As December begins, I’m going to be taking some time to celebrate and elaborate the roots and concepts of this long-running Parlando Project as we reach our 800th-released audio piece milestone.
For those who are new here, let me restate again what we do: we take various words, mostly literary poetry that was never intended by its authors to be performed, and combine them with music in differing styles. Sometimes the page-words are sung, sometimes they’re spoken or chanted. Sometimes the music will patently match the text, sometimes not. The latter class are some of my favorite pieces: Emily Dickinson as blues singer or psychedelic ranger, Robert Frost with EDM, Longfellow at a beatnik coffee-house, Li Bai with western orchestral instruments, Jean Toomer or John Keats as performed by an indie-folk combo. I expect long-term listeners to scratch their heads at times, though I also fear that some will sample a piece that they don’t much care for and leave off from future listening here.
No one idea or artist inspired this all, but today’s piece is about the farthest back I can recall anything that might have inspired the Parlando Project. I think this happened when I was around age 10.
I grew up in a mid-century Iowa town of 700 folks, and it wasn’t a particularly musical place. There was a small high-school marching band, a handful of children probably had piano lessons of some kind, if only in hopes there’d be someone to play piano in the three Protestant churches in town. The two best musicians in my childhood cohort played trumpet and accordion. The former was surprised to admire Louis Armstrong despite having personally absorbed dismissive racial stereotypes, the other might aspire to Myron Floren level of showpieces on the stomach-Steinway. The same little town might have over-achieved in literature though. It was named by its 19th century town-platter “Stratford,” and its streets were named for British poets and Longfellow — main street being Shakespeare Avenue. If you grew up on a street that was merely numbered, or an avenue named for some animal or geographic feature, such things never had a chance of shaping your worldview. I grew up thinking of Milton or Shakespeare as being a local possibility.
My father sang, mostly in church. My mother thought he had a good voice (“better than Perry Como” she once said) and I recall it having a very nice timbre when I was a child, but there was no piano or other instrument in the house, and he didn’t sing a cappella that I recall. We didn’t have a TV until I was 7 or 8 (and even then it was a chancy fringe-reception, rabbit-eared, used set that would send its display to snow or tumbling whenever it felt like it). There was some kind of radio, for which I’d hurry home from school to listen to the Lone Ranger on, though I can’t recall what the radio looked like. And at least some of the time there was a phonograph. I recall it was one of those that looked a bit like a portable typewriter with a luggage-finished case that could be clasped-closed. It may have been one of my parent’s from their college years. It sat in a little side room off the kitchen at home that we called “the breakfast nook.” And with it was a small cache of records. And here it gets odd — specifically odd — but applicable to the Parlando Project.
I clearly recall four 78-rpm disks, an unexpected set for a Fifties, small, rural-town-in-Iowa record collection. Two were commercial spoken word recordings, the sort of thing that was a viable genre then.** Record one: Robert Frost reading his poetry. My recollection that the featured poem was his “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” but so far I’ve found no Frost recording of that poem to refresh my memory or share here.*** The second was Vachel Lindsay reading from his “The Congo,” which has an insistent, chanting, rhythmic flow. The fact that I can remember them would be clearly meaningful, but to be honest I have to say that I didn’t like either of them. I’m not sure what I expected from poetry that came from poets more recent than those whose names were on my streets, but Lindsay seemed overwrought to me, and even at a young age I might have been put off by the whole white-guy-doing-primitive-African vibe of his poem. And Frost? I’ve often written here that I didn’t care for him until I started to explore things musically that became this Project in the 21st century. Only then did I discover that he was a supple lyric poet — and furthermore, a much more subtle observer of humanity than I had appreciated in my youth.
The fact that I didn’t really dig these two poets didn’t keep me from playing the records. Experiencing them felt exotic then, and I liked that even if I didn’t admire what was engendering that feeling.
The third record didn’t match suit. It was a recording from the 1940s of a song called “Open the Door Richard.” I didn’t know then, but this was an unusual “Novelty Record” piece, charting in versions by as many as five different musicians within one year, 1947. All those musicians were Black, and before it was one of their recordings it apparently was a Black Vaudeville comic number that the musicians spruced up with swinging jive-cat musical settings and choruses. The musical versions all differ in detail while sharing the chorus. Some of them are largely drunk-act comedy,**** while others are more at down-on-one’s luck frustration and focus on the riffing, musical, chorus-hook. From listens today I suspect the recording I listened to back them could have been the Count Basie Orchestra version or (best guess) this one by the Three Flames. I liked that record, though I thought it a little odd, and I probably didn’t fully understand it. If these first three records have a link, that’s it, isn’t it? I enjoyed the strangeness, the difference.
Tortured Poets Department, but my childhood: disks containing a psalm of comfort, a song of misapprehension,. and two early 20th century Modernist American poets.
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The final record was the one I listened to the most. It was not a commercial 78, but a recording, perhaps from a record-yourself booth (or offers like that) which provided the earliest Elvis Presley recordings. It was my father reading “Psalm 23,” the famous psalm of David. The voice was someone in my life, no exotic stranger, but I was totally mesmerized. If no one is more mundane than one’s own parents, this everyday, ordinary person had their voice on a record! And the text, in familiar English translation, is one of the most comforting pieces of poetry in the canon. When I’ve revisited the Psalms periodically as an adult I’m sometimes shocked at violent and authoritarian themes I find weaving in and out of Psalms’ religious rapture — but if “Psalm 23” implies frightful things, it does so to say that they pale in comparison to a connection with a godhead.
Parents sometimes comfort their children, do so by saying “it will be all right, we’re here to protect and care for you.” My parents weren’t much like that in expression however, though by action in life they were being that with much effort. This object, this record, did that, using someone else’s words translated from a Bronze-Age king, poet, and musician.
I think I asked about the “Open the Door Richard” record and the “Psalm 23” record. I can’t recall what my dad said about the Psalm recording, though I wish I did. I have a vague memory that he said the “Open the Door Richard” song was something of an in-joke between his brothers. I didn’t get, or can’t remember the full story, but one of my father’s brothers went by the name Richard (one that became a successful Protestant minister). Another brother was named David, though he never talked to Leonard Cohen about secret chords or sling trajectories.
So there you go, in summary: I had formative exposure to poetry on recordings. One case with my own father’s voice offering comfort; and another, an Afro-American tale of misapprehension. It would be years before I had any idea to do likewise, and decades before I could do something from this early experience regularly in ways that you could hear.
Longish post, but here’s a short musical piece called “Records in Childhood” using a sonnet I wrote this year casting some of that remembering my early experience with recorded words. You can hear it with the audio player below. No player? This highlighted link will open a new page with its own audio player
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*There may have been other records, though it was not any kind of large stack. The fact of memory that these four are the ones I recall testifies to their impact.
**Besides poetry recitations, sermons, and even some secular speeches were released on disk — and spoken-word comedy records were often big general-interest sellers. In a previous post I talked about how vividly I experienced Hal Holbrook’s one-man stage show of Mark Twain Tonight on an LP record in a library in Iowa.
***I did find this professional recording of Frost reading some of his “greatest hits,” and was surprised to hear quiet piano backing was used in a way that could be compared with some Parlando pieces.
It’s possible that my home’s Frost recording was a separated part of a set. 78 RPM records were sometime sold in a bookbinder of page-sleeves holding multiple disks, which is the reason we still call a longer form vinyl LP, CD, or issued-together set of digital files “an album”
****Drunk act comedy goes back to at least Shakespeare’s Falstaff, and in an earlier personal history Parlando piece I found out how my teetotal great-grandfather might have perceived the sometimes brutal alcoholic folk-song “Rye Whiskey” as stoner comedy.
One benefit of having an acquaintance with this largely forgotten song was that when I first heard the Bob Dylan Basement Tapes song “Open the Door, Homer” I knew the reference.
Frank Hudson 
