Saturday, November 08, 2003

Patti Page, "The Tennessee Waltz"
(December 30, 1950)

In "The Tennessee Waltz," the narrator recounts the moment when an old friend stole her little darlin' as the Tennessee Waltz played...making this song a song about itself. And there's yet more than that here in terms of modernism. Page's hits are some of the earliest examples of overdubbing on a record: my understanding is that this involved recording Page singing along to tape of herself singing. You can hear that in the song, I think, as the orchestra, especially the horns, sound oddly distant, almost blurry the way dub records can be, perhaps from the result of making a recording of a recording (of a recording?). Page's voice, doubled several times over itself, has a startling presence, like a bit of day-glo green paper on a grey background.

When I was a kid, Sesame Street had this bit of interstitial video where one moving image -- a kid running -- would be multiplied five or so times in a line on the screen, with each multiple starting slightly before the multiple next to it. The effect was one of one kid being chased by an army of exact replicas, like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This unnerved me...well, no. Young kids are never merely unnerved, they're TOTALLY FREAKED OUT. And the Kid Clone Armies totally freaked me out because it forced me to ponder the possibility of some malignant force creating multiple, free-willed copies of unique individual free-willed me that I'd have to deal with in some way. (Now if they were robots, that'd be OK, because I could destroy them with a bucket of water.) Eventually, though, I realized that this was a bit of post-production hocus-pocus, but it makes me wonder: did Page's hits unnerve people in the same way when the overdubbing gimmick was first tried out? If you allow yourself, you can imagine hearing those doubled voices not as something you understand as an illusion, a trick, but something you don't quite understand at all, and something that just be what it sounds like -- multiple copies of the same voice coming from multiple copies of the same person. Or more prosiacally, perhaps just twins or triplets. 4

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