A Kind of Love Song
By Katherine Sacco
My dad recently texted me a clip of a home video in which my mom and I are putting on a living room performance for an audience of two: him, behind the video camera, and my one-month old brother, lying under a baby play gym on the couch.
“Welcome to our big show tonight,” my mom announces. We both hold toy microphones, my mom’s attached by coiled cable to a maybe-functional plastic boom box. She asks me a series of questions to which I give dubious answers. What’s the name of our band? “Delta Dawn,” I say (actually the name of the song we’re going to sing). What’s my name? “Samantha,” I say (apparently I have chosen the name of my American Girl doll as my stage name). I’m only four years old in the video, so these answers come off as cute, rather than delusional.
After some banter between my parents, my mom and I launch into our big number.
“Delta Dawn” is an early 1970’s hit made famous in back-to-back recordings by Tanya Tucker and Helen Reddy, though I couldn’t tell you which version we were singing in this 1997 home video, and not only because my vocals are interspersed with too many giggles to identify any particular musical style. I knew the song not from either recording, but from hearing my mom sing it to me in the bathtub as I splashed around in sudsy water.
In my recollection, this became our bath time song because our tub had a faucet made by the Delta Faucet Company, imprinted with the company’s name. If not for this incidental word association, it’s not exactly the kind of song one might think to teach a child. The chorus, which I sing more or less accurately in the home video before my dad cuts away to a shot of my baby brother, tells of a forlorn and slightly deranged woman:
Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on?
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?
And did I hear you say he was a-meeting you here today
To take you to his mansion in the sky?
I didn’t think twice about what any of this meant when I was a kid. Later, I thought maybe the woman was suicidal; maybe the “mysterious dark-haired man” described in another verse was supposed to be God. Only now, reading Wikipedia, do I piece together that she’s lovesick for an old flame.
In the video, I cut my mom off as she starts in on the first verse, bringing us instead through few more rounds of the chorus as my brother’s cries cut in more and more loudly. “He’s the background music,” I declare, and keep singing.
As far as love songs go, “Delta Dawn” is a haunting one — not the kind of thing you’d play at a wedding and too troubled to really make it on a playlist of sad breakup songs. The story unfolds in two verses that describe a woman who was jilted by her lover and never recovered, doomed to wander the town like a crazy woman, waiting with her suitcase packed in case he returns.
As it turns out, I’ve misremembered the first verse for the past twenty years, and never learned the second one, all of which might explain why I never quite understood what the song lyrics were about. Even so, I’ve thought of it as a love song all along, albeit with a purer sentiment than the lyrics convey: a love song between that little girl in the home video and her mom, that we’ve kept singing to each other, from near and afar, voices trembling or strong, ever since.
