Song lyrics as a language form
The students in my English as a Second Language (ESL) class will be writing an essay about their “immigrant experience.” I put that in quotation marks because a student is not really an immigrant, but he or she experiences the same culture shocks as an immigrant does, the same homesickness, and the same rebellion against a new culture.
As part of the reading for the essay, I will introduce two songs, Danny Boy, and Deportee.
Danny Boy is the story of an Irish mother/father saying good-bye to a son she/he may never see again. In the days when the Irish were flooding to America, many people were illiterate, and there was no internet, and not even a post office in many of the places were those immigrants ended up. Good-bye might be forever.
Song lyrics: (http://www.ireland-information.com/irishmusic/dannyboy.shtml)
YouTube performance (this is my favorite of many): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=852gverKRPo
Deportee , on the other hand, is a protest song about the callousness with which we treat some immigrants, especially illegal immigrants. Woody Guthrie was an important cultural figure in America who wrote protest songs celebrating ordinary workers. His songs are a staple of the American Songbook.
Song lyrics: (http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Deportee.htm/
My favorite YouTube performance by Arlo Guthrie, the son of the composer, Woody Guthrie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN3HTdndZec
This is an opportunity to focus on the difference between song lyrics and other kinds of poetry. Read the lyrics aloud, then listen to the song. Do the lyrics read as well as they sing? There are often repetitions in songs which do not occur in other kinds of writing, for example.
Exercise: After reviewing the lyrics and listening to the song, have the students write a short (or long) essay comparing their own viewpoints about immigrants to the viewpoints expressed in the songs.
Exercise: For native speakers of a language other than English, a good exercise is to play a performance of the song, perhaps repeating it once or twice, and asking the students to write down the lyrics as they hear them.
Leave a Reply