Bill Monroe and the Monroe Brothers’
When listening to “By the Bank of the Ohio” by Bill Monroe and the Monroe Brothers’ I realized that at the beginning of the song the lyrics seem to be expressed somewhat accordingly to the melody. By this I mean that although the melody was still more cheerful than the topic of the song, the melody at the beginning of the song is slower than at the middle and end of the song and when we look at the lyrics we can see that at the beginning the lyrics are not bad at all, it isn’t until we hit the part after the chorus that we realize the darkness in the lyrics and at this time the tempo of the melody seems to me, to speed up. Another thing I realized was that the song’s melody didn’t really seem to go with the lyrics. If one was to pay attention to the way the song sounded and completely ignored the lyrics, I think we would think this song was about something happy or at least not as dark as what the song is really about. This coincides with our discussion in class about how in folk music the song’s melody is very different from the song’s lyrics or message. For example, the song we heard in class, “Sun and Moon,” had a very upbeat melody but they lyrics were very dark, just as in “By the Banks.”