Month: July 2023

William Carlos Williams’ Summer Song

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

One of my favorite Indie rock band names is Yo La Tengo. The name comes from a convention that was formulated decades ago as talented non-English speaking players began appearing in North American baseball teams. “Yo la tengo!” means “I’ve got it!” – a useful term as two or more fielders with their eyes fixed skyward tracking a fly ball might otherwise collide. In such a situation, the most confident player needs to call off the others who also think they might have a chance at making the play.

Today’s piece is by William Carlos Williams, who grew up speaking Spanish. It was published in Williams’ 1917 collection Al Que Quiere!   Wikipedia quotes from a later memoir by Williams where he translates that phrase as “to him that wants it,” a cry that he associates with playing football (AKA soccer). I don’t have access to that memoir, but he expands on that definition to make it sound like it’s an in-game cry meaning “I’m open, I’m confident, I have advantage on the defenders, get the ball to me!”*

Odd to think of WCW as a young athlete. I always picture him in his later years, the time that overlapped my lifetime, as an older man.**  But there is another element of his nature in that cry: if not exactly a poetry ball-hog, he seems to have been a poet who was not ashamed to make claims for his artistic validity. He got the Modernism bug early, and went right on to the business of “Making it new” even before this collection was published. Confidence. Or stubbornness.

William Carlos Williams’ poem “Summer Song”  starts out straightforward, with the Moon still visible just after dawn. If you’d like to follow along, here’s a link to the text.***  WCW is right-off attributing personhood to the Moon. If self-aware, the Moon must know it will soon be washed out by the rising sunlight, but Williams says the Moon is indifferent to that, it goes on smiling, for even if it’s a “wanderer” it also seems to understand that it will come to a new place, a new town, a new day, soon enough.

In the final section I’m a bit less clear at how surreal WCW is going. Let’s presume he’s the poem’s speaker, the man observing this moon in the summer morning. I try to picture the image he portrays. He says he might buy a shirt the color of the Moon (white? gray? silver? ruddy?) and accessorize it with a sky-blue tie. I’m puzzled. Wouldn’t the blue of the sky be the field (the shirt) on which the moon would (whatever color) be the tie in the foreground? Is he purposefully reversing foreground object and background field? Perhaps his intent is to say that the wanderer moon is really bigger than the present blue morning sky?

decalcomania by rene magritte

Painter Rene Magritte reversing field.

.

I’m unsure, but his final line is clear — if he too may be overshadowed — he may wander too, even if fading into invisibility, until his time might come. And here we are, some 106 years later, and I’m singing his words in front of a rock quartet today. You can hear that performance with an audio player you’ll see against the field of this web page. Or not? Well, then this highlighted link will tie you to a new tab which will supply its own audio player.

.

*I’m unable to find any confirmation in a quick search that this is some kind of standard on-field player cry. The Wikipedia excerpt from WCW explaining it also goes on to have him say that “I was there willing to pass the ball if anyone did want it.” So, is “al que queire” the cry of the player who wants the ball — or the cry of someone putting up a long kick in hopes one of their teammates will be there to receive it, a soccer equivalent of an American football “Hail Mary pass?
Again, Willians was like that. He was willing to write and to publish, put himself out there, without the level of attention and praise that some of his Modernist contemporaries received during their lifetimes. Anyone know anything more about this Spanish phrase?

**Also like the band Yo La Tengo, Williams was based in New Jersey.

***Here’s a link to an earlier version of this poem as published in 1916 in Poetry  magazine. As I improvised while singing, unaware of the this alternate version, WCW extended and refrained his ending there.

Sinéad O’Connor has died

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Scrolling news and social media is how I misspend a lot of my time now, since the larger blocks when I can really bare down on artistic work are scarcer and less predictable in my life. Every so often someone famous in the 20th century will start to pop up unexpectedly in news article headings and post streams, a dreadful event. What is it this time, the back of mind thinks, nostalgia or death?

So yesterday it was Sinéad O’Connor that trended. One heading said the tense: “…she was….”

I was a little surprised at the building response, but shouldn’t have been. I have been aware, despite her shortish career in popular music, that her performances had a capacity to deeply touch people. There was a pure dialectic in many of those performances: fierceness and vulnerability simultaneously in an unstable state. When those two things exist at once, like flame and water, it’s dark and warm, bright and reflective, quenched and fueled.

