song

Jazz and reading John Darnielle: Part Two, This Year 365 Songs Annotated

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s the final piece of this two-parter, and the place where I take off that hair shirt for a while and present a review of John Darnielle’s new book This Year, 365 Songs Annotated.

I largely owe my appreciation of singer-songwriter John Darnielle to my daughter, who found solace in his earlier recordings as she moved through adolescence. One 2005 song, the one that gives its title to a new book by Darnielle, features a 17-year-old speaker refraining: “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.” It resonated more than a decade later with another 17-year-old. What a good thing for a song to do.

I knew Darnielle’s work from a couple of songs recorded under his long-running project name “The Mountain Goats,” most notably the mysterious anthem “Jaipur.”   My daughter gifted me his All Hail West Texas  album one Bandcamp Friday a year or so ago. My immediate thoughts on Darnielle were that he was a good song lyricist. Like the late poet-associate of mine Kevin Fitzpatrick, his work is full of “other people,” and those people are often working class or lost-soul types who make themselves known as if in overheard declarations in his songs. Writing in Boomer classic-rock consumer-guide style “he’s like…” comparisons are misleading in Darnielle’s case. Saying he’s lyrically a mix of Randy Newman, Bruce Springsteen, Ray Davies, and John Prine is a bad assay, because he’s like all of them at once or in sequence, and he is his own man too. Still, the range of characters is an important strength. A lot of poetry, and a lot of indie songwriting too, is a singular solipsistic narrative, and Darnielle’s of the songwriting school that avoids this.

This Year cover

More than a collection of song lyrics (though they’re good lyrics)

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Yet, This Year  is largely the story inside one person, a memoir in a different form: a book of days where he writes somewhat sequentially, but not by strict intent or always, about how 365 songs came about, what he thinks he was trying to express, and what his life was like as he wrote and recorded them. The entries can be quite short, a couple of hundred words typically, though a few extend for a few pages. The lyrics to each day’s song are included with each entry, which is helpful for any reader who’s not familiar with his work. I’m half-way through reading it straight through, but the book can also be read an entry at a time, as sort of daily thought-starter. I’m somewhere between a hardcore fan and someone that doesn’t know any of Darnielle’s work, and I’ve sought out some of the songs after reading of them in the book.

Things I’ve learned? It was not apparent to me beforehand, but he’s a poet who converted to songwriting, and many of his early songs had preexisted as page poems that he wasn’t planning to sing. Reading his lyrics silent on the page in this book demonstrates a literary poet’s craft in his writing, but my finding this out in memoir is a testimony to their lack of crusty poetese. Poets as well as songwriters would benefit from exposing themselves to Darnielle’s lyrical tactics, and he talks effectively about them in this book. I also learned that he spent formative years in his songwriting’s development living in a small town in Iowa, the kind of place I grew up in, in roughly the same part of the state, though I’m more than a generation older than him.

Another part of his story, which unreels through the day entries each devoted to a single song from his now large catalog of original songs, is that he began recording and making these songs public using meager equipment. He so far mentions almost nothing about the particulars of his instruments which are likely unremarkable and inexpensive, and a considerable part of his early career recordings – including the original versions of some of his best-loved songs – were recorded on a boom-box cassette tape machine at home. I resonated with that, having spent around 20 years using such cassette tape along with low-budget equipment. A late 20th century indie-music and fanzine samizdat network allowed Darnielle a slow-burn career doing that, around the time that my own nerve to share my work had faded. He recounts in the book, that royalties from the tapes sometimes paid part of the $170 a month rent,* but he had a day job in a lower-paid nursing field, again something I rhymed with in my cassette years.

The short entries in the book also tell a story of Darnielle’s religious journey, which began as a Catholic youth and has had elements of return, though I’m midjourney on that arc so far in the book.

These similarities paradoxically bring up the personal gap which makes reading his book so meaningful to me now. From what I’ve read so far, Darnielle apparently retained confidence in his own work through these long-beginnings, low-rent, lo-fi years, and even if there are dark nights of the soul in coming parts of his book, he displays that now as he discusses the work in retrospect. I had, and still have, substantial gaps in being able to carry that in public during my cassette years. Having days of private levels of self-confidence in some of my musical work is not an effective dose to properly present it to others, and my doing so “blind” without that confidence led me to some painful comedy of misreadings of likely interest. Those two things (managing self-doubt, being able to present one’s work effectively to others) interact. Darnielle may have been more personally engaging, or just more persistent in his networking. Elements of luck might have been significant (with me, they were in my “day job.”) Thinking of this difference as I read Darnielle’s book, it’s (too) easy for me to think, “Well, it must have been easier for him, his work was so darn good.” He’s a better vocalist and performer than I am (no-biggie, almost everybody is), and though I’m not sure how far apart we are in “on a good day” guitarist skills, his song lyrics are teaching me new tactics even after decades of my doing this on the page and with guitar.

In the first part of this pair of posts I sincerely worried about my work and hubris when I put it up against the skillset and history of Jazz. Despite those differences in how we’ve used our parable of the talents, I find reading Darnielle’s book heartening so far. You don’t have to be a songwriter, if you are any kind of writer – and likely if you are an artist of any kind – spending time with this book may be helpful.

Here’s an early song of mine, recorded on primitive equipment before the nearing 900 songs of the Parlando Project had started counting off, but consistent with its principles, a setting of John Keats’ “In the Drear Nighted December.”   Audio player gadget should be below, but if not, this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

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*For any younger folks reading this, the $170 a month rent (for a house!) must seem a dormouse fantasy. For younger musicians, the idea that royalties from indie recordings might contribute in any substantial way to making rent must seem equally fantastic.

The Sunset stopped on Cottages

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a poem by Emily Dickinson that I made into a little song. There’s an audio player below to hear it.*  I intended the music I made for this piece to be jaunty – not only because I worry that too many of the Parlando Project pieces are slow to mid-tempo, but because it fits the language of Dickinson’s poem. Just 8 lines, but its “what’s in the box” description includes: a sunset, a morning, cottages, and a USB C charging cable.

No – error – sorry. No charging cable. I looked at the catalog listing:

Emily Dickinson no longer includes a charger or charging cable as part of our environmental commitment, which we maintain as we continue to offer the finest in Cottage-Core products for the home poetry enthusiast. Folks who listen to ‘The Sunset Stops on Cottages’  often listen to ‘I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose’   and may also be interested in a delightfully antique Emily Dickinson tulle tippet nightgown or one of the delightful Tyrian purple moth-scented candles from our Susan Gilbert Dickinson collection.

OK. I’m funning with you. After living with the poem for awhile as I set it to music and recorded my performance of the result, I instead believe this poem is an example of the genre my wife calls “Cozy Gothic.” How come? I think the poem’s cottages are graves.

