"Elk River Blues" - Why Does Sad Music Feel Good?

Plus TAB for clawhammer and 3 finger banjo

One of the tracks on my second “Chillgrass” banjo album is the fiddle tune “Elk River Blues”. Here’s the version from the album:

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If you want to skip my neuro-philosophical musings about the tune and skip straight to the tab, then just scroll to the bottom. If musings are your thing (right on!), then keep on reading!

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The Origin Story for “Elk River Blues”

Unlike most of the fiddle tunes that enjoy widespread circulation in old-time music circles, we happen to know both who wrote this one and why.

In this case, the composer was West Virginia fiddler Ernie Carpenter (click here to listen to him playing it).

Carpenter grew up near the Elk River in Braxton Co., West Virginia. He witnessed the planning and construction of the Sutton Dam by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the river during the 1950s and 1960s.

That work resulted in the flooding of his boyhood home and the surrounding area, and that loss is what ultimately led him to write the tune.

Here he is explaining the tune’s origin story:

I was the last person out of there. I went ahead then and tore the old place down and brought it up here. Part of it’s in this house…I was sittin’ here one day, an’ I had the blues. I reckon as bad as anybody could, thinkin’ about my old homeplace up on the Elk River. I started sawin’ on the fiddle an’ that’s what I came up with.

“Elk River Blues” was his way of processing feelings of profound loss and longing. And those emotions come through loud and clear. You can feel the pain. Which I think in no small measure explains why so many people like it.

The question is…why?

Why do we voluntarily play and listen to music that makes us feel this way? Over and over again.

After all, the goal of life is the pursuit of happiness, right?

The Paradox of Pleasurable Sadness

These sorts of contradictions are a gold mine for understanding ourselves.

Because what they often reflect is not a true contradiction, but a misunderstanding. They suggest that we don’t know ourselves as well as we think.

In this case, the misunderstanding centers around our own feelings, what they’re for, and how we categorize them. In trying to resolve the contradiction, we deepen our understanding of ourselves.

In Portuguese, there’s a word that refers to the feeling we get from a tune like “Elk River Blues”: saudade.

Saudade is a state of pleasurable sadness, often associated with nostalgic longing.

It’s the ache you feel listening to a certain song from your past, or remembering a place you can never return to, or thinking about who you were at another time in your life.

Saudade is an integral part of Portuguese culture (especially if their tour guides are to be believed!). There’s even an entire genre of music, Fado, that’s dedicated to making you feel this way. It also permeates popular music from the late 1970s and early 80s, in my view (I’m looking at you, Alan Parsons).

The closest we can get to the meaning of saudade in English are phrases like “sweet melancholy” or “bittersweet longing.” In these terms, there’s an acknowledgement of a flavor of sadness that feels good.

But how? What’s going on here?

Why We Listen To Music That Hurts

Psychologists have put forth several theories to explain the phenomenon of pleasurable sadness, including:

• Safe exploration - We’re drawn to melancholy in controlled contexts so that we can feel profound emotions without real threat. Like watching a horror or war movie, we can explore scary things and feelings while remaining fundamentally secure. Music here is like emotional training wheels.

• Meaning making - Bittersweet emotions make us feel that our lives have significance. The ache of saudade signals that something in our life was meaningful enough to miss. The reflection that it triggers helps us place those events into our life story.

• Tribal cohesion - Longing for the past or for absent loved ones may have kept our ancestors bonded to their social groups and motivated to maintain relationships across distance. Natural selection wired in the capacity for saudade because it kept families and communities connected.

• Emotional healing - When we recall a painful memory, it becomes temporarily malleable. Revisiting that memory in a safe, soothing context can update the emotional charge attached to it. The memory gets “re-saved” with less intensity or new associations so that it’s less traumatic.

These are all plausible, and of course they aren’t mutually exclusive. There may be truth in all of them.

Your Brain on Saudade

Another way to figure out what’s going on is to stick a brain inside a scanner while it’s experiencing these feelings.