When that combination resonates, it resonates deep with the listener. I myself have only the most inconsistent fierceness. There is an element of self-righteousness taken on as an armor that frightens me, no matter how just the cause, because I have seen the same armor worn on evil as often as good. But then, approaching injustice, as I may do with only questions and pain, seems to equivocate.

There was a pure dialectic in many of those performances: fierceness and vulnerability simultaneously in an unstable state.

My own oddest combination? I am something of a spiritual seeker deeply distrustful of every other pilgrim and certain that any mystical explanation obfuscates reality. This part of me may make me like and unlike O’Connor. As a human being I feel foolish and pretentious discussing any of this, though I hold my nose and type on today.

Yet, O’Connor, with her unstable and uncommon combination, should have taught me the insight that many are sharing in the past day: that there’s a human inside the armor. I knew that — but didn’t know  that well enough. Art may be persistent in showing us that deeper knowing.

Getting back to O’Connor’s performances then, here’s a lesser-known one, of a song that has to be one of the most over-done and over-sung Celtic tunes. Even without any additional context, pay attention to the presenter’s introduction. One could write an essay on its undertones. And then she sings.

.

Bed In Summer

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today’s text was written as a children’s poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. What it notices about the enticing longer days and late sunsets of summer is not limited to children however. I suspect many adults too find it harder to wind down when it’s still light and pleasant out.

Bed In Summer

They say I’m supposed to go to bed, but there’s birds out there, and where’s my phone or my Nintendo?

.

Stevenson published this in 1885 when some things of the earlier 19th century were wearing out. The voice of the child in the poem says they were used to arising from bed by candlelight in winter, and now they are going to bed in the still-daylight of a summer evening. How common was candlelight in a child’s room when this poem was first in print? Gas lighting had given its name to that age, and electric light was soon to become common. The adult Stevenson likely knew of such things, as I read his family business was lighthouse engineering. Perhaps Stevenson was recalling his own childhood, when humble candlelight was the norm? The collection that included this poem, A Childs Garden of Verses,  was still in circulation in my mid-20th century childhood. I guess we young readers just translated the lighting technology, figuring that poems were from olden days when open flames in kids’ rooms weren’t problematic.

One thing Stevenson’s poem might have gained by being aimed at children is that it’s delightfully spare and unfussy. The adult verse of 1885 was often not so, but here there are no classical allusions, no high-flown metaphors, just that memory of candlelight, an evening’s sunlight, some active birds, and footsteps on the street. The poem is not idealized at all, instead it’s simply present in the child’s conundrum.

I performed it with a 12-string acoustic guitar, an instrument I always want to keep around in addition to the more common 6 string guitar. My music is simple and unfussy today, as is fitting for Stevenson’s poem. You can hear it with the audio player you should see below. No player? Some ways of viewing this won’t show it, but this backup highlighted link will open a new tab with an audio player then.

.

.

Helen Hunt Jackson’s “July”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

I can’t help it — actually I do  try to help it, but sometimes I can’t. I was in a movie with my wife, the polemical Emily Dickinson biopic Wild Nights with Emily,*  and they introduced Thomas W. Higginson as this nincompoop who couldn’t discern the poetic genius of Dickinson compared to the kind of poetry he preferred. For an example of the latter, the filmmakers briefly gave us Helen Hunt Jackson as a prim, forgettable, mediocrity.

I nudged my wife, “Jackson was better than that” I murmured.

This is what happens when you’re married to someone who likes to look in the odd, unswept-out corners of poetry’s storage shed. Jackson was a childhood classmate of Emily Dickinson. Jackson left for marriage to a brilliant engineer, who Emily then met and sorta-kinda-maybe had a crush on. Jackson’s husband was killed in an explosion working on a secret torpedo weapon during the Civil War, and widow-Jackson went on to a substantial literary career of her own with poems, novels, and early activism for Native American rights.

Helen Hunt Jackson seated

mid-19th century photographs often conceal their subject’s personality, which makes this one of Helen Hunt Jackson a bit special I think.

.

No, she’s not as original as Emily Dickinson, but the congress of poets who could claim that level is small even now. She understood Dickenson’s worth enough to plead with her childhood friend to publish — and though it appeared anonymously, she did include the only Dickinson poem to be published between hard-covers during Emily’s lifetime within an international anthology she produced.

