In 1970’s age of the Singer-Songwriter, Poet and folksinger U. Utah Phillips had an anachronistic career. In performance he might sing for only a portion of his time on stage, mixing in story-telling, verse, jokes, and his brand of political advocacy that reflected his even-then old-fashioned connections to Catholic Worker activism and the Industrial Workers of the World.* He would sing his own songs sometimes – and while he apparently didn’t write an awful lot of songs, a couple of them I know are extraordinary. Today’s musical piece, performed for American Labor Day, is one of those.
Here a video of my performance of U. Utah Phillips’ song
.
On the dusty surface of it, “On the Goodnight Loving Trail” is a cowboy song, one of the real ones that recognize that cowboy is a job title after all, not a romantic name for a gunfighter or wandering charismatic cinematic horseman. That type of cowboy song existed of course – Phillips didn’t have to invent it – but his take on the genre is sui generis. Consider the historical appropriation in the song title and the chorus’ refrain from a historical cattle drive route going from Texas to Wyoming. That trail was named for two cattle-driving ramrods: Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. A mere accident of family names, but Phillip’s choice to use them imbues the song from the start with elegiac affection.
Calling the aged cowboy whose cattle drive job fell to being the camp cook “The old woman” is also taken from fact. Is this gendered part of the song’s refrain an inevitable accident, or a choice by Phillips? That the song reinforces the old cook’s abrogation of manhood in a verse’s line about “wearing an apron instead of a name” says that the author wanted to underline that – it’s a choice. If this song isn’t Brokeback Mountain or the sibling of Paul Westerberg’s and the Replacements’ “Androgynous,” I’ll take the leap and say it’s maybe a second-cousin. Is it possible that Westerberg knew Phillips’ song? That’s impossible to say – the underground aquifer of the folk process is dark and damp.
U. Utah Phillips: an IWW member in the days of James Taylor and Carole King
.
I chose to present “On the Goodnight Trail” todaybecause it’s Labor Day weekend here in the U.S. This song about work ends with the ground-truth that the lot of many of us is to use up most of our life in our labors. Years ago, thinking of two specifically American holidays, I wrote this short statement caught commuting itself towards a poem:
The temple of summer is guarded by two pillars:
Memorial Day for those who gave up their lives in war,
and Labor Day for those who gave up their lives in peace.
I’ll flatter myself and say U. Utah Phillips would have liked that one if he had heard it. I did my best to sing his song. Seven years ago I did a musical performance which included these three lines about The Temple of Summer, and if you haven’t had enough Parlando Project music after the video above, here’s an audio player below to play that performance as we ride up to the gates of autumn this weekend.
Welcome back to our regular fare after a spate of summer diversions. And what is it that you’d expect to see here? We take various words, mostly literary poetry, and combine them with original music in differing styles. I’ve done this Project for over nine years, and within the archives here you can wander through nearly 850 of these combinations. Since poetry can be described as words that want to burst into song, such combinations might seem an obvious task – sometimes they are – but I enjoy looking for unusual connections, conversations between tendrils and mycelium deeper in the soil, not just the majestic and visible branches everyone sees.
One frequent supplier of words to be recast in sound here is the seminal American 19th century poet Emily Dickinson. Dickinson’s mind is Shakespearean in its scope, and while her modes of expression vary to meet those needs, much of her poetry sits in a rich intersection between short epigramic verse that superficially seems like it could be stitched as some crewel homily, and unconventional, rebellious, independence of thought.
For example, this lesser-known Dickinson poem: “The spider holds a Silver Ball.” I’ll link the full text of it here. The opening four lines are praise to a spider’s industriousness, with the arachnid – unusually for this poet – standing in here for the highly common Dickinson totem, the bee. Dickinson, the avid gardener with a science-focused education, knows well the necessity of pollinating and honey-keeping bees. In this rarer appearance in her work, the spider is no such creature, for their work is occult or predatory. She praises its web-work none-the-less, that work’s imperial provisioning for prey goes unmentioned. This praise continues in the next stanza. The web is anchored or arises from “Nought” she says. The spider makes its spider silk from a secreted process, its attachment points may be a dimly lit corner unespied, its constructions do not exist until the spider’s efforts create them. But “Nought to Nought” is an omen too for all this effort as the final stanza will tell. Note too, Dickinson genders the spider: “His.” Spiders of either sex spin webs, but this action is male.
A mélange of moss and mushroom. Can you spot the spider’s unperceived hands in the picture? (click to enlarge)
.