Here’s how I understand Dickinson’s poem. There’s a pretty sunset, an eternally repeated and universal, broad-sky-set thing. The sunset must appear where ED’s poem sees it, but after its moment it’ll be “Gone Westerly,” for today. Gone westerly is likely a similar idiom to “gone south,” a euphemism for death. The sun has not fled out of dereliction of duty –“treason” – but because a day, like a human life has its limits. The poem’s second stanza reminds us of the circadian day too: that morning and a sunrise was, and will be, there – but that’s no matter to the dwellers in the cottage/grave “swellings in the ground” who can’t see the “supercilious Sun.”

Sunset stopped on Cottages

Here a chords sheet, and what’d be more Cottage-Core than playing this Cozy Gothic song in your own cottage? That G chord form I played is just the B & E strings fretted at the effective 3rd fret along with the open D and G strings.

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I asked my wife again this morning about “Cozy Gothic” as I prepared to write this. I reminded her that the young Emily Dickinson did not grow up in the grand house that’s now the Emily Dickinson Museum, but in another place where the Dickinson family lived in her youth after her grandfather got the family finances mired in debts until her generation extracted them from that and were able to move back to the grander house we associate with her poetry. The grand Dickinson manse was across the road from a crop field, and had room for gardens of fruit, food, and flowers; and it was beside a main road for travelers in and out of town. The place that her family had to relocate to was smaller, and across the street was a graveyard. Mix those two homes ED knew in her lifetime, and you have some pretty good poetic loam. I asked my wife, a known PK,** “Did you ever live next to a graveyard?”

Yes, when we lived in a parsonage. The town was taken aback when I sunbathed in the graveyard. I didn’t know what the big deal was about that – it just seemed like a nice, peaceful, place.”

That’s my wife. Nature nymph and likely a better writer than I am – and for all the mixture that made up her childhood, she got to live the spirit of this Dickinson poem directly – Cozy Gothic.

Here’s that audio player gadget. What, has any such audio player “Gone Westerly?” You can take hope in the resurrection, but it’s likely because some ways of viewing this blog suppress displaying the audio player gadget, just like they mute the angels that would write better, more concise blog posts. I make do by providing this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player though. Playing the bass track for this one – without making a point to think of it, but still thinking of it – I was thinking of the great British bassist, Danny Thompson, who died this autumn. Thompson’s playing could be quite free and capable of quick, large, leaps in register, but while doing that he could follow complicated or chaotic other players ad lib and help make musical sense out of them. I loved his playing, and of course mine is more a tribute than the work of a peer in skills or dedication to the instrument.

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*I find it puzzling as this Project enters its 10th year that the number of people who take the time to listen to the (almost always) short musical pieces here remains essentially flat from 3 years in the Project on forward, while the number of readers of the blog posts continues to grow. Less than 10% of readers click the audio player or link, assuming that the stats I get are accurate.

I have guesses. My rough-hewn voice will never make me America’s sweetheart. My naïve compositional skills may fall between the sawhorses of pop ready-mades and art-song sophistication. The variety of my musical approaches may put a stop to continued listening, as I’m near certain to attempt a style someone doesn’t like (and so my failure or limited success in evoking those styles could be beside the point).

**”PK” = “Preacher’s Kid.” Not just my wife, then Dave Moore, my long-time musical partner sometimes heard here, is a PK too. I’m sort of one, though my father left the Protestant ministry, except for fill-in roles, in my childhood – but that history and those fill-in pulpit appearances likely helped shape me.

The sequela of being a PK vary. Some become rebel angels, some follow into the “family business,” some suffer from having had childhood expectations of goodness and polity, others take the close-hand connections with music, ethics, or philosophy and use that in some other field. For myself, I think the main thing I took from it (and my father deciding not to take to it) is the concept of “a calling.”

Before the Snow

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Long time readers know that the Parlando Project is largely about our encounters with other people’s words – usually their literary poetry. Poetry, even impersonal or hermetic poetry, is a rich way to transfer experience between consciousnesses. Poetry’s strengths in this transference over memoir, blog post, or informal conversation are largely the strengths of focused beauty – that thing that attracts us even before knowledge, expressed as sound or by novel connections.

Still, these beautiful elements of poetry come with costs, which is why many, most of the time, prefer other modes. Yet, I think the shortness and the compressed incidents of lyric poetry offer a possible compromise. We’re asked to share a little burden, a few minutes of reading or listening, subconsciously absorbing the word-music and linkages, which may in leisure or with mood be extended by re-reading and re-thinking such a small number of lines.

One of the things that caused me to begin this Parlando Project was thinking that a short musical accompaniment might add pleasures to possible serial re-encounters with the words. Is this so? I’m not sure, though I persist in doing this.*

That preamble out of the way, I’m going to look like I’m violating the “Other People’s Stories” maxim that is a principle of this Project, because I’m presenting today words I wrote to go with the music I compose and record – but hold on, I’m going to tell you this is still about a poetic transference across a gap.

Here’s why: once again I’ve been running into things from decades ago as I do my “death cleaning” reduction in things stored away or unlikely to be of foreseeable use. Just last week I moved aside a drum set that had been played by Dean Seal when he was in the LYL Band,** and found under the bass drum a plastic carryall tub with things hurriedly packed up after some gig: a Radio Shack battery-powered mixer, cables, a guitar strap, a cassette recorder, and a few tambourines we’d hand out for audience participation. And more spiral, college-ruled notebooks have come to light. Glancing through one I found a page with 9, untitled, lines – the start of a poem. From the style of the poetry in the fragment I think it’s from the 1990s, but it might be earlier or later. It caught my attention because it seemed to be talking about November in Minnesota in that interval right before the first snows come.

I remember nothing about writing this poem, or what prompted it, but it had some nice word-music and was roughly pentameter. That pentameter made me think I was writing a sonnet, and for some reason left off at this incomplete draft. That night, before bed, with my aching muscles and joints from twisting, bending, and hauling I decided to complete a full 14-line draft.

Before the Snow

More musical perversity: the difficulty in finding times to record acoustic guitar with sensitive mics in the past year or so has increased the number pieces I’ve done with that instrument.