One part of Jackson’s poetry that can be found online is a sonnet series on the months of the year. A couple of years ago I presented her August sonnet, and this summer I’m ready to give you her July sonnet.

Like Dickinson, these poems include a close examination of nature, though I don’t sense here the notes of humor often found in Dickinson’s nature. In Jackson’s July example, the flowers mentioned are in danger from heat and drought, something that seems contemporary in my own midwestern summer. Only the poem’s water lily seems immune from the danger.

You can hear my musical performance of Helen Hunt Jackson’s “July”  with the audio player gadget below. Don’t see the player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with a player for you. Want to see the text of the poem? Here’s a link to that too.

.

*Released between the more scrupulous A Quiet Passion  and the joyously anachronistic Apple TV series Dickinson, Wild Nights with Emily  was the less fully realized, perhaps due to a lower budget. Its broad characterizations were intended in the service of satiric exaggeration. The film’s central point is to portray the often-suspected erotic bond between Dickinson and another childhood friend and confidant, Susan Gilbert.

A poet, Joseph Fasano, has a music recording, and he barely let’s you know about it.

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

My Project says it’s about where music and words meet, yet I’m still surprised and gratified when I encounter literary poets whose connection to music is significant. Most poets enjoy music — hell, most people  do. And the arts of poetry and music have long been siblings. Who can count how many poems have the word “song” in their titles, or how many poems speak of birds or unfeathered human musicians making music? Yet the number of poets who have publicly taken to composing and performing music is limited.

One might think that songs with words, the music most listeners prefer, would be already halfway accomplished by any good poet. In practice, that’s not always the case. A great deal of literary poetry doesn’t work like a song that captures listeners in real-time once in and through their ears.

What you say: “You do this all the time, you take literary poetry and you combine it with music!”  Yes, but I’m choosing what poetry to use, rejecting much more than I even attempt to compose music for. And while I appreciate the audience this project has developed for your open-mindedness and tolerant ears, by Internet standards my Parlando musical pieces have a small audience. Part of that is my voice, which has its limits, and my reach-exceeds-my-grasp musicianship — part of it too may be that I’m no one’s young, good-looking, begging-to-be-discovered talent.

Last time I said I’d leave a fourth example of someone combining poetry with music that I’ve discovered recently for a future post. That one is poet, novelist, teacher and promoter of poetry* Joseph Fasano. In the midst of his very active social media presence this summer, Fasano let it (rather casually) drop that he had publicly released an album of songs, The Wind That Knows the Way.

Fasano is an effective promoter of his own work on Twitter, and he’s amassed (by PoetryTwitter** standards) a sizeable number, thousands, of followers. “Followers” in the social media world is something of a hollow stat. Many in the count are proforma or “polite” followers mutually responding to follows from others, and then there are bots and insubstantial accounts seeking merely to draw attention to their causes & businesses. But when Fasano posts a poem of his or a series of notices about his latest novel, he gets (by literary standards, or mine, whatever I am) lots of eyeballs, re-tweets, and at least a bit of replies and response. By PoetryTwitter standards, people are paying attention to him.

To my knowledge, he’s not followed up to that single notice about his album of songs. For someone showing such effective and continuous effort to promote the other things he’s doing, that’s odd. Even though getting ear-time from me for musical work is tough — composing, recording, mixing the Parlando Project pieces take away from those opportunities — I listened to the album (available on Apple Music, Spotify, and likely some other current music streaming services) within a few days of the announcement.

It’s good, and a particular surprising adds to that goodness. I guess I expected a typical modern musical production — either pop in pretense or a rougher indie one. When someone tells me they have a recording these days, that’s what I’ll most often hear. Instead, the album’s sonic approach is a remarkable duplication of an early 1960s Folkways, Sing Out, folk-venue-appearing guitarist-singer with original songs record. In arrangements and general vibe, it’s like the early records of Gordon Lightfoot, Tim Buckley, Jackson C. Frank, or Eric Anderson.  For musical particularists, let me add I’m not talking about post 1965 records.  At times Fasano’s voice and musical approach reminds me of a less gruff Tim Hardin, but Hardin’s most popular later ‘60s records used highly skilled bandmates to fill out his sound. The Wind Knows the Way is just Fasano and his acoustic guitar, but like the early ‘60s records I’m referring to, his voice is pleasant and his music appealing, while his lyrics express more emotional complexity and range than the average pop song.

