The Mundane, Brutally Emotional, Divine Genius of John Hartford's "First Girl I Loved"
A masterclass in the lyrical one-two punch.
I have ten tattoos.
When I was younger, before I had any of them, I used to dream up idea after idea of all of the ways I would reclaim my skin with ink once I was legally allowed to. I’ve always felt foreign to my body, and the physical process of receiving a tattoo can be really grounding to the spirit. Simultaneously, the symbolism acts as a flag in the ground, a reclamation of territory that, for whatever reason, has not ever felt like mine. Chalk it up to patriarchy, and to being the child of food scarcity on both sides of the family, who is in the first generation to know food stability, which means my DNA said “hold onto every single ounce of this because soon we will starve.” I was a chubby kid, and that led to a relationship with food and the body so distorted that it’s almost taken me out of this realm a couple of times. My makeup is such that I will always have to actively participate in my recovery if I want to be well.
Tattoos say, “This is mine, and I put this here, on this part of my body, and I like it!”
I had so many ideas for tattoos as a kid and teenager that were inspired by music. If thirteen-year-old me had her way, I’d be covered in Hayley William’s words and Bono’s imagery. But now at 30, only one of my ten tattoos is taken from a song.
It sits just above the inside of my elbow crease on my right arm, above the negative space portrait of Lucille Ball that lives on my forearm.
It says, “BUT THAT’S ALL,” in a little banner.
Now, in college, when I was around a lot of man children in the film school who believed I was dumber than them and told me that to my face, a few people told me they thought I was misquoting Porky Pig.
No, I don’t not have a Porky Pig half quote on my arm. Like, go off if that’s your truth. That’s, uhhhh, not mine. :)
“But that’s all” is the refrain from one of my favorite songs of all time, off of a record I would for sure bring with me to a desert island if I had to choose, like, five records. It’s not the record I would bring - that is Time (The Revelator) by Gillian Welch. But Aero-Plane by John Hartford is up there.
My father would often wake whatever sleepers were still in bed on Saturday mornings on Arcadia Street with his sound system. He’d choose a record, often a Grateful Dead live album, u2, the Allman Brothers, John Prine, Fleetwood Mac, Mike Oldfield, the Talking Heads, or later on, Arcade Fire, Postal Service, Dave Matthews Band, or John Mayer. I don’t know what he plays now. It’s been Goose and Billy Strings last I was exposed to the practice.
My favorite Saturday mornings began as I awoke to Aero-Plane by John Hartford. It’s a hippie bluegrass masterpiece, melting traditional bluegrass musicianship with Hartford’s whimsically weighted, blunt force storytelling. I could write pages and pages about this record, but we’re going to zero in on track 6.
Musically, this song rambles and trips over itself as the narrator recalls his first love. We sit with him in a stillness only accessed after years spent on his part of the path that did, in fact, diverge from hers. He alternates between describing the mundane details dusting themselves up from the past and swirling around him in this stillness, before landing in blunt, potent, expressions of emotion they spring from. It’s one two punch after one two punch.
Shall we?
We begin the first verse with an introduction to the reality of the narrator’s emotional truth, presented through the lens of nostalgia:
Was in love with you, well before I knew
It meant more than just wanting to be with you
I used to look for other girls that looked like you
But the laws of nature said, 'forget it, son'
'Least that's what somebody told me
I worried about it a little bit, but that's all
This is the first of five repetitions of the refrain, “I worried about it a little bit, but that’s all.” We’ll see Hartford come back to this phrase again and again, after indicating deeper expressions of potent emotion still living within him. Deeper emotion = deeper regret. But I can’t live in regret, because this is where we are. I worried about it a little bit, but that’s all.
This leads us to my favorite group of words in all of music. Truthfully, this is might be my favorite group of words ever written in the English language:
I dreamt that you were Joan of Arc
And I was Don Quixote
And everywhere we went the world was tin-foil
But I gave up dreaming, and became a priest
It put it right out of my system
I worried about it a little bit, but that's all
I dreamt that you were Joan of Arc. I dreamt that you were a divinely inspired French revolutionary whose drive to fight for herself and her people trumped the limitations of her gender. I dreamt that you were Joan of Arc. I dreamt that you were a seventeen-year-old French military leader, born as a peasant girl out in the sticks, who insisted she be brought to the future King, to inform him of the holy visions and guidance she received from archangels, saints, and God about his future as a monarch. I dreamt that you were Joan of Arc. I dreamt that at 19, you were caught by the Burgundians, tried by English Bishops, and burned at the stake.
