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An old man gazed on a photograph
In a locket he wore for years.
("Two little girls in blue"!)
Her photograph is all you have to gaze upon
("You will never miss your mother till she's gone"2)
I think I see my sweetheart still
With eyes of softest brown.
("While leaves carne drifting down"3)
I see in every vision amber tresses tied in blue.
("Amber tresses tied in blue"4)
Oft when I sleep a melody comes rushing on my brain,
and the sweet music of that night comes greeting me again.
I take her fair small hand in mine amid my blissful trance;
one more vision is worth a world, I lead her forth to dance.
("The Closed Cottage Dance"5)
"Visions," "dreams," "photographs," etc. indeed pervade the sentimental diction of
such "old songs." Fashion and nostalgia apart, photography, born in their century and
evolving in our own towards the chronicling of private events of life, partly explains the
recurrence of "pictures" and associated ideas in these songs of personal and family
dramas. 6 Another reason could be the implicit suggestion of the "return" or these regretted
ones 10 those unreconciled to their loss. Edgar Morin underlines the natural link between
the concept of revenant or "double" and any "image" of a person, whether dead or alive:
Etonnanle, extraordinaire identite entre Ie spiritisme et les croyances les
plus archaiques concernant Ie double! Visible jusque dans les moindrcs
details! lei comme IIi. Ie double se manifeste avant la mort. lei comme lit Ie
miroir, I'effigie, et ce reflet moderne qu'est la photo, peuvent fixer Iii
presence dl! double...7
lLeach, Folk 168.
2M UNFLA 87-159/C10652.
3MUNFLA 87-159/Cl0645.
4M UNFLA 87-159/C10648.
5M UNFLA 87-159/C10630.
0Bjarne Kildegaurd, "Unlimited Memory: Photography and the Differentimion of Familial
Intimacy." Man and Picture: Papers from the First Internalional Symposium for
Ethnological Pic/Ure Research in Lund J984, cd. Nils-Arvid Bringcus (Stockholm:
Almkvist: 1986) 71.
7Morin 179.