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For the final 5 lines I used an incident from a recent bike ride. Rolling down to a favorite breakfast destination at the borders of my wooded city I’m usually met with a rewarding bit of wildlife (outside of deep winter): constant squirrels, rabbits, small rodents, birds, including waterfowl by a pond and creek I pass, insistent crows, and so forth. If Keats wrote his “Ode to Autumn”  on Hampstead Heath in the Highgate section of the city of London, these near-daily rides of mine with this contrasting nature in the midst of modest single-family houses and parkland is my equivalent. What I saw this day was a little epiphany – a squirrel had been quite recently struck down crossing the road. Not smack dab run over, for it was not squashed, and there was only a little blood – yet it was clearly not moving or breathing, and even from the height of my bicycle its eyes could be seen fixed and dead. And then, as I was approaching, carelessly another squirrel scampered out onto the road and up to the corpse. Though I was riding onward, and only slowed a bit moving to the side, this squirrel bent down right to the head of the dead one, close enough to touch it barely with whiskers, clearly looking closely at it, for a moment regardless of my vehicular approach.

And then, just as I was beside them, it scattered off, missing by accident or close design, my slowed, but rolling, bike wheels. What was that squirrel after, what was it thinking in those few seconds with the dead one? This  was the matter to finish the poem that had started years ago with a rabbit finding scarcely-leaved autumn bush and brush to hide in. And I too had had my customary Parlando encounter without firm context, working with the part of the poem written by someone I hadn’t seen for decades: though in this case, it was my younger self. Not really that different from the usual encounters here with Frost, Dickinson, Sandburg, Millay, Stevens, Hardy, et al.

I originally gave the resulting sonnet the title “Before the Rapture of Snow,”  because I thought that tied-in the rabbit’s anxious waiting and the dead squirrel. I drew back from that thinking it too grand a reach, and because the theological implications of “rapture” would repel, puzzle, or draw in too-determinant reactions.

I was lucky enough to have a Monday to record this, finishing what felt like a good take of the vocals and acoustic guitar just before I had to leave my studio space. I added piano yesterday and mixed the tracks. As a non-pianist I’ve fallen into using that instrument simplistically as I do here, and I’ve grown fond of how these pounded single notes mesh with the timbre of acoustic guitar. You can hear “Before the Snow”  with the audio player below. Has the player been raptured up to heaven? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress displaying such a thing, so I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Besides my lack of talents for promotion, I sometimes feel what I do with this Project presents a number of detriments to gathering an Internet-scale audience. Poetry, as I write above, is not something sought out by modern Americans in great numbers. And then the music I make suffers from these things that reduce audience interest: I’m not a singer with a beautiful voice, nor do I think of myself as a performer with charisma or erotic appeal, and the music I make despite that is both too varied and too limited.

Many potential listeners or readers, presented with an infinite library of options in our modern age, will avoid things that have but one of those strikes against it – and to add another one or two against the Parlando work wouldn’t be rare either.

All this isn’t breast-beating or humble-brag, and I’m even hesitant to waste your time writing this. I am proud of much of the work I’ve done over the last decade here. While my audience is Internet-small, I believe it’s not all that small by poetry standards, and increasingly, not completely outsized by the audience for much non-Pop Indie music. Thanks to my hardy listeners!

**Dean was working elsewhere in comedy, and with at least one other partner in music, when he played in the LYL Band in the 1980s. He was talented and creative, we were looking for a drummer or bass player, and we perversely came upon him as both – unconcerned with the challenges of one person filling both roles! He may have grown to think of us as less professional or ambitious than he was, I don’t know, or events of his life may have intervened, but for reasons unknown to me we just stopped playing together – but this happened without him picking up the small drum set he played with us, and stored at my place. While working on my cleanout this fall I briefly tried to find contact info for Dean to see about the drums, but the trail ran cold after finding articles about him being part of the pastoral lineup at a church that no longer listed him on staff.

The Pumpkin

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Last time I was musically blasting your ears with twin electric guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards as I commemorated the snark of the early Internet’s “flame wars.” Today’s piece combines – just in time for American Thanksgiving – a quiet nylon string “classical” guitar, and a 19th century poetic ode to pumpkin pie.

The words I sang were written by John Greenleaf Whittier, one of a circle of New England worthies who were grouped as the Fireside Poets. Back in my parents or grandparent’s time the Fireside Poets were as celebrated as pumpkin pie. As a group they took on the job of creating an American poetry written by Americans with American subjects.* Alas, that’s a job that once done, doesn’t inherently demand continued interest, particularly in a country like America that has become a cultural superpower. American poems written by Americans about American subjects are a commonplace thing now.

But to do this was a piece of work in the first part of the 19th century – and in furtherance of this Whittier chose an indigenous American plant for his poem. The pumpkin represents American autumn is so many ways, starteing with jack-o-lanterns in October, as a decorative harvest tote, and for its curtain call, the fruit for pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. Whittier wrote his ode mentioning all these things, and here’s a link to his entire poem. I read Whittier’s tone as “mock heroic” in his poem, but I chose to make a small song using only his ending, the pumpkin pie part, since I was racing to complete it before American Thanksgiving. Friends of our officially young-adult kid are gathering downstairs tonight to do whatever they will, as I hole up under the slanting roof typing this.

pumpkin pie

“Fairer hands never wrought at a pastry more fine.” Pumpkin pie picture by Evan-Amos

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Is it just me, or is there a touch of what my wife calls “comfy gothic” in this passage at the end of Whittier’s poem? The poem starts out addressing the pumpkin plant itself, but as it continues we see it speak to the humans associated with it from childhood to grey-hair-dom. When I have Thanksgiving tomorrow with my little family I’ll have thoughts of everyone distant or dead that made or attended Thanksgiving meals over my life. In the poems final stanza Whittier speaks of, praises, the hands that make the wonderful pumpkin pie, and then as the poem ends, he sings them away with a wish that their final sunset is as orange and lovely as a pumpkin.

There’s an audio player gadget, or should be, below that will let you hear me sing that last stanza of Whittier’s poem. I focused on the simplest and most modest of musical settings for this one, purposeful contrast to the previous musical piece here. If you don’t see the audio player that’s likely because some ways of reading blogs suppress it, so I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player. Consider that the apple or blueberry pie option to hear this song about pumpkin pie.

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*Earlier this year when I asked AI to create some protest songs, it defaulted to a musical style stuck somewhere between Bro-Country and Indie Americana. When I needed to make up names for the faux acts I chose Fireside Poets’ names like  “Greenleaf Whittier” for them – because though writing for the page, those Fireside poets were the poetic roots of Americana.

Like the Touch of Rain

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I wanted to get another musical piece up this week as I was somewhat dissatisfied with my performance in my last one here for Armistice Day/Veterans Day. I looked a pieces I had near ready, and selected this one, by Anglo-Welsh poet Edward Thomas. Thomas is lesser-known in the United States, but is more recognized in Britain where he often gets grouped as a “War Poet.” The main reason for that: he volunteered and was killed in WWI, and some of his poetry speaks about his thoughts as he considered volunteering for overseas front-line service.