I dreamt that you were Joan of Arc, and I was Don Quixote. I dreamt that you were a real, living martyr and saint, returned to the Earth, and I dreamt that I was a fictional character from the Spanish epic written by Miguel de Cervantes. I dreamt that you were canonized by the Catholic Church, and I dreamt that I was a fictional character who went mad from reading too many romance stories that I decided to knight myself and set out on a quest to bring chivalry back from the dead. I dreamt that you were deemed “the Savior of France,” as a teenage girl, and I went so mad with my delusional fantasies of reality that I ran around stabbing at windmills while the whole village laughed. All for love, all for chivalry, all to save the the heart and the soul from the invisible, violent giants only I seem to be able to see.
I dreamt that you were Joan of Arc, and I was Don Quixote, and everywhere we went the world was tinfoil. Everywhere we went, the world reflected us back to ourselves, but the image wasn’t quite right. It was distorted, cracked, blurry, unclear. Vague.
I dreamt that you were Joan of Arc, and I was Don Quixote, and everywhere we went the world was tinfoil.
And then I stopped dreaming, and I metaphorically joined the priesthood to forget you. I read the bible. I chased faith. I tried to find Joan of Arc in myself because she was you and now you are gone but there is a space inside of me that is now unoccupied and dormant because it belongs to you and you alone.
The narrator then grounds us, with the mundane details that bubble up and ground the feelings of longing and loss attached to the place in him where the first girl he loved still lives. It’s almost like he’s reminding himself it was real:
Now you used to play the guitar
We worked in a country band
I hung out down on the river bank, on Sunday
Your brother was my closest friend
He drove a pickup truck
He used to bring me home sometimes, from high school
Marrying the fantastical, whimsical BIGNESS of the feeling with the details, we see a more honest explanation of what the narrator is experiencing emotionally as he lets himself ramble through the melody and explore this space in himself. It’s a deeply intimate process of communication we’re witnessing between him and himself:
Now I was fifteen, oh the very first time
Love broke completely inside me
We young, and we were learning about it together
And we had enough of what we thought we'd need
Of those well known secret fables
We worried about it a little bit, but that's all
We were young. We knew what it was. We knew what it had been told to us as, and we knew it was love. And we were young. And we knew so many of the stories end before they begin. We knew this might become a secret story that lives on within us forever, buried deeply so as to not upset the integrity of wherever we land in life.
We worried about it a little bit. But that’s all.
Now that the narrator took us through a big swing with the fantastical nature of THE FIRST LOVE feeling, let the pendulum fall all the way to the other side of mundane details to ground it, and leveled out the perspective, we are lowered into the reality of what this feeling is really called. We zoom out, ever so slightly.
I regret my life won't be long enough
To make love to all the women that I'd like to
Or least of all, to live with the ones I've loved
And I've never regretted a love affair
Except one and that's all over
I worried about it a little bit, but that's all
This is an expression of regret so thorough it needs no further commentary, in my humble opinion. Zooming back in to our girl, our first love, the first one:
Now I heard you lived a way up north
Your kids are fat and plenty
And I haven't seen your brother since a-way last Easter
And if every other girl in the whole wide world
Was just a little bit more like you
I'd worry about it a little bit, but that's all
You have a whole life, a whole life that doesn’t involve me. It’s far away from me, from us, and from where we were together. And your brother, who was my closest friend, who was woven into my love for you, is a stranger.
And if every other girl reminded me of you, just a little bit more, every girl in the entire world, I’d worry about it.
I’d worry about it a little bit, but then I’d have to force myself to tend to this feeling enough so that it isn’t the main focus of my every day until I die, because the love I felt for you and feel for you, and the loss that now lives bound hand in hand with that love, is the biggest thing I have ever felt. And it can’t be that big. I need to live. I need to be as free from this feeling as I can. So that’s all. I worried about it a little bit, but then I remembered, and that’s all.
And this is what I’ll remember:
Now you used to play the guitar
We worked in a country band
We hung out down on the river bank, on Sunday
Your brother was my closest friend
He drove a pickup truck
He used to bring me home sometimes, from high school
I hope you listen to this song today and let yourself feel it. The structure of the music itself is the final piece, grounding these massive and vivid expressions of potent emotion and monotonous lists of details in a beautiful ramble that expertly communicate what it feels like to reminisce.
I love music, and I love words, and I thank you for the opportunity to share this here.
I’m traveling for a show this week, which is why my publishing schedule is a little off here! I’m not sure if I’ll be able to publish tomorrow, but I’ll still write at least 1000 words and share it whenever I’m back at my computer.
Expect a new Enlighten Up on Friday, along with a giveaway post and a new guided practice! If you’d like to submit a question or topic for me to explore in Enlighten Up, you can do so here.
See ya!
xx Meg