Here’s the title song from Fasano’s album for those that don’t use Apple Music, Spotify, et al.

.

I don’t know who engineered this recording, but the recording is technically well done too. My favorite cuts on the album are “In My Time,” “The Trouble,”  and “The Wind and the Rain.”  I’m an outsider to Fasano’s creative process, but it appears to me that he already has a “song lyric” mode that both borrows from and differs from his page poetry. These songs don’t come at you with a strange torrent of unusual metaphors with hermetic connections between them. Song lyrics forgive, even arguably benefit, from less originality in tropes, from commonly returned to, simple, elemental words. Many literary poets have trained themselves to avoid those things — and so the Parlando Project sometimes asks the listener to allow more weird words and similes that one hears with most songs. Fasano seems to know that as a songwriter he can write differently for song.

I assume he wrote the music, though the modern streaming services and his sparce posting about the record make this only an assumption. His melodies are fine, not showy, catchy and very singable. Harmonically he shows some variety in this set of songs, but he’s not from the Joni Mitchell or Nick Drake school of advanced guitar composition. This isn’t a pioneering, challenging, or world-changing record, but then too our contemporary world doesn’t have many records like this anymore: a voice, a guitar, and tuneful well-written songs that don’t require anything more than that.

In summary if you are a fan of those early ‘60s records (as I am) or if you would like to hear an intelligent record that usefully uses simplicity and a direct unadorned presentation, there’s a good chance you might like Joseph Fasano’s “The Wind That Knows the Way.”

.

*Fasano’s “promoter of poetry” element appeals to me. I’m forming a number of things I’d like to say about his efforts in that area, and if time and fate allow me, there’s maybe yet one more Joseph Fasano post to come this summer.

**Twitter, its faults and its problematic owner, is a current topic that’s launched a thousand takes, which I won’t add to today. I will say that PoetryTwitter is not overly large, but there are interesting people there. Part of what draws me to poetry is that I’m a naturally long-winded, run-on-story kind of person, and poetry’s compression lets me pare that back. The off-the-cuff, short-answer nature of Twitter lets me exercise the same muscle, and it fits my current fate of having few assured blocks of time to compose more complicated music or thoughts.

Four people doing something like what the Parlando Project does

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

You might know this pedant’s complaint: something can’t be “more unique” — because the word unique means the only, singular. If so, what the Parlando Project does then is quasi-unique. I well know that setting literary poems to music isn’t unprecedented, but the way I do it is  a smaller grouping. For reasons (some practical) I’ve taken to using my rough and not always reliable singing voice more often,* and more pieces have simpler arrangements featuring acoustic guitar. In the past couple of months I’ve become aware of four other people, singers and guitarists not totally unlike myself, who have being doing things related to this presentation of music combined with literary poetry.

I ran into Evan Gordon on a guitar-related online forum this year where he introduced himself as working on combining poems with acoustic guitar-centered music, including his version of a passage from Jack Kerouac that I too admire, and which supplied the name to his collection “The Long Long Skies Over New Jersey,”  a short album released this year. Kerouac’s words are there along with Houseman and Yeats and a couple of covers of well-known songs. I rather like Gordon’s poetry settings, and though there’s only three songs taken from literature, the range of the poetic sources he chose to set echoes what this Project does. So, you might well like this too. My favorite in this collection is his setting of Yeats’ “When You Are Old,”  a poem which I too have done.  I (and some other listeners) like my expression of that poem, but Gordon’s is exquisite. You can find Evan Gordon’s “The Long Long Skies Over New Jersey”  on streaming services such as Spotify or Apple Music.

Andrew Merritt introduced himself to me via a comment here at this blog regarding my versions of the classical Chinese Tang Dynasty poets, telling us he’s looked to them for inspiration too. Merritt has a collection that he calls “Twang Dynasty”  where he combines influences from Tang poems with classic American country music. Does that seem far-fetched to you? Well, I can imagine a translated scroll stroked in traditional Chinese calligraphy of Hank Williams lyrics sitting beside those of the Tang classical masters, so I like Merritt’s imagination. His lead-off cut, “Drinking with the Moon”  is Merritt’s version of a Li Bai poem I performed here.  You can hear his work at this link.