Sitting in America, which hasn’t regarded Thomas enough, I’d like to expand him a bit from behind that label. First off, like Wilfred Owen (another British poet filed under war poets, and another WWI casualty) Thomas was something of a beginning poet,* but like Owen his poetic voice is so strong it doesn’t need to apologize for being early days. As powerful as Owen’s poems about trench warfare are, I’m just as impressed by his home-front poem “Shadwell Stair.”   And Thomas, this other “war poet,” seems not to have finished any poetry about his short front-lines experience before his death in that service. As we celebrate Veterans Day it would be good to remember that each person who served is not just their service.

edward_thomas_in_uniform800

Edward Thomas in his uniform. He was married and past the age of most soldiers, but still volunteered.

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So, here’s a poem that I think has nothing to do with the war directly – perhaps not indirectly either. “Like the Touch of Rain”  seems to me to be a love (or rather a loss of love) poem, though the nature of the relationship is not spelled out.** It uses as its central symbol rainfall, and I suspect it’s speaking of erotic love because of the sensuous opening where the rain, however wild, is caressing the poem’s speaker and he sings and laughs here. The poem ends by telling us he’s now closed in, out of the rain, not by his choice but by some her’s “Go Now.” It’s a turn-about from the typical “Who’ll Stop the Rain”  or “Shelter from the Storm”  depiction of rain vs. shelter. Here’s a link to the text of the poem that I’ve now turned into a short song.

“Like a Touch of Rain”  is not the most complex or virtuosic poem, but it also doesn’t detract from its depiction with any overreaching or stilted poetic diction. There’s a power in that. Reading Thomas’ contemporaries’ poetry in search of material for this Project I’ve read a great deal of published poetry that doesn’t escape those faults. My wife gave me a copy of Thomas’ collected poems a few years back – it’s not a thick volume, and I believe that most of the poems in it were first published in this collection posthumously through efforts of Thomas’ friends.***

After overreaching with my Padraic Colum poem setting earlier this week, and having to settle for an incomplete recording, it may behoove me to leave today’s piece as just voice and acoustic guitar accompaniment – and as rough-hewn as my voice is on this performance, I think it’s better too.

You can hear my performance of Edward Thomas’ “Like a Touch of Rain”  with the audio player below. What, has the door to any such player gadget been shut? Well, this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Thomas took up poetry only a couple of years before his death, at the insistence of his American friend Robert Frost.

**I have not read a full biography of Thomas, but before the war he seems to have had a complicated set of affections as well as bouts of depression and drug use. Those two things might cause one to suspect a ne’er-do-well life, but through-out that he wrote voluminous freelance reviews and essays to pay the bills for a young family.

***Friends? Well, Frost for one. And since one of the good things in my post before this one was the discussion of poets best remembered for what became a song lyric, one of his close affections was with a young writer Eleanor Farjeon, who wrote what became the lyrics to the song “Morning Has Broken.”

Old Soldier

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Today’s piece was created from a poem written by the Irish poet Padraic Colum. Colum was born in the 19th century, then traveled through the world of 20th Century Modernism, and lived on long enough to overlap my lifetime. Looking at the outlines of his life I am pleased to report that Colum connects a favorite of this Project, the undercelebrated Irish poet Joseph Campbell* and the American mythological theorist of the “Heroes’ Journey” also named Joseph Campbell. With the American Campbell, Colum connected because he was a folklorist as well as a poet, and he wrote several young adult and children’s collections of folk tales and retold myths which I’ve not yet read. With the former Campbell, besides being Irish literary revival contemporaries, he collected folk-songs.** Like that Irish Campbell, Colum’s best-known work today is arguably a folk song.

Long-time readers here may recall that the poet Campbell is likely responsible for the song “Reynardine”   being sung in a version featuring a supernatural, shape-shifting lover. At around the same time, and for the same publisher of Irish folk songs, Colum collected/wrote the lyrics to the song “She Moved Through the Fair.”   Why the slash notation on the authorship? There’s some controversy if Colum closely adapted a traditional set of lyrics, or largely wrote original lyrics to an existing tune. Colum claimed he wrote the lyrics, making use of only a few floating lines that are folk song ready-mades. The challenge to Colum’s authorship strikes me as highly suspect: it’s based on another collector writing in 1970 that he came across an old man who told him he’d learned it as a traditional song before Colum’s version was published in 1909.

Old Soldier

I suspect there’s someone out there who can do a better job singing this song I created from Colum’s poem.

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“She Moved Through the Fair”  was included as a poem in Colum’s first poetry collection “The Wild Earth”***  which also includes today’s poem. I note that “Old Soldier”  has some similarities with the lyrical methods of SMTtF:  both use spare details and leave out a great deal. Some of what is implied in the two lyrics may have become more obscure to modern listeners. SMTtF  very early on speaks of the singer’s “lack of kind” which uses a now archaic meaning of “kind,” meaning family. “Old Soldier”  opens with the titular old soldier going door to door. Since “hawking” (a hawker is a street-seller) is used as a verb in the second line I thought at first he was peddling, but from what I can find, no one sold flour that way. I think he’s begging for bran, which was then the discarded part of the milling of flour. That waste part after the wheat was milled or boulted, was thrown out or used as animal feed, though apparently the poor sometimes made use of it for human consumption.**** In the second stanza we meet the old soldier’s only companion, a dog, and the bran the soldier has garnered may have gathered mold.

I don’t know if “Old Soldier”  has been set to music before this, but it seems every bit as singable as “She Moved Through the Fair,”  and as soon as I read it, I wanted to sing it. I decided to use an arrangement soaked in South Asian musical influences, perhaps due to the wonderous extended version of the SMTtF tune played by Davy Graham. That link above includes one of Graham’s recordings of it, as well as Anne Briggs wonderous acapella version. Oh, hell, here’s that link again, click it indeed if you haven’t heard the song Colum made. Last week I recorded the basic tracks singing and playing a tune I created for Colum’s poem using my guitar in an alternate tuning driving a sitar virtual instrument though a MIDI pickup. To this first pass, I added harmonium, tanpura, tabla drums, acoustic guitar, and a final vocal.

Every one of those overdubbed passes felt good as I played them (save for my vocals, I’m never happy with my vocals) but the result was a whole bunch of tracks that would require careful mixing so that the instruments blended well. I set about doing that, working until midnight when I figured I might have a piece to present and saved a complete mix down. Awaking the next morning, I listened again, and the result wasn’t just flawed, it was a mess. A useful question for one mixing a piece of music with various instruments in an ensemble like this is “What track is the focus of the piece?” My putative mix had no good answer for that. The voicings of the chords on the sitar and the guitar didn’t mesh well. The harmonium and the tanpura were fighting over the same part of the sonic spectrum despite my efforts to give them their own sonic space. The tablas didn’t mesh with the acoustic guitar’s rhythm.