I’ll make a leap here: Dickinson, the prolific weaver of 1,789 poems, identifies with this spider. One accounting has this as poem 513, so there are hundreds of poems behind her as she makes this one, and more than a thousand yet to go. The bees in Dickinson’s poems are usually cast as joyfully playing, the spider here is more obsessive. Even the dourest Puritan in her era would know the worth of the bee’s work: flowers, food, unspoiled sweetness. In the final stanza, the spider’s work is destroyed by what Dickinson genders as woman’s work, by housework – as endless as this spider’s spinning. Another leap: I wondered if Dickinson might have composed this poem while busy with housework, secretly engaged in the (gendered by her) masculine work of inessential gossamer creation – no matter if “Nought to Nought” is that work’s fate.
I combined Dickinson’s words with music that partakes of the sound of the 1960s psychedelic genre.* The joy of that kind of expression is the freedom granted to instruments to take novel roles and reconstituted timbres. To a loping 6/8 time, the bass is allowed to rise to sing, the electric piano has been having an episode, the guitars wander onto new paths, an organ breathes, the drums fibrillate. Over this I sing wildly, unconcerned to be overheard. You can hear this performance with the audio player gadget below. What, has that audio player seemingly come to nought? Some ways of viewing this post will suppress the gadget, so I offer this highlighted link which will spin a new tab that has its own audio player so you can listen.
.
*I don’t find this a strained pairing at all. The 19th century American New Thought and Transcendentalist strain was still alive in the Beat and later counter-culture outlooks that arose a century later. Dickinson’s recasting of language and syntax in many of her poems is like to the sonic experiments of psychedelic music, which I’m attracted to for their adventuresomeness rather than their drugs. What is novel about my application of this to Dickinson is that this element of her poetry is under-observed, while it’s more common to view William Blake as “A ‘head’ before his time.”
A funny thing happened on my way to winding-up my Summer diversion series of thoughts on Artificial Intelligence. I’d concluded last time: since current AI was capable of producing musical pieces in popular styles that could pass for human works in casual listening – or plausibly even more exacting listening – those who’d prefer music expressed by humans might need to change the things they look for and value in music. What kind of things? Accept more imperfections in the music, cultivate an appreciation for the humanness inherent in live performance, and increase their consideration of the intent and motivations of the musical organizations they support.
That last point, about more significantly honoring intent, had hardly inscribed itself as a blog post here when a mischievous thought came over me: while AI is created by businesses with commercial intent, human-made music doesn’t have to be. As difficult as it is to refine authentic intent from music made by strangers distributed in a marketplace, could we be fooled about intent by entirely software-generated music? So, what if I asked AI music generating software to produce a protest song? What if I went further and presented it in a misleading context?
Disregarding my environmental footprint for the duration of the experiment, I created a free account on an AI music generating site, and I set about creating a new protest song. Out of the many outrages of 2025 so far, I picked the authoritarian assaults on academic independence which have sought fines/bribes/tribute from some of the U.S.’s most prestigious universities (known in America as “the Ivy League”) while demanding oversight into their operations and academic programs on flimsy pretexts.
Like a lot of AI, the one I used for this works on a “freemium” structure, with limited features for non-paying users. To make a song I only needed to enter in a text prompt (length-limited for free users) describing it. I asked another AI engine to suggest a prompt and asked it to create lyrics for a song (though the song-creating AI site would be glad to generate its own lyrics). The more general AI answer-bot suggested including artists whose style the music generating AI site should seek to emulate. I picked Phil Ochs and the Fugs. I wanted something with real anger and satiric bite.*
I created around six songs. None of them gave me that, even when I tweaked my prompt. What came out was sweet-voiced singers with an attitude of pop-music yearning, or acceptably sorrowful disappointment in their delivery. The AI lyrics did come up with a few phrases that had some charge to them, but the lyrics generally suffered from what I personally call “Horse With No Name” defects.** My prompt specified “gruff,” “angry,” rough” or even “sloppy” to describe the vocal delivery I was looking for, and out came the singers with an air of polished regret, and lyrics that groaned under their attempt at machine-constructed sincerity. The best I could say for the lyrics on the songs? They might pass as modern recording-production-style versions of the parodies created for the Spinal Tap acting company’s folk-music parody It’s a Mighty Wind.***
These results fed into the context I chose to present them in. I wrote a script for a podcast, supposedly devoted to American folk and Americana music. I decided the podcast presenter would be earnest, but a bit removed from the less-commercial segments of American folk music, and so I made her British. She would be portrayed by the machine speech that I use on my writing computer as a proofreading aid.**** As the token human in this enterprise, I’d appear as a hype-man for the Parlando Project.***** Over the next day I wrote the podcast script and recorded it folding in sections of the machine-generated protest songs. I slightly degraded the audio quality for the British host’s dialog, though after I finished I now think I should have done that for my own dialog instead, as I’d be more likely the guest relying on a remote overseas link for the imaginary podcast.
