Читать книгу Woman with Guitar - Paul Garon - Страница 7

Minnie’s rushed and compressed delivery presents a number of problems, not the least of which is the number of words that exist somewhere short of articulation, in the vicinity of the implicit and the suggested. Often a word like “you” is only broached with a barely detectable “y” sound, and we are faced with the choice of rendering it “you” or “y’”, or ignoring it entirely. This difficulty leads to another. Rather than print lyrics in pseudo-dialect, we have chosen not to attempt to render every aspect of Minnie’s (or any singer’s) accent. But this decision puts even more strain on the question of the words whose first syllable is barely articulated, if that. There is no ideal solution to this problem, but we feel our quoted texts accurately represent the songs.

We use a standard method of transcribing verses where the first two lines are alike or similar by adding a “(2x)” at the end of the first line, and following it with the third line thus:

I found my rooster this morning by looking at his comb. (2x)

You can look out now, pullets, it won’t be long.

This method ignores the idiosyncrasies that occur between Minnie’s various renderings of the same line, where line two is of the form, “awwwwww, by looking at his comb,” but it is otherwise textually faithful. Further, the (2x) system became an economic necessity for a book of this size. All songs appearing in the text without an author credit are by Memphis Minnie.

In all cases, “harp” refers to harmonica.