The wise solution would be to just re-track the piece. Maybe I should have more particularly considered that Davy Graham had made his impressive version of a Colum poem/song with only a solo acoustic guitar. But I would not have another opportunity to record with a sensitive open mic until this week, too late for Veteran’s Day. So last night I went to work stripping back the crud of my failed mix, leaving mostly the acoustic guitar and the vocal, with the tanpura and then the harmonium coming in for later parts of the song in turn. It’s not an ideal recording, but it’s my hope it lets one consider “Old Soldier”  as song today.

The more palatable version can be heard with the audio player below. The song itself is simple, and the remixed arrangement that builds a bit as the song continues serves it better. You don’t see any audio player gadget? No, I didn’t remove that, it’s a side-effect of some ways of viewing this blog. I have a plan B for that too: this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Joseph Campbell, who also wrote under the name Seosamh MacCathmhaoil, was acquainted with the original London Imagist circle, and wrote what I think is some excellent short verse in the form. His life and literary career were brought low by siding with the losing side in the Irish Civil War.

**Given that I’ve been doing this project for a decade, the folklorest/singer/collector and poet is a combination near to my heart. Besides Colum and Campbell, two American poets from the same era, Carl Sandburg and Edwin Ford Piper did both things, and I’ve tried to briefly make the case that Sandburg should be more often cited as instrumental in connecting folk song with progressive politics and literary poetry in the United States, which eventually leads to the case of a Nobel laureate in Bob Dylan. Around the same time as all these others, elements of the “Harlem Renaissance” in Afro-American literature were open to melding folk song with high literature too (Fenton Johnson, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Waring Cuney, Zora Neale Hurston).

I’m going to jump far afield before leaving this footnote: I’m writing this on the 50th anniversary of the release of the Patti Smith Group’s glorious debut LP Horses. The Patti Smith Group started because Smith, a poet personally immersed in colloquial music, a paramour of Fugs-adjacent musician/actor/playwright Sam Shepard, joined up with a guitarist/rock critic/crucial anthologist of garage bands Lenny Kaye, wanting to make unexpected poetry combined with electric guitar.

***Just when Colum’s The Wild Earth was published is unclear to me. My copy has a 1927 American printing of a 1922 edition. Wikipedia says “She Moved Through the Fair”  was in a 1916 edition of the book, and then in their entry for Padraic Colum gives a 1907 date for the book.

****What, that’s the healthy part! Whole wheat! At the time the milled pure white flower was prized from making lighter baked goods and for a longer shelf life. The city I live in was growing rapidly at the time of this poem by finely milling the “Best” and the “Gold Medal” flour that had absolutely no bran or wheat germ at all.

Searoads: a contemporary poem by Henry Gould

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today’s piece is rare for the Parlando Project: a presentation of a contemporary poem by American poet Henry Gould.

Contemporary? How contemporary? “Searoads” was written only a few days ago. I read it on Halloween when the poet shared it on Blue Sky shortly after it had been written.  Since I follow Gould on Blue Sky, I had read several of his poems before. He’s posted poems and poem drafts written serially as he works on a book-length opus dedicated to a topic. In recent Gould poem-series, historical time seems to take place simultaneously, and wide references to history and literary works weave through stanzas (or even within lines) of individual poems, this weave sometimes worked with the warp of wordplay.

That makes for a challenging density. Since my youth I’ve taken self-pride in being a history buff, and working on this Project has extended the poetry I’ve had contact with to a level that tests the working set of my old-guy memory. When I’ve got the energy to exercise those parts of my personality, digging into one of Gould’s poems can match up with those receptors. Gould’s work is ambitious and deals with earnest subjects, but I suspect it’s also playful. When you can catch, and hopscotch through the pattern of one of his sideways leaps to connection, there’s a pleasure in discovery – and this is so even though honest history and literature contains a great deal of conflict and pain.

I have a term I use for an effect I find in poetry – the polyphony layers of perceptions invoked with images, the melody of tracking from one thing to another like unto it, the intervals of sames separated by time – The Music of Thought. I assume this isn’t a new idea, but while study of the prosody of sound is commonplace, a prosody of the patterns when the images and what they present, composed in that order and layering, seems rarer to me. That I take any pride in writing about this is likely secondary to my ignorance of how thoroughly others have already written about this. I’m the kind of solitary, stubborn cuss that has to discover it myself to be able to integrate it into my enjoyment of poetry.

There can be a problem with the Music of Thought. While tastes in the word-sound-music may vary among readers and listeners to poetry, the effect requires nothing special in terms of shared knowledge. Children can enjoy Dr. Suess before they have much of a corpus of knowledge at all.*   Poems of Yeats, Eliot, Frost, or Emily Dickinson can charm us by their sound even when – if we were tested by some exacting taskmaster to do so – we couldn’t write an internally consistent and plausible essay on what they were on about exactly. Fear of that looming taskmaster kills poetry readership, but the lure of the pleasures of sound draws us back in. The Music of Thought may still be sensuous, but it’s more abstract, it requires more knowledge and attention from a reader.

Assembledge in Powderhorn Lake Halloween 2025 by Heidi Randen

My wife shot this mysterious assemblage in Powderhorn Park at the dawn of All Souls Day 2025

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When I came upon Gould’s “Searoads”  it was late in the day. I was in the context of the short-attention-span-theater that is a modern social media feed. Tough court for the poem?

The sound caught me first and last, and I also easily fell into this poem’s Music of Thought. In both musics, “Searoads”  drives forward attractively, and I was gathering meaning even on the first time through.**

How does it work? I’m bad at scansion (when creating music I’m habitually playing with offbeats and syncopations, sporting with measures, which probably demonstrates that I don’t understand the basic pattern well enough). Could “Searoads”  be intended pentameter with predominant iambic stresses? I read the stresses as having variation (which good verse should have) but I scanned the lines as having a goodly amount of iambs, while I hear them as predominantly four-feet lines.***

The use of rhyme here is excellent. I heard rhymes the first time through, but not the scheme – so I didn’t know when they were coming. My own ear or taste loves off/near rhyme, and that too helps the sound work without some regular clock-coocoo chime effect. If I take apart the mechanism, it’s ABABCABCA. And there’s a lovely moment in the poem when an extra C rhyme comes strongly in the middle of the last line of the first stanza with “infants.”

