Richard Thompson

The Highwayman

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I’m continuing with my examination of a pair of 1920s poetry anthologies aimed at children: 1922’s The Girls Book of Verse  and the following 1923 The Boys Book of Verse.   Since you’re getting so much of me this month, you may welcome a short break from my singing voice today. In its place, you’ll get the voice and guitar of a singer-songwriter from The Sixties: Phil Ochs.

Despite its 18th century setting, Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman”  wasn’t all that old a poem when the anthologist chose it for one of our pair of books. It was first published in 1906. As I write a bit more about the poem, and give you this link to the full text of it, you may choose to play along with the little game I’ve been suggesting as we look at this set of gendered poetry books: was this poem in the girls or the boys volume? The answer is below.

The poem is a highly romantic though tragic tale of a mysterious but altogether gentlemanly armed robber and his devoted landlord’s-daughter sweetheart. I’m unread in modern romance fiction for young adults, but the general characterization there strikes me as surviving into the present day in such genre novels. I’ll also say that I don’t know how many current young adult novels deal in deaths of the main characters, particularly violent deaths with a strong overtone of chosen death. I knew this poem as a mid-century child, and loved its rush of alliterative language, but I’d suspect that modern American sensibilities might find it’s death-wish problematic for younger readers. “The Highwayman”  seems to have retained some general esteem in Great Britain at least through the end of the 20th century when it placed 15th in a 1995 survey of that nation’s favorite poems. One other late 20th century piece of evidence: a favorite singer-songwriter of mine, Richard Thompson, wrote a somewhat analogous death-of-a-romantic-robber narrative into one of his best-loved songs: “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”  which was released in 1991 and is an obligatory part of his performances to this day.*

Speaking of death wishes, guitarists who hear Thompson play may be tempted to self-harm.

.

Roughly midway between our anthology of children’s verse and Thompson’s song, American Phil Ochs set Noyes’ poem as a song he’d accompany with only his acoustic guitar. Ochs had made his way to the East Coast scene during the Cold War “Folk Scare” where he made his specialty the topical song. As one of the “sons of Pete Seeger” then, Ochs’ songs often commented on social issues and expressed left-wing viewpoints, and a good case can be made that Ochs was the purest expression of that. Yet, it was just such a summary that eventually would stunt his continuing reputation. His compatriot Bob Dylan could write songs like “Oxford Town”  or “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” that overlap with the kind of songs that Ochs was writing at the same time — but alongside his advantages of untouchable charisma, Dylan had a knack for writing more abstract songs with a longer shelf-life, even early on.

Ochs did work on developing other modes of his songwriting. Near the end of his active recording career he demonstrated some achievements there — but The Seventies, that decade that took Americans from Nixon to Reagan, troubled Ochs greatly and made is New Frontier persona seem yesterday’s papers. The endgame of Phil Ochs is as tragic a story as “The Highwayman,”  but the details aren’t ballad material, and they are everything but romantic.

But if I step back to 1964, I’d guess that Ochs recording Noyes poem was a way for him to buffer his branding as just a topical lefty songwriter. The rest of the LP it appeared on, “I Ain’t Marching Any More,”  otherwise showcases those strengths that would be seen as limitations later.** I remember hearing that record in The Sixties, and I’m sure I filed the tactic it demonstrated — that you could set literary poems to music with only an acoustic guitar — away to later become an influence on this Project.

.

OK, you’ve either heard Ochs sing Noyes or read the poem — maybe both, and it’s time to finalize your guesses: girls or boys book? Today’s answer: boys. I think this shows one marked difference between Noyes’ 1906, the anthologists’ 1923, and even Ochs’ 1964, Are young American boys or teens connected with anything like this level of romantic outlook today? That’s a honest question — I can’t say I’d know — but I suspect the answer is almost never. I can’t assay what’s good or bad about that change, it that’s so, without adding a thousand words to this post. Consider it amongst yourselves.

.

*This is of course a side-point regarding a cracking good song, but has Thompson ever said (or has anyone ever asked) about Noyes’ poem (or Ochs setting of Noyes’ poem) as an inspiration for this song? As a mid-century-born British songwriter, Noyes might have been known to Thompson — and his original UK band’s USP was (at first) performing works by the North American singer-songwriters of Ochs generation.

**Other reasons Ochs might have chosen Noyes’ poem? Noyes was a life-long antiwar man, and in 1940 he even wrote a science fiction book with a prescient trope of a weapon that could — and did in the story — wipe out nearly all humankind, leaving only a handful who were under the surface to survive.

The Drunken Singer

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

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.**

The Drunken Singer

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.

.

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.

.

*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.