Even though the Parlando Project is about presenting other people’s words,* I sometimes remind myself that I still write poetry and lyrics. Every so often I’ll think of a song, sometimes one I wrote years ago, maybe one that never got a presentable recorded version, and I’ll wonder if I could record it like a regular Parlando Project piece.
“The Drunken Singer” is one of those songs. It’s well over a decade old, predating the Parlando Project altogether. A couple of coincidental things made it come to mind. At another place online that I participate in, there was a recent thread on another older song, one by the extraordinary singer-songwriter Richard Thompson called “God Loves a Drunk.” I love Richard Thompson’s work, but his fans sometimes feel called to warn potential listeners that he can be very dark. Like the British Isles folk music that influenced him, he can produce songs of death and misadventure — but he’ll also go another step further and produce songs of even greater bleakness. “God Loves a Drunk” is one of those.
Early in this Project I told the story of my misapprehension of a folk song of alcoholic abandon “Rye Whiskey.” I had wondered how my teetotaler great-grandfather could have been fond of it. In the process of working with this Project I discovered it was an oft-performed set-piece for the popular “Cowboy Singer” Tex Ritter, who played the song for laughter by imitating a drunken fool while he sang it. Thompson’s drunk song has no plausible laughter, though it does point out something ironic: that inside their degradation, the alcoholic touches on elemental things about the limits of the human condition.
Thompson’s song, and his performance of it, are skilled and intricate as are the many details he uses in it. None-the-less, it reminded me of this song of mine. “The Drunken Singer” uses only three sketchily presented incidents, a less-is-more approach that I often favor when writing lyrics or other poetry.**
A part of the inspiration for writing this song: despite my being in the cold-water army, my voice often produces sounds that too are not proper or correct.
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The second reason “The Drunken Singer” came to mind was that I found myself working this month on a handful of possible songs I could set from poems that referenced singers, and you just heard one of them last post: “The Late Singer” by William Carlos Williams.
So, these are my reasons for inserting this, my own song, into the Project today. You can hear my new recording of “The Drunken Singer” with the player gadget you should see below. If there’s no gadget (some ways of viewing this blog suppress it) you can use this highlighted link that will open its own tab with an audio player.
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*New here? The Parlando Project takes those words, usually literary poetry intended for the page, and combines them with music we compose and perform. Because I almost always use poetry in the public domain, I often use poems from the most recent period that has clearly moved into that status: the early 20th century, the era when Modernism emerged. But I don’t keep to the early Modernists only, as an examination of the more than 700 audio pieces available here since we started eight years ago will demonstrate.
**As to the “Are song lyrics poetry?” question, my summary answer is “They are a kind of poetry.” Do lyricists and literary poets focus on, or stress different things, or work with different expectations? Yes — but the range of what is canonically literary poetry shows those things vary widely within literary poetry too.
This Project knows there’s a tension there between page poetry and songs. I just think it’s fun to work within that tension, to push: to pull, to refer and to connect.
Frank Hudson 