Friday, October 08, 2010

Long Neck Blues

Like most resolute travelers, I don’t care much for packaged tours—not even for a day. I think they make us all a little uncomfortable because we are herded together too early in the morning (tour starts at seven) into a mini-van that may seat six to seven comfortably, but is always filled to capacity, cramming nine to ten into an uneasy long day of intimacy. 

I don't think any of us are uncomfortable because we are no longer on our own adventures but now just a gaggle of gaped mouthed, digital photographers always unzipping, zipping up our belt packs and haggling for the best price at the souvenir stalls which surround each noteworthy stop.

The last stop of the tour, we reached the outskirts of a Padaung village where we got out of the van, stretched our backs and legs, paid our entrance fee, then walked a short distance up a hill to the  souvenir stalls where the ladies who wear brass coils around their necks worked as cashiers. Amidst the futile attempts to bargain--all of the factory made kitsch is sold at a fixed prices--I was drawn right away to a song hanging in the air, to a voice as lamenting as a sigh.

I approached the singer, her round, moon face framed by Beatlemania bangs. She sat stiffly holding her head high atop her brass neck rings as she strummed a steady rhythm, using one finger on her left hand to open and depress a position on the guitar’s fret board. The changes in pitch accompanied shades of her plaintive voice.

We made eye contact, exchanged smiles, and I waited for her to finish her song then applauded. I gave her a nice tip and extended one hand towards the guitar, waggled my head, “May I?” She accepted the money and handed me her instrument.

It is not really a guitar, only an instrument shaped like one. One string is tuned a fifth below the other three strings which are all in the same key—drone strings we call them. The instrument doesn’t allow for chording, but changes pitch simply when one finger holds down a string then releases it.

The “action” of the instrument (the distance between the fret board and the string) is high. This makes it nearly impossible to make a full chord. It takes some wrist strength to use one finger to bear down on one string for any length of time.

Holding the instrument, strumming it, trying to mimic the song I’d just heard, confirmed to me that the it is more closely related not only to an Appalachian dulcimer but also to a “diddley bow”, an instrument once crafted by black sharecroppers in the deep south of the United States, usually a wooden plank and a single wire string fastened together and played by plucking the string with one hand while the other hand used a glass or metal tube to slide up and down the string to change pitch. This sliding tube was necessary because the distance between string and board was too great to allow for painless fingering. It is the diddley bow that gave birth to the slide guitar.

I looked around her stall for a slide and zeroed in on a tube of lipstick. I pointed to it, and she made a motion across her lips. I smiled, “I know,” and put out my hand. She made a face seeming to, “Well, OK, let’s see where he’s going with this.” She handed me the lipstick.
 I removed the metal cap and fitted it to my left pinky. I began strumming, and then slid the tube up the neck on the three drone strings until they were in harmony with the open note. I did this a few times, falling into a Mississippi delta blues shuffle. She narrowed her eyes, following her lipstick tube up and down the fret board. A small audience began to gather, and what the hell, I thought, I’ll never see these people again, so I broke into song:

“Oh the long neck women, they really like to pose,
Yeah the long neck women, they really like to pose
Why they got them long necks, only the long neck man truly knows”

I doubt if I planted a seed that will one day produce a hybrid of Padaung folk songs resonating Muddy Waters, but I left with what all travelers hunger for most, an impromptu illumination of a moment, one that is carried away in an instant like a puff of smoke, impossible to capture with a camera.


0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home