The poem has a few unusual words. I knew “sarabande” was a dance form that survives in European classical music, and I even knew that there is some dispute about its origin, including a theory that it includes American musical ideas adapted by Spanish colonialists in the 16th century from native central American music. I didn’t know the word “Argive” (of the Greek city-state of Argos) – but two things referenced in the poem were part of my attraction. On Halloween I was intending to work on a piece for All Saint’s Day (November 1st) or All Souls Day (November 2nd), but despite some effort earlier in the week I hadn’t found a suitable text. As I read Gould’s poem, he may be invoking circular reincarnated or pre-existing souls in the second stanza – so in celebrating all who have died and the unity of that human experience, we may celebrate all unborn as well. What a lovely autumnal thought! And the same stanza even needle-drops a line from one of the All Souls’ texts that I wasn’t progressing on making music for: the “full-fathom five (my father lies)” speech from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

But one word (well, hyphenated, but…) is most responsible for the piece you can hear today: “Ark-Dove.”**** I suspected the dove sent out from Noah’s Ark to confirm the time afloat in the great flood was ebbing. When I asked Gould, he confirmed to me he was thinking of that too, at least in part, as he wrote his poem. In our troubled times, a great flood of destructions, on a boat stinking of animal effluents, I think we are waiting for the dove to return with a green twig – but I had another specific thing going off in my mind too.

There’s a folk song, collected in 1906 in Texas at a temporary work camp along the Brazos river. A woman there, washing clothes on that riverbank sang this song about being abandoned; but imagining Noah’s dove anyway, singing “If I had wings, like Noah’s dove, I’d fly down the river to the one I love.” Beside the song, the folk-song collector only got the name “Dink” for the singer. He wrote that he tried to find out more later, but when he returned to ask about her, she was gone from the camp and no one knew where. We cannot know if she found wings to carry her above the river or if the river carried her, submerged, down its current.

So, as I returned to the top to read Henry Gould’s poem for a second time on Halloween, I was already humming that folk song, known as “Dink’s Song,”  to myself as I read the words. The next morning, I had no Dink to ask for, but on All Saints Day I decided to work out some music to sing Gould’s poem. I did this with no expectation that anyone besides myself (and probably Gould, who I figured I’d just send it to, unbidden) would hear it.

I’ve been composing a lot in October on acoustic guitar, this meant I had some musical ideas to try with the words. I loosely based my music on the chord cadence from the verse of “Dink’s Song,”  (D G5 D / Bm G5 D) with an even looser variation from the song’s chorus on the last line of each stanza (D G5 D Asus2 D). I’m not a very melodic singer, and unless one knows “Dinks Song”  and reads this, one won’t hear the connection. I recorded this using my usual cross-picking technique on acoustic guitar while singing, and picked the best out of about five passes I quickly recorded that afternoon. I added a low-pitched piano part that emulates the way a tanpura is used in South Asian music and a bass part as I thought the piece needed a little more low-end activity.

Henry Gould received the recording and has graciously allowed me to share this musical performance of his fine poem “Searoads”  here. You can hear it with the audio player below. Has the audio player flown down river? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress showing an audio player gadget. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player so you can hear it.

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*Adults could enjoy challenging Modernist poetry more if they allowed themselves to initially listen to it (even silently) as a toddler listens to board books. For that matter, I assume Dr. Suess/Theo Geisel had Lewis Carroll and Ogden Nash in his ear when he wrote, but his poetry makes me think he was reading Gertrude Stein or Marianne Moore too.

**I don’t rate myself highly in understanding poems, but a short poem that draws me in usually gets a repeated reading where often my understanding changes. One of the pleasures of doing this Project is that that the poem I start with can change to a poem I understand differently by the time I’m done with the recording.

***Today’s short discussion of prosody demonstrates why I do that sort of thing rarely here. I suspect a combination of being bad at it (not getting the correct answers in my scansion) and distrusting the classic accentual/syllabic theory that may need to be followed more loosely to produce a sophisticated effect.

****”Searoads’”  unusual “Ark-Dove” with hyphen and capitalization made me think Gould must have had something else specific in mind, beyond my folk song and the Bible story. I did a quick search and found that two ships, the Arc and the Dove brought the first English settlers to Maryland – the Arc and the Dove are sort of the Catholic U.S. version of the Pilgrims and the Mayflower. What a rich reference! I asked Gould. Nope, he wasn’t thinking of that. Ah, but the muses Henry – they must have whispered in your ear.

And the poem’s title gave me thoughts too. Isn’t “Searoads” the way medieval English poetry might refer to a ships’ path?

The Spider and the Ghost of the Fly

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

As Halloween approaches, here’s a song that focuses on the playfully frightful aspects of the holiday. Wait a minute – I debated typing “playfully” there with “frightful.” I went with that combination as it’s my best guess at the intent of the Vachel Lindsay poem that I converted into a song, though I can’t be sure.

Playing with fear and horror is clearly a part of Halloween. We expect children to celebrate the holiday, and the adults participating in Halloween celebrations plan them to be happy occasions, even though the decorations will be full of spiders and their webs, and monsters, and skeletons, and those dream-flickering pumpkin skulls.

But if you take the poem (now a song) at face value, this is about a woman who is personified as a predator, the femme fatale trope and her victim fly. Had poet Lindsay felt himself wronged by some lover to come up with this piece? I don’t have biographical evidence to point to with an emphatic gesture,* and the internal evidence within the poem speaks to me of a playful mode to the condensed tale of horror it tells. There seems to be a paradoxical agreement on the part of the singer: they’ve been done wrong, but they’re going to speak lightly about this, and while the song’s fly doesn’t say it out-loud, they might be open to just a little more peril.**

Spider and the Ghost of the Fly

A poem that literally describes tearing the wings off flies, yet I’m still holding it as playful.

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Earlier this month I wrote about the mid-20th century “folk scare” in passing, and as someone who has some grasp of the songs revived by that movement, I couldn’t help but think that Lindsay referenced a floating verse that appears in some American folk songs. Did anyone else catch it from listening or reading the text above?

The spider takes her prey with the line: “She drove me to her parlor/above the winding stair.” Reading this, I immediately heard a specific tune – cementing the idea that this poem would get the Parlando Project treatment. What tune? One widely sung song that features the verse about a woman taking a lover to her parlor goes by the title “Cindy, Cindy.”   Besides the parlor destination – sometimes sung in the folk song as “She took me to her parlor and she cooled me with her fan” – most “Cindy, Cindy”  versions have devouring women in them too, with verses like “I wish I was an apple a-hanging on a tree and every time my Cindy passed she’d take a bite out of me”*** or even “My Cindy is a pretty girl. My Cindy is a peach; she throws her arms around my neck and hangs on like a leech.”

Quick research says that “Cindy, Cindy” was sung in America in the early 20th century when Vachel Lindsay wrote his poem. I’m going to suspect Lindsay knew one of the variations of it – and he might have thought some of his audience would too.

