Black is the Colour of My True Love's Hair

quill

The salient lines in this traditional song, for me, are these:

“… and still I hold, / that the time will come / when he and I will be as one …”

What need is expressed in this “holding”? Against what, does our singer hope? The resistance, the barrier to resolution and happiness, is profoundly real, but is darkly tacit and remains obscure throughout the song.

The difficulty of presenting this traditional melody is in the balance that must be struck between feelings of loss and a sense of hope. Despair could easily resonate through the melody, but it is just held back by the airy dream-image of the lover that is detailed in the first few lines - the hair, the hands, the face and eyes. An almost incredible, maddening tension exists between the text of the tune and its haunting melody. How to play it …. But even in the text, the lover’s absent presence is painful, and the sense of waiting, its endlessness and the lyric voice’s interminable suffering, is but barely encompassed by the song’s cycle; the repetition, at the last, of the opening line, seems to bound the mood, in a way; the form of the text shifts the near-despair of the lyric voice outward from the suffering self by re-invoking the image of the lover once again at the end.

I’m noticing that when the song’s form is interrupted, by a lapse of memory, a distraction, a mistake, its thick and fluid centre spills out and its dark obscurity takes over the moment.

One day I will get this one right. Nina Simone’s recording of this tune, in which she, of course, struck the perfect balance, is heavily with me. My take is too clumsy, formally a mess and too sad. But it’s coming.