In a recent post on Carl Sandburg I tried to make the case that this somewhat deemphasized Modernist poet’s footpaths can be seen all over music in folk and Americana genres. I wrote that Sandburg blazed a path and model for Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan; and as an early American folk music revivalist, he personally allowed a connection between folk songs presented in the raw (not as motifs in fuller orchestrations) with progressive/populist politics and high poetic culture. Sandburg did this not only by performing those songs publicly at his free-verse poetry readings (with a voice and level of guitar skills roughly like my own, not as a concert artiste) but by publishing a pioneering general anthology of American folk song purposely mashed together from around our whole immigrant country and its various sub-cultures with his 1927 The American Songbag.

One problem with The American Songbag  as published is that it appears to be aimed at the musically literate owners of parlor pianos more than guitarists, many of whom are allergic to sheet music.**  So it was with great joy that I heard just this month of a project undertaken during the heights of the Covid pandemic by Stephen Griffith. He sought to record the entire Songbag,  all 315 songs, and to present them, as Sandburg might have sung them himself with just simple voice and acoustic guitar. I eagerly went to his web site to thank him last week, only to find that it had fallen off the web. Given his apparent age in the videos, I hope Griffith is well and still with us, that he’s perhaps just engaged with other things. Luckily, his performances are still available on YouTube at this link — and their unadorned presentation is a treasure chest. Some of the songs in Sandburg’s Songbag  became folk music “standards,” but the versions Sandburg and his collaborators collected ending in 1927 sometimes differ, not just in the folk-process of a few floating or varied verses and lines, but occasionally in entire melodies. I’ve listened to a lot of folk revivalist music over the years, but even though I haven’t made it through all of Griffith’s Songbag  versions, some of the songs I’ve heard there, taken from Sanburg’s anthology, seem new to me. Anyone interested in The Old Weird America owes Stephen Griffith a debt of thanks (well, and Sandburg too).

There’s a fourth example I want to draw your attention to: Joseph Fasano, a man who is doing some other things while also being a poetry-aware person wielding an acoustic guitar. Because of that range of things he’s doing, I’m going to leave him for an additional post to follow.

Here’s one of Giffith’s Songbag performances, a variation of a song I discussed here that my great-grandfather liked in this post.

.

*Earlier in the Project I was more likely to use spoken or chanted vocals. I still do this sometimes, depending on the text and what I feel is most effective.

**There are piano lead-sheets for the songs in The American Songbag, but no guitar chords or parts. Many/most folk music associated guitarists and singers learned their repertoire “by ear” from hearing others sing the songs, and those who wanted to notate guitar parts beyond chord sheets were likely to use guitar tablature not treble staff notation. There’s an old joke regarding guitarists as musicians: “Q: How do you make an electric guitarist turn down? A: Put sheet music in front of them.”

While technically possible in a narrow sense, it would have been an impractical task to try to present all 315 American Songbag songs as recordings in 1927. Decades later, after WWII, record collectors created anthology record albums such as the Folkways, Library of Congress, or Harry Smith’s LPs which “taught” old folk songs to new, young players. Sandburg’s existing work helped make this later work interesting — but those recording anthologies relied on dubs from 78 RPM records made a decade or so later than the era Sandburg and his collaborators were working in collecting songs from unrecorded singers.

All These Wild Geese Poems – and how one of my music pieces migrates

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

The route today’s musical composition took to existence was almost comically round-about. I added a new virtual instrument (VI)* drum set this week, one with a drier, more retro sound. I decided I should try it out. I grabbed an acoustic guitar track I’d recorded weeks ago, but not used for anything, and went to creating a simple drum track using the new kit’s sounds to see how they meshed.

It sounded pretty good, but that track-of-convenience guitar part had bleed from other stuff into the acoustic guitar mic, and so I used a tool I have that extracts a chord progression from an audio file, and then had that extracted progression played with a VI piano.

That cleaned things up enough that I figured I should make a little instrumental piece with this. Why not complete a trio and play some bass? Just over my shoulder in my little bedroom-now-home-office sits a Squier fretless Jazz bass.** I love its sound, but my old fingers need to be in good shape to get a clean sound out of it. Yesterday, my fingers were feeling strong, so that’s what I grabbed. I found a bass motif and played it in my best attempt to fit into the “pocket” of the drum groove.

A great musician or a more meticulous recordist might have perfected this, but something in me accepts a certain looseness and imperfection. Even if I’m recording one track at a time in one-man-band mode I’m often looking to get that spontaneous live-take feel, and my resulting trio had that I thought.

