I can tell a lie, but I sure can't sing one - Dave Van Ronk. Tin Angel...
When I was a kid playing in clubs, I seldom sang songs in which I changed the gender to reflect my own maleness.
It's something I picked up from my Dave Van Ronk phase, since I saw him do it lots of times in his live shows, and I spent a lot of time trying to emulate him; lots of people did. (I never did learn to play something close to his version of Billy Holiday's "God Bless the Child;" I just wanted to try to do his holler of "Money! Money! You've got lots of friends, crrrrrying round your door..." followed by the shout "When money's gone, and spending ends..." followed by the gentle, almost feminine, yet hoarse, simultaneously soft and yet firmly accusatorial staccato "they donnnn't come 'round no more..." )
Generally when I sang songs written and recorded by women, I left the gender intact.
I sang my version of "Ode to Billy Joe" in a feminine gender, and Joni Mitchell's "Woman of Heart and Mind" in gender, but adding some words to indicate I was repeating something said to me, which is how I felt about the song anyway. As it happened as a young man, I'd broken up with a woman who played it for me just before the end, singing along with the record, when pointing out that I was an asshole, which, in fact, I was. Anyway, it's not like I could sing "I am a man of heart and mind, with time on his hands and no child to raise..."
"...you imitate the best, and the rest you memorize..."
If nothing else, from Dave Van Ronk I learned to live that truth: "I can tell a lie, but I sure can't sing one."
There was one song whose gender I did change, Joni Mitchell's beautiful Tin Angel, the last two verses, which I changed as I reflected on an evening I'd spent with a (then) friend, who would one day become my wife, after I managed to break past "Just Friends." As it happened, after a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we went downtown to the Village, and really did talk "in a Bleecker Street Cafe..."
Joni Mitchell's last two verses:
Not a golden Prince who's come
Through columbines and wizardry
To talk of castles in the sun
Still I'll take a chance and see
I found someone to love today
There's a sorrow in his eyes
Like the angel made of tin
What will happen if I try
To place another heart in him
In a Bleecker Street cafe
I found someone to love today
I found someone to love today"
The way I sang those last two verses:
Not a golden Princecess come
Through columbines sweet revelries
and dreams of castles in the sun
Still I'll take a chance and see
I found someone to love today
There's a sorrow in her eyes
Like the angel made of tin
What will happen if I try
To place another heart within
In a Bleecker Street cafe
I found someone to love today
I found someone to love today
"Dark with darker moods is she..."
She was there one night in a campus club when I played it on stage, but I'm not sure she knew who I was singing about.
I never played on Bleecker Street, but I was there with her one night, after going with her uptown to the Met, just sitting, drinking at a table in a cafe with her, not daring to dream that she'd be my future lover and ultimately my future wife, but after all these decades, it remains a night that I have never forgotten, when she was "just a friend" I'd found.
It struck me though, as improbable as it all might have been:
I found someone to love...
Yeah.
I could tell a lie, but I sure couldn't sing one, especially not that night on stage in that little campus club, with her in the audience, more than four decades ago.
In these terrible times, it brings me peace to remember that life is a wonder that, for all its sometime pain, yet rises with paroxysms of ineffable joy.