So, I’m calling it: playful. Likely erotically  playful.

I also suspect my music for today’s performance of “The Spider and the Ghost of the Fly”  had “Cindy, Cindy’s”  tune in its ear a little bit too. You might be able to hear that performance with the audio gadget below – but like the devouring and dangerous love between the spider and the fly, some of you may find the audio gadget hidden and suppressed. Aha! I have this highlighted link, a veritable grail-shaped beacon, that will open a new tab with its own audio player so you can hear the song.

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*Vachel Lindsay and Parlando Project favorite Sara Teasdale were romantically linked for a time. For more on the story of how that turned out, you can read one of the most popular posts in this Project’s history. The Teasdale poem musically performed in that above linked post also talks about the surrender of love.

**As per Sir Galahad’s tale in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

***This verse in the folk song rhymes in with the apple stealing fairies in Leigh Hunt’s poem from earlier in this month’s series, and I’d suppose the song’s connection of apples with erotic passion may echo back to the Garden of Eden. And that choice of Cindy as a name? Could that be evoking sin?

A Ghost’s Leavetaking. Returning to an odd-ball instrument and a resulting musical sketch

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Today’s piece, continuing our series as we consider the variousness of Halloween including the surrounding Days of the Dead and associated horror/fantasy elements, has odd origins. It starts, since it’s useful to mark a starting point, with the death of my late wife decades ago, something that led to an unusual instrument.

Shortly after my wife died, and I was left alone in the house we once shared, I decided I’d take to playing more music in the silence. I went looking for new instruments to inspire me. This intimate death, as it happened, was followed by another kind of ending. To tell you about that, I won’t get too deep into the weeds of the musical instrument business, but one of America’s largest musical instrument makers, Fender, had in the late 1990s quixotically decided to introduce an entirely new guitar brand, DeArmond. In short order they created an entire line of electric guitars and basses, around two dozen models, priced between their budget Squier line that featured inexpensive renditions of traditional Fender instruments and their more expensive American line that the Squier guitars copied – but the DeArmond guitars weren’t copies of the highly popular Fender designs at all. Instead, they were versions of electric guitars and basses once produced by another company, Guild, which had around the same time been absorbed into Fender. I expect few who read this Project will know anything about Guild guitars, and that explains why they ceased to exist as a separate company. But those who do hear the name “Guild” and have a light bulb illuminate, are most likely to think of Guild acoustic guitars.*  Guild produced a successful line of acoustics. The Guild line of 12-string guitars were highly thought of: John Denver, Tim Buckley, and Ralph Towner constantly played jumbo-bodied Guild 12-strings, and other folk artists played acoustic Guild guitars in this era: Richie Havens, Paul Simon, and Bonnie Raitt.

So, this was a strange business idea: create a new brand, but make it closely reference past electric instruments many players had never heard of. So how did this turn out?

To quickly answer, I step back in marketing time and type: “Edsel.”**

OK, where are we getting to Halloween? This started with one death – trust me, we’ll get there – and now there’s the pseudo-death of guitar line. Fender pulled the plug abruptly just as our current century was getting underway. They had lots of unsold DeArmond electric guitar stock. I mean lots.  They gave some away to schools and music programs. They sold the rest at fire-sale prices. Guitars made to be sold for around $600 ($1200 in 2025 dollars) were being blown out at $200. I quickly bought three of their guitars: a large hollow-body archtop, a 12-string electric solid body, and a 6-string electric with a Bigsby vibrato bridge – not at BOGO pricing, but at those BOG2 prices. I’m writing about a lot of things today, but not those – instead, it’s another DeArmond.

One of the weirdest Guild designs that that Fender/DeArmond revived only to kill – indeed one of the oddest guitar designs of all time – was the Ashbory bass. Guitarist readers are now visualizing an electric bass: bodies at least as big as an electric guitar, but with longer necks. Old guys like me that play electric bass also are thinking weight – heavy, too often more than 10 pounds.

Nope. This is my Ashbory bass:

My Ashbory Bass 800-600

White lines, don’t do it. The Ashbory is a fretless instrument, the fretboard lines are just markers. Exact intonation with the thick strings and very short scale is a challenge.

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Weighs less than a Stephen King novel. Less than half the length of a regular electric bass. Body just a little bigger than a CD case. The original strings, specially designed for it, were translucent rubber bands. The current strings on mine are smooth white opaque nylon, essentially extra thick versions of a modern classical guitar string. Unlike a normal fretless electric bass, which is a beast to play, you need to be almost delicate when playing these extraordinarily low-tension strings.

Other than the tiny size, a goal here was to approximate the plucked sounds of the even more unwieldy upright bass, but neither the original 1980’s Guild Ashbory or the late ‘90s DeArmond copy sold well. I used mine when I wanted upright and fretless bass sounds for a while, but in the last few years I’ve moved over to using other methods to get that sound on Parlando recordings. This week someone mentioned they’d just purchased a used Ashbory, reviving memories of that time and leading me to revisit the instrument musically. In my studio space I got the tiny bass out and plugged it in to record. To get the upright bass sound from it you want to use bare fingers, but for some reason (habit?) I decided to use a thick rubbery pick – which is one way I play regular electric bass. This gave me a slightly more aggressive sound than I recall getting out of it and I then programmed in a drum pattern to match where that result was leading me. Building from the groove, I played some electric guitar and added a piano part, producing a short two-minute piece as my studio time ran out yesterday.

Listening to the result this morning I felt the music had a sense of longing or leaving. That may have leaked from my connection between the DeArmond Ashbory and the time after my wife’s death, which was followed by my mother’s, and then after an interval, my father’s death. Could I find some words to go with this music? Nothing I had in my files of poems for Halloween seemed to fit, so I did a web search for “poem about a ghost leaving or disappearing.” Bam, this lesser-known Sylvia Plath poem came up, right on point!

Plath’s “A Ghost’s Leavetaking”  is an 8-stanza/40-line poem, not all that long, but longer than my just-over-2-minute music could cover. The poem describes a somewhat distressed awaking in a morning where the speaker is mixing dreams and remembrance of the dead with an ongoing adjustment to mundane household tasks.*** Just as in Phil Dacey’s “Frost Warnings”  poem from earlier this month, Plath sets up tired laundry and bed sheets that “signify our origin and end” while they play the role of ghosts of the departed.