At this point my little house was filled with a half-dozen late-stage teenagers, all looking to have an autonomous time playing video games and watching YouTube. I holed up in my little office to let them be young. Might as well look to add another VI to my trio — if nothing else, to pass the time. The computer I work with virtual instruments on doesn’t have speakers, only headphones. Returning to the world between the cups of the headphones, I wouldn’t be bothering them.

What could be that another instrument? I decided to try cello. What articulation should I choose? My cello VI has a dozen or so articulations to choose from: different bowing techniques, styles for flowing legato or choppy stabs. I auditioned a few, and found two finalists I liked with the existing trio. Two roads diverged within a wood. Which one to take? I decided I’d use both  of the finalists.

I set the cello part to echo the keyboard part, a simple choice. I often enjoy simplicity in music, and my use of orchestra instruments often reflects that. I’ve taken to calling some of my pieces “Punk Orchestral” for this reason. Hey, ho, let’s go!

It was 11 PM by the time I finished the instrumental. The teenagers decided to decamp for a Perkins restaurant*** in a late-night post-modern way. Listening to the rough mix of the trio with the cello section I now thought this is good enough for a Parlando Project piece — I just need to find a poem for the words. I didn’t have much collected for possible imminent use. I had some Emily Dickinsons, but I fear I’m doing too much of Dickinson lately, as much as I like the results. I tried a Robinson Jeffers, but the mood of the poem didn’t match the jauntiness of the music’s groove. Then I tried a short poem I’d drafted in June, inspired by watching waterfowl in my city’s urban parks, lakes, and ponds. That fit!

All These WIld Geese Poems text

The poem that became today’s lyric

.

I revised the music slightly to use with these words. Guided by the instrumental’s chords and using my imperfect voice, I devised an expeditious melody. I tried a couple of takes singing the words, and found that my poem sung better with some mild editing of its text. It was around midnight when I tracked the final vocal take you can hear today before going to bed. It was just after that final tracking that a comic turn happened. The drum track, the new VI sound I started with, that, which had inspired the course of this composition, stopped playing, muted itself. A bug perhaps? But in the early AM hours I decided it sounds better without the drums, as the other instruments now have absorbed the groove conception I started with within themselves.

Today I mixed the resulting piece “All These Wild Geese Poems.”   Mixing involves placing the instruments within the soundfield in stereo width and volume depth, and using other audio processing on their dynamic envelopes and frequency ranges. I then created the final mix using some computer tools to adhere to current streaming services loudness levels, and uploaded it to the service that shares my audio to play here and on the podcast platforms of Google, Apple, etc.

A Goose as Ratso Rizzo 600

You, poet, you’re not much of a goose, or much of a Yeats either, so get out of my way!

.

“All These Wild Geese Poems”  takes off from the many romantic poems about geese, cranes, swans and such large waterfowl. The urban geese I meet in my city nature are instead cantankerous beasts, and I thought our contemporary poems often take a similar stance, no pristine “Wild Swans at Coole”  musings for these birds — more at the famous Dustin Hoffman Midnight Cowboy  “I’m walkin’ here!” self-involved swagger with a limp. You can hear the performance with an audio player below if you see that, or with this alternative link that will open a new tab with an audio player.

.

*Virtual Instruments are precisely recorded sounds of the various notes and timbres of a physical instrument. Either by using compositional scoring, or the computer equivalents of that; or by playing the notes with a MIDI controller equipped keyboard or guitar, one can make reasonably convincing performances of instruments that one cannot play or afford in real life.

**I play interesting but relatively inexpensive guitars. Squier is an entry-level brand devised by Fender to sell low-cost versions of their famous instruments. Back in the 20th century any aspiring player found with a Squier was considered non-serious. “Real musicians” used “pro instruments” — but in the past decade or so the quality of the better Squier instruments has increased substantially.

***Perkins restaurants are like a Denny’s. Big menus with lots of senior-citizen specials and tastes —but open early and late for the time-expanding young person.

Almost Independence Day

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Like many days recently with this Project, I have been thrashing about looking for time to find an inspiration for a new audio piece, and some inspiration to spend that time. This weekend I found one sliver of inspiration in musical memory, and then yesterday, I found an Independence Day piece so monumental that I had to figure out how to grasp it inside music.

