hoc roots music primer—though it would be years and years before I understood the significance of any of the songs or the artists or considered their place in the world beyond the confines of my parents’ Dodge Caravan.
My dad was going through this really weirdly obsessive Nanci Griffith phase at the time, and when he was at the wheel, that cassette was in the tape deck. Soon it just became a fact of life, like water or air or breakfast cereal or underpants. I heard those songs over and over and over again, the words becoming ever more familiar to my small ears—ever more familiar, and ever more confusing. I was a kid; I liked Treasure Trolls and American Girl dolls and the most tragic thing in my life was mastering cursive. But these songs were heavy, all about the Dust Bowl and failed farms and lovers leaving and cowboys and old abandoned apartments. Other Voices introduced me to all of those things.
And then there was my very first whore.
Van Zandt’s “Tecumseh Valley” is about a country girl named Caroline who leaves her ailing father to work in town, does okay, sends money back and returns home only to find him dead. She kinda loses it, and eventually dies—at nine, I understood that much. But there was one verse that really boggled my little brain:
So she turned to whorin’ out on the streets
With all the lust inside her
And it was many a man
Returned again
To lay himself beside her
Whorin’—what? Huh? At school, when we were reading, some teachers told us to skip big words we didn’t know, but I was a total vocabulary nut and prided myself on figuring that shit out on my own. This wasn’t a big word, but it was weird and new. (Thank God I always misheard “lust” as “must,” or it would have been double-madness.) I couldn’t figure it out—didn’t know how to spell it, didn’t know what it mean. I didn’t know what to do. It stuck in my head, just rattled around.
A couple years later, when I was 11 or so, I fell into a strange obsession of my own. During a winter pledge drive, our local PBS station started airing the Great Performances taping of Les Miserables live in concert at the Royal Albert Hall. They played it seemingly on loop, and I watched it seemingly on loop. All the French Revolution business was totally over my head, but my pre-pubescent brain soaked up the songs like a desperately thirsty, nerdy sponge. The night my dad brought home the soundtrack on tape, my sister and I squealed and ran around the living room and demanded we play it during dinner and then during every single family car ride for the next several weeks. Could have been months, actually. (Having bombarded us with Nanci Griffith for the better part of two years, he could hardly refuse.) It was just fantastic—dramatic and romantic and funny and big. But there was one song that left a burr in my brain, just like “Tecumseh Valley.” It was “Fantine’s Arrest,” in which the destitute, consumptive single mother quite unwillingly—well, uh, at the time I wasn’t sure what she was doing, actually, but at some point, she hits some dude for saying something to her that I also didn’t quite catch, and when the police arrive he shouts, “This prostitute attacked me!” And then later she dies.