A good poem, but now I had two problems: an apt text too long for my music and a poem not in the public domain.**** “A Ghost’s Leavetaking”  was written in the 1950s and has not yet reached PD status in the U.S.*****

I made a quick decision. I would use only some lines from Plath’s poem. Artistically I thought that worked. It made a shorter set of text to fit the music I had finished. I was able to zoom in on the Day of the Dead and ghost elements of the poem, shortening the examination of how we sometime wake still recovering mundane reality from our dreams. If you would like to read the entire poem, as Plath published it, here’s a link. As to the PD situation, my solution is at best mixed. “Fair use” is not a firm concept, and my Project’s entirely non-revenue and educational purposes are no guaranteed Kings X. Using only a few lines would bolster my case, but as I used about a third of the poem, that’s not clearly kosher. Even forgetting laws, if Plath were a living author, she’d be well in her rights, regardless of the law, to take issue with someone cutting her poem up, making it less than she intended it to be.

So, from that decision, we’re left with this musical piece where I quickly sketched out today in my little home office “Studio B” how one might sing some lines from Plath’s poem with the music I finished yesterday. I’m aware of the limitations of my voice, and in an ideal world the melodies could be better worked out and ornamented by a better singer. None-the-less, I found it personally rewarding to inhabit Plath’s words and do the best I can today to convey the emotions and images she put in them, and some listeners may gain something from that performance. You can hear my sketch using lines taken from “A Ghost’s Leavetaking”  with the audio gadget below. Has the audio gadget gone to Plath’s “lost otherworld?” I offer this alternative as a keeper of the “profane grail,” a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Fender had never been able to make itself a factor in the upper end of the acoustic guitar market, so it was assumed that’s why they snapped up the distressed Guild company: for the well-thought-of acoustic guitars.

** There are car folks who will tell you that the Edsel was a perfectly fine late 1950’s American car, but that doesn’t change what the brand name invokes.

The Guild electrics were pretty good guitars, if not answering what the market wanted back in their day. Some of the DeArmond sort-of copies were arguably better instruments than the originals, but they were just as out of sorts with what the market wanted. In 1998 the electric guitarist customer wanted a Stratocaster or a Les Paul, with a Fender or Gibson name on it, or one of the slightly hot-rodded extensions of those Fender or Gibson models. The sort of funky, oddball looks of the DeArmond guitars would have stood a better chance a decade later after Indie rock stars started to come forward making a point of playing anything but a Les Paul or a Strat.

***I had the vivid experience of my late wife seeming to return to my bedroom in the liminal hours. From things I’ve heard from others, this is not uncommon for those who’ve lost intimates.

****I’m not all that troubled by asking for forgiveness from a ghost, but one of Plath’s children is still alive, and may hold the IP rights to Plath’s work. Her web site lists the Faber and Faber UK offices as the contact for Sylvia Plath rights permissions, but I got no reply early in this project when I asked that very organization about my small-time, non-revenue use of another Faber and Faber author. I would remove this piece on any objection.

*****If I did a little day trip up Highway 61, to say Thunder Bay Ontario, Plath’s poem would be PD there. And thanks readers for following me on this post’s road trip.

Robbing an Orchard

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Halloween is a multi-valent holiday. There’s the cluster of religious and spiritual holidays of prayer and remembrance for the dead, the holiday of horror and monsters, the children’s festival of costumes and small candy-bars, and so on. I went looking for some supernatural poems that might be fun to present this week, and I came upon this short poem by British Romantic-era figure Leigh Hunt that was begging to be sung – after all, the full title of his poem was written down as “Song of the Fairies Robbing an Orchard.”  It’s light fantasy, but then the news has stolen all the horrors.

Was I thinking of a particular orchard as I worked on this piece? There were two apple trees just to the side of the house I grew up in, but they were past their prime by my time. I remember they bore small and not very appetizing fruit, and sometime around when I left home they were cut down. I recall my sisters and I climbing in the low and scraggly branches when barely more than toddlers – but it wasn’t exactly that pair of trees. I was probably thinking more of an orchard I have never seen: the apple trees that are part of the homestead “kitchen garden” that blogger Paul Deaton often writes about.  I also probably visualized Deaton’s apple trees and his stories of work with them when I performed Robert Frost’s great harvest-time poem “After Apple Picking”  a few years back. Deaton’s a regular reader of this Project’s blog – so Paul, if you read this, and when you next check you are missing some of your apples, you’ll know who tipped off the fay. Well, the more they take, the fewer you need to harvest and put up.

Leigh_Hunt

An engraved drawing of Leigh Hunt by J. Hayter

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Leigh Hunt is one of those Zelig or Forrest Gump like characters of the 19th century British Romantic-era. He knew and worked with all the big three Romantics: Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Hunt was key in launching Keats poetic career, was there for Shelley’s death by drowning, and had a tempestuous relationship (I suspect the most common kind) with Byron. As a poet himself, he’s decidedly minor, but this opus’ mischievous whimsy charmed me. I love the characterization tidbits in it: the fairies peeping in at pious humans worshiping in chapels, and their admission that they don’t even care that much for apples, but are in it more for the challenge of stealing them.

The 12 string guitar as played by Leadbelly 800

Come to think of it, Julius Lester probably has as least as high a Zelig/Forest Gump score as Leigh Hunt

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For music to sing Hunt’s poem, I used a 12-string acoustic guitar. Last week while commenting on a poem I’d read online, its author asked if I’d read Julius Lester. An old man, my steel-trap memory has corrosion problems, but the name rang a rusty bell. I remember seeing Lester’s byline in the Village Voice back in the Seventies, and I had some vague recall of him working on radio. But poetry? No, I had no idea he wrote any poetry. I hit a quick web search, and Julius Lester as it turns out was a multi-hyphenate: author of many books in several fields, social activist, college professor, photographer, critic, broadcasting host, and folk-scare-era folk singer. Reading about him I realized that I had owned one of his books: the early Sixties instruction manual “The 12-String Guitar as played by Leadbelly.”   I’ve long been interested in this 12-string variation of the great folk instrument of my country: the steel-string, flattop acoustic guitar. Leadbelly was a pioneering performer on that instrument.*  I can’t say that today’s piece is fully in his style, but it’s the work of someone who’s heard Leadbelly and some of his more apt descendants. You can hear the short song I call “Robbing an Orchard”  with the audio player gadget below. What, have the fairies run off with the audio player too? Naughty fairies! I give you this alternative enchantment then: a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I heard a counselor at a kids summer camp play a 12-string in the early part of The Sixties around the time that the 12-string-featuring song “Walk Right In”  made it to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.  I note in the linked wiki article on that song, that in 1962 12-string guitars were so scarce that when they decided to use two 12-strings playing together for an even more powerful sound, they had to wait for a second one to be made by the Gibson guitar company. Lester’s book, co-authored with no-less-than Pete Seeger, was a rare publication on how to play this instrument.

Minnesota’s Twin Cities was something of a hotbed of 12-string players in the 20th century, and shortly after I moved there, I bought my first 12-string, a cheap one sold as a sideline in a Musicland record store.