The sliver? I recalled a song, or rather just a line, a refrain from a song, from my younger years. That refrain was also the song’s title, and the title of today’s piece, but by itself it was insufficient. “Almost Independence Day”  is a song that closes an early 1970s album by Van Morrison. It’s a peculiar song,* a lengthy (10-minute) two-chord jam with largely mundane lyrics that earns it’s interest — if it does — by the singer’s investment in presenting the ordinary, and by the unusual combination of instruments it uses to accompany itself. Morrison’s “Almost Independence Day”  has drums, bass, two guitars, and keyboards. But the bass is an upright Jazz-sounding bass, allowed a high place in the mix at times, and one of the guitars is a 12-string guitar prominent in the song’s texture. And the keyboards? The keyboardist on the cut is Mark Naftalin, the son of a former mayor of my city. Naftalin was the keyboard player in the classic Butterfield Blues Band lineup, a tough sounding, gritty integrated band that played post WWII Chicago Blues — but on this song, the most prominent keyboard part is a low electronic synthesizer, reportedly played on one of those made by American synth pioneer Robert Moog. Wikipedia thinks it’s one of the earliest uses of that instrument on a “rock” record.

I had only remembered that song’s refrain — but even on re-listening to it, I found little besides the refrain and the song’s odd musical texture that I thought I could use.

Then early yesterday morning I thought of another, more substantial, set of words for Independence Day: a speech given in 1852 by Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”   I’ve read it silently before, and I read it silently again. It’s a 19th century oration, the kind of lengthy and precisely enunciated rhetoric that would seem archaic to modern ears and attention spans.** Yet, it’s worth reading because it’s a unstinting analysis of American Ideals (worthy), acknowledging of American scientific and civic achievements (evidence of the possibility of unimaginable change), and yet clear and precise on great failures in extending its best to all Americans. As the title given to the speech makes clear, Douglass spoke at a time when chattel slavery was a large part of our country, when he himself had been enslaved, when a reticent and resistant national government had (through the Fugitive Slave Act) made clear that the whole nation was to support and maintain this evil.

Young Frederick Douglass

Does it seem odd that I’m linking Douglass with a Celtic song? Here’s an article about Douglass’ link to Ireland.

.

I assume we are all in agreement on that evil, on that horrendous disconnect.***  But continue: Douglass’ speech still speaks to us today if we can translate a bit from its old-style oratory. Doing so, it’s a forceful reminder on this holiday that American ideals, such as the things stated in our historic Declaration on the first Independence Day, aren’t an award citation — they are a to-do list. The work of our founding, the work of emancipation, the work of fulfillment of our ideals, is on-going. So, if we are clear in retrospect about the acceptance and legal enforcement of slavery, that’s only a beginning lesson. We need to be as unstinting in asking where we are today out of step from our best principles and practices.

American ideals, such as the things stated in our historic Declaration on the first Independence Day, aren’t an award citation — they are a to-do list.

In devising a way to use Douglass’ speech in our short musical format, I decided to take a short part of it, a litany of assertions made in 1852, and make them an enduring set of questions to ask ourselves (or for any nation to ask itself) about that disconnect now and in the future. Douglass’ recast litany starts at about 1:20 in the audio piece, and the other words are mine, though I’m seeking in them to convey Douglass’ insights.

So yesterday, in an hour or two that I had available after finding my inspiration, I worked to perform Douglass’ litany of questions, and still was able to finish with a couple of lines from an Irishman’s song. Why was Van Morrison singing about almost  Independence Day? Perhaps, it was only July 3rd, and he was noticing, as an immigrant, the expectations of this American holiday. But maybe too, this white man who sang “they can’t stop us on the road to freedom” was thinking that we are always, should be always, like those men in granite who declared our Independence two days before July 4th, looking forward to Independence Day, not remembering it.

You can hear my musical performance of this recast portion of Frederick Douglass’ speech with the audio player below. No player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with an audio player.

.

*Peculiar and a Van Morrison record is a tautology.

**Consider this: for all its elaborate speech, it’s shorter than the usual modern podcast length, and spends less of its time with repetitive familiarities and co-host back-slapping. Have our attention spans really gotten shorter, or is it the density of 19th century speeches like Douglass’ that wears out our attention?

***Well, there are still some neo-Confederates out there who will tell us it was a benign sort of thing, unremarkable really, and so long ago that we need not think about it — and coincidently, we should not think or teach about this example, and so setting out laws or best practices against that.