What do you see when you do that?

Quite a lot, as it turns out! When you listen to music that moves you deeply, it activates distributed networks across your entire brain. Areas associated with a wide range of functions.

Specifically, researchers observe activity in the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens (your brain’s pleasure and reward system), the amygdala and limbic structures (raw emotional processing), the hippocampus (autobiographical memory), the medial prefrontal cortex (self-referential thinking and meaning-making), and even motor areas despite your sitting still.

These disparate systems don’t normally fire together like this in the course of everyday life. The ability to elicit such widespread cortical activity is but one of the many things that makes music so unique and wondrous.

But what does all that activity indicate about what’s happening in the brain? We can’t know for sure, but we can make some educated speculations.

The Awe Connection

In aggregate, this pattern of brain activation resembles what’s observed during experiences of awe (which means that music is literally awesome…but you already knew that).

There’s a growing body of research around the phenomenon of awe. It’s a distinct and complex emotion, and one we find intensely pleasurable.

Awe is typically triggered by scenarios where we appreciate vastness. Of time, of space. Where our focus shifts far beyond ourselves.

That outward shift in attention often provides a welcome change for those of us who, whether we want to or not, spend much of our time focused inward. Our sense of self melts into an experience of pure wonder, sometimes overwhelm, smallness, and transcendence.

But what’s especially intriguing is that the data suggests that, when we’re listening to emotionally charged music, the self remains. That’s because the default mode network (DMN) tends to become more active during emotional music, and the DMN is strongly associated with states of mind-wandering and self-reflection. DMN activation is the neural signature of our attention directed inward.

In short, we’re seeing brain activity that’s associated with both a sense of awe and of self-reflection. We’re simultaneously experiencing a sense of something grand beyond ourselves while still maintaining a sense of self. As if we’re a part of that vastness.

It’s as if we aren’t losing ourselves, but grounding the self in something bigger. Or perhaps redefining our concept of self altogether.

Deep Belonging

Why might we enjoy that feeling so much?

We don’t like feeling isolated. We don’t like feeling separate. These are intensely negative emotions with deep evolutionary roots.

Social isolation activates the same brain regions as physical pain, like the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula. To our brains, isolation is a major threat to survival because, for our evolutionary ancestors, it was. The pain of isolation is our brain saying “find some friends fast or you’re toast.”

Yet the concept of self naturally invites in a feeling of separateness. It’s baked into the standard definition. There is us, and there is the world that’s separate from us.

But we are, of course, of the world and fully integrated into it. Our self concept is a useful fiction created by our brain.

We might be able to appreciate the illusion of separateness intellectually, but feeling the connection is another story.

And maybe that’s what’s happening when we experience saudade. Maybe that’s what the imaging data is showing us. It’s showing us experiencing deep connection.

That would explain why we enjoy it so much. Because if isolation is one of the most negative feelings we can experience, an intense belonging to anything and everything should be one of the best.

In that case, we don’t pursue saudade despite the pain, but because it’s one of our most reliable paths out of isolation. Music becomes a portal from separation to belonging.

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And now, for those of you who’d like to use your banjo to evoke a bit of saudade, here’s how to play it:

Banjo Tabs and Audio Demos for “Elk River Blues”

Click below to download the lead sheet and tabs for “Elk River Blues.”

Elk River Blues Tabs

189KB ∙ PDF file

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“Elk River Blues”: Lead Sheet

Here is the lead sheet for “Elk River Blues.” This is the tune stripped down to its basic blueprint of melody and chords so that you can embellish as you see fit!

“Elk River Blues”: Clawhammer Version

Here’s one way to take that basic blueprint and transform it into clawhammer banjo:

And here’s what that clawhammer version looks like in tab:

“Elk River Blues”: 3 Finger Version

Here’s one way to take that basic blueprint and transform it into 3 finger banjo:

And here’s what that 3 finger version looks like in tab: