#NPM2025

Sitting on Top of the World: three songs and one poem lead to a new song

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I woke up to economic tumult around the world this morning after finishing a mix of this song I made from a poem by Carl Sandburg last night. I’d gone back and forth on mixing this simple piece of music. At one point I thought it needed piano. I tried an arpeggiated part. Hmmm….no. I tried a coda with underlying low-register sustained intervals. Nope too. So, no piano. I was going to post the remainder yesterday when I began to wonder if the bass line was mixed too high. I told myself I’d reconsider in the morning and went to sleep.

Awaking, I found the news of international economic fears overlaying the world of our current sustained carelessness and cruelties. Well, I thought, maybe it’s not all that important how perfectly the song is recorded or mixed. It’s time to get this little bit of Carl Sandburg out to our modern world for National Poetry Month.

This Project spends a lot of time in the previous decade to be called The Twenties, a time when all the arts and poetry had to deal with a changing culture that ended with a great falling of commerce. For much of the decade it was written up as a time of fashionable Modernism, easily pilloried as a faddish, brainless rush. The label “The Jazz Age” wasn’t meant as cultured praise. Even Afro-American intellectuals were worried that Jazz was just some fast-tempo frivolity, a soundtrack for licentiousness. Luckily for us, some Black composers and songwriters kept on making their form of Modernism.

From our time, we know the plot arc of that last Twenties. A great worldwide depression began in 1929. Fascism rose in multiple countries. Poets may have started the decade engaged with new, freer verse modes, but by The Thirties they’d be charged with dealing with the IRL world of racial-nationalist authoritarians, widespread economic hardship, and war.

I believe it’s easy to forget what an early and fervent Modernist Carl Sandburg was. He was close to his brother-in-law Edward Steichen, who was thoroughly engaged in the international visual arts Modernist revolution. His poetry helped popularize English language free-verse. His collections were peppered with clean, concise poems as Imagist as any written within that vanguard. It appears to me that he may have written Jazz/Blues literary poetry even before Langston Hughes.* Like some others in his American Modernist cohort, Sandburg had early ties to political economics of a leftist kind. How would he traverse this change in the artistic climate?

He was going to go folksy.

Much of his energy would turn from poetry to a giant biography of Lincoln, who he’d portray as a canny folklore-sage. He would publish a popular landmark book of collected folk songs. He brought his guitar to poetry readings. A Robert Frost may have made much of his farmer neighbors, but his blank-verse eclogues were orchestrated with a more academic formality.**

Sandburg’s long-form poem “Good Morning America”  is a case in point. It’s a civic poem, a stock-taking set of observations of the United States, peppered with folk-wisdom admonishments uttered in Sandburg’s version of contemporary vernacular. I picked out this section of it to use here because I noticed it riffs on a phrase also used in a remarkably durable American folk song: “Sitting on top of the world.”

As a lyric refrain that phrase appears in a song by The Mississippi Sheiks, an Afro-American jug band. As members of the continuum of the folk-process (i.e., appropriating and reusing any good stuff they could grab) these non-Arabian Sheiks stole a harmonic cadence from Tampa Red, who had used it in another oft-covered Blues song: “It Hurts Me Too.”  “Sitting on Top of the World”  quickly integrated itself into American folk music. It became a country and Bluegrass standard, but it could also be done with the force of a Howlin’ Wolf or by a classic British rock power trio like Cream.

It would be a neat package for me to say that Sandburg heard the Mississippi Sheiks and shaped this poem from their music, but the timeline doesn’t work out, though it gives me more connections to mention. Sandburg published “Good Morning America”  in 1928. The Sheiks record of their song was released in 1930. Sheik Walter Vinson says he came up with it while playing a white dance. He and that audience might’ve been familiar with a 1926 hit song sung by Al Jolson which used the same phrase. The Jolson “I’m Sitting on Top of the World”  is a friendly ragtime ditty about a man who cites his tenuous status in the economic prosperity around him as beside the point because he’s about to marry his sweetheart. Vinson on that dancefloor stage is going to fuse Tampa Red’s riff from a song about a singer who confesses empathically that his sweetheart’s troubles trouble him, because “when things go wrong…it hurts me too” with some new lyrics.

We don’t know what lyrics Vinson sang on that first performance. As the song proceeded over the years, new verses were plugged in by various singers, but the Sheiks’ recording we can hear starts off with both economic and romantic losses. Objectively, the singer isn’t presenting a happy life, but still he refrains he has “no worries…because I’m sitting on top of the world.” This is an ambivalent statement. Is it a mantra of positive thinking in the face of misfortune? A call to party on the dance-floor even if the rest of life is hard times? An easily seen-through statement of questionable bravado? Is it even possibly sarcasm, an answer-record dis of the happy sap in Jolson’s song?

Two Songs Sitting on Top of the World

You can hear Jolson sing his version here, and the Mississippi Sheiks’ version here. (click the picture to enlarge)

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In between Jolson’s Roaring Twenties white song using that title and Vinson’s post-Black-Friday Black version, Sandburg wrote his poem, closer to Vinson’s version that would follow. Sandburg’s poem is about national wealth and hegemony, but it wants to say that that’s temporary. All it takes is one mad king blind to any contradiction. So, I sang this part of Sandburg’s poem this month, with music leaning more toward the Mississippi Sheiks. You can hear that version with the audio player below. What, has a circuit-breaker stopped trading in graphical audio players? No, some way of viewing this just won’t show it, so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

Frank Hudsons Sitting on Top of the World

In adapting the 14th section of Sandburg’s long poem, I doubled the number of times “I’m sitting on top of the world” is refrained and re-lineated it from the page to fit the music.

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The audio player for my version:

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*As I read the two of them, Hughes and Sandburg, I often feel an American kinship in their voices.

**The Southern Fugitives took another, if Copperhead, path on Modernist poetry tied to an agrarian tradition in the era between the World Wars. Sandburg would leave the urban center of Chicago, first to Michigan and then to rural North Carolina and a working goat farm in the between Wars era — but he never fell into the reductionism that the “real Americans” are Anglo-Saxon-stock farmers.

If Frost didn’t haul a guitar around like Sandburg, Edwin Ford Piper recounts that between-Wars Frost was willing to offer his own renditions of folk songs at informal poet’s after-party hootenannies.

Northern April

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I wrote down this poem earlier in the year as a good fit for an April National Poetry Month piece. It’s author, Edna St. Vincent Millay, was from Maine, and I write from another northernmost American state, Minnesota. If a southern-born St. Louis boy like T. S. Eliot who went to live his life in temperate England wants to ironically write about April being the cruelest month, dryly riffing on the Middle English of a Chaucer’s pretty “Aprille with his shoures soote” — well, what with all the flowers and pleasant nourishing rain, that kind of puts a climatic brand on the month poetry-wise.

I rise with Millay to contradict: we have birdsong here, but it’s a more desperate, assertive song, not some celebratory strope — because it rained, sleeted, and concludingly snowed a sloppy wet mix all night and afternoon as I worked on completing today’s musical piece, and this morning everything — tree branches, overhead wires, yard fenceposts, garbage cans — had, to the very limits of toppling, piles of sticky snow as high as any booklover’s stack of unread books.

My nature loving wife took a European-born friend on a hike last week and showed the friend skunk-cabbage, a strange red, raw-meat looking early Spring plant that is exothermic — it creates its own heat like some huddled mammal so that it can bake through the snow cover. Nearer to home, indeed right next to the foundation, a small surviving clutch of tulips has sent up green leaves, but no buds yet. Their leaves course with some green antifreeze, as nighttime temps remain consistently below freezing.

Skunk Cabbage - Photo by Heidi Randen 800

“O April, full of blood, full of breath, have pity on us!”

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My wife and I have varied memories of who planted the tulip bulbs. I remember it was my late father, long ago — while she thinks it was her mother more than a decade ago. There are only a few left. Brazen squirrels dig them up, or perhaps they are only perennial in the same sense that we are, bound to rise in many springs, but not forever.*

So, if the theme of this April’s Poetry Month is The Shared World, I certainly felt I was sharing the world within Millay’s poem “Northern April.”   The wind, the resonance of a creek with remaining ice, the just warm enough to be rain/rain. At least for me, in my northern clime, there’s a rich sensuousness in the poem, and enough word-music inherent in it to command me to sing it.

I’ve noticed that I haven’t used my 12-string guitars much this winter. They are a little more stout to play, and I think they show less forgiveness for my less-than-pristine technique, but I tried to plant today’s piece in the furrows dug between my limitations.

My music today makes use of a couple of instruments playing at the edge of their ranges. The bass guitar part is entirely played in the upper octave of the instrument, giving it an unusual sound I found I liked; and for a bit of melodic embellishment, I played an oboe line, again at the upper reaches of the instrument. Why an oboe? I thought of a 20th century band called Oregon who would mix 12-string guitar with reed/woodwind instruments, and I wanted to revisit that set of timbres from the composer/player side instead of from my listener’s memory.

You can hear my performance of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Northern April”  with the audio player gadget many will see below. Has no such gadget sprouted? I offer this alternative, a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I took leave from poetry and music to very briefly look at that issue from gardening knowledge. It appears that the bulbs shoot off other child bulbs, a process hidden in the dark underground in the later, non-flowering, part of the year. If so, appropriate for the idea that we think these spring flowers are from our parents.

She Dreams of Sewing Machines

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I wondered what I’d do for this April’s U.S. National Poetry Month. I’ve usually done something to observe it, though what I do may not be similar to other places. The audio pieces here almost always use literary poetry we combine with original music, so appreciation of poetry is business as usual there. What about writing poetry? I’m not a big fan of overt poetry prompts, instead working from a personal expectation that anything in life or art worth creating a poem over will let you know; and while I write sometimes about the process of creativity, I’m not a creative teacher. I’m also not promoting my own poetry — an honest, necessary task, just not one that I’ve chosen to do much of. Similarly, I’m by present resolution non-commercial with the music I create here. The current music business situation is difficult enough that the least troublesome and most assured way to make nothing from music is to start with, and keep to, the goal of doing exactly that!

So, what to do this April? I’d considered a close-focus theme, or the presentation of the work of a particular poet, but I’ve recently tested my appreciated readers a bit with a long series on the mystery of a musician’s scrapbook that came into my possession decades ago. Enough long- form for a while I think.

Online, I asked for requests, and got one: anti-fascist poetry. I’ve been bending somewhat away from my usual “you can get your complete diet of politics many other places” practice due to my nation’s current situation, which frankly disgusts me in the present and frightens me in its extrapolated expectations; but as a practical matter I almost always use older Public-Domain-status words for the poetry texts I combine with music here. Unlike our current Twenties, the last decade to be called The Twenties (where PD status generally ends) had yet to come upon that brand of authoritarian superiority.*

I found my solution by looking at the materials made by the organizers for this 2025 National Poetry Month. I saw that this year’s theme takes off from a line in a Naomi Shihab Nye poem “Gate A-4”  which offers me a suitable theme for the Parlando Project this April in this country in this year. That line is: “This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.” So, there will be some civic poetry on civic issues. There will also be poems of varied shared experiences. I haven’t completed any translations from other languages recently, but if I don’t get to that this month (and it’s usually a very busy month) I may feature some of my favorite not-originally-in-English poems from my past decade’s work.

2025 National Poetry Month Poster 1080

This year’s poster by Christy Mandin.

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To start off #NPM2025 I’m going to do something that’s not representative of what this Project normally does: from the start we’ve focused here on other poets’ poetry, even though Dave or myself could’ve supplied a great number of song lyrics and poetry to be recast as such. That decade-long primary practice is not followed in today’s audio piece — instead, it’s a sonnet from the Memory Care Series I’ve been writing for several years — some of which have been performed here in draft form. Though I wrote these words, it doesn’t really violate this Project’s maxim: “Other People’s Stories,” because it’s the tale of a daughter with a mother descending deeper into dementia, and of the connections and slow-motion mourning the course of this disease assesses.

Earlier this month I performed Alice Dunbar Nelson’s “I Sit and Sew”  a civic poem about a woman who wished to help the war-distressed and injured. Sewing was a bitter consolation in that poem — but in today’s sonnet, sewing is an image of a different, though still bittersweet, connection. You can hear my performance of “She Dreams of Sewing Machines”  with the audio player gadget below. If you don’t see any such gadget, it’s likely because you’re viewing this blog through a reader that suppresses showing it, and so I offer this highlighted link as an alternative.  It will open a new tab with its own audio player.

Return here throughout April to see what other, varied poetry, music, and performance styles I can complete and add to our shared world, or just use the blog follow feature.

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*Arrogant ignorance, prejudice, persecution, vain greed for glory and gelt — that all existed before the name fascism, and that may still provide some PD poems. The pieces that I have nearer to completion are more about the human experiences that we all share, and by telling of them we by implication speak against callous disregard.