I had fun doing this, trying to gauge how many tells that this wasn’t on the up-and-up I should drop before revealing the near total AI nature of the content in the last minute. For the names of the Americana acts that were purported to be performing the AI songs, I decided to burlesque the names of U.S. 19th century Fireside Poets. I think “Greenleaf-Whittier” is a great name for a band in that genre – failing that, Jeff Tweedy if you’re reading here, you’re welcome to it for the next Wilco album title.
Featuring the exciting new song “University Surrender” you heard on the “Kit That Sounds So Real” podcast.
.
The audio player below will let you hear the 18-minute program. The program opens with a snippet of an AI generated folk instrumental whose prompt I supplied was its title: “Obey in Advance.” Though only a small selection, I think it demonstrates that AI generated music without vocals is particularly “real” sounding. The program continues with parts of three versions of a song called “University Surrender” where the AI program supplied the words, music, and fully produced recording in three slightly different Americana styles it thought appropriate. The three versions resulted as I tried tweaking my text prompt – and while distinct, on repeated listening they seem somewhat “samey” to me. More smooth than I was asking for, “Ralph Waldo Bryant’s” version rising to falsetto delivery almost works for the material despite the pitch control artifacts I can detect in the computer-generated performance – but remember, as I said earlier in this series, the same artifacts are now common with recorded human vocalists in current pop. “Greenleaf-Whittier’s” cover did add one, nice, out-of-leftfield, touch: the flagrantly computer-voiced autotuned opening refrain of the title before continuing into its bouncy two-step country groove. And then there’s “Oliver and the Rolling Homes’” version of “University Surrender” whose arrangement serves up a country-music playlist/station format sound. I was laughing hard as I heard the small-town-worshiping-my truck-my girl -I may get a little drunk sometimes-but I’m a hardworkin’ man-like my daddy sonic approach, but this time holding forth on tenure and syllabus issues. And then there’s “Ivy Towers Bow” that is said to be written and performed by “J. R. Lowell.” The lyrics here were written by an AI chatbot and then those lyrics were given to the AI music generating program to make this song. Musically this one doesn’t give me anything – so generic. I almost didn’t include it, but I decided it was an example that a generate-songs-AI was on par with a text-focused AI when writing lyrics. The final song on the fake podcast might be the one of the group that does the best emulation. If I was listening casually and “E. E. Peterbuilt and the International Harvesters ““The Emperor’s New Chains” came on, I’d think it better than many songs in its style. Oddly enough, the AI program produced it when I goofed and clicked generate when I’d only partly written the prompt “Folk or Americana protest song, gruff voice…” and by not having to lyrically add the academic details that made Oliver and the Rolling Homes version of “University Surrender” so unintentionally hilarious, its Horse-with-No-Name lyric faults are not as exposed. If I wanted to pick one AI song from the ones I generated to fool a careful listener, I’d pick this one. You know you’re in the Uncanny Valley when the guitars have faded out and the robot vocalist gives us a little aside into the still open mic. Spooky.
If you don’t see the audio player gadget to play this imaginary podcast, this highlighted link was human supplied to let you hear it, and will open a new tab with its own audio player.
If my courage and energy hold out, I still want to write one more post about what I call “the guild issues” that concern some artists engendered by plausible AI results.
.
*The AI program didn’t object to those two 20th century folk-rock artists of outrage and cutting satire being supplied for models – but it completely ignored trying to emulate them. When I tried “Bob Dylan” – suggested by the separate AI that’d given me a prompt I could use elsewhere – the song AI immediately refused to do so, presumably due to a specific concern about IP.
**”A Horse With No Name” was a 1971 song, recorded in England by a band led by expatriate Americans. The recording, done by humans, not AI, sounded like someone had anachronistically entered our future and asked AI to “Create a song that sounds exactly like a Neil Young record.” The lyrics went forth despite including some awkward lines like “There were plants and birds and rocks and things,” “the heat was hot,” “’Cause there ain’t no one for to give you pain,” and “Under the cities lies a heart made of ground, but the humans will give no love.” To spare us from more lyrical howlers, the song also featured a lot of repeated “la la la’s” in its chorus, well-performed in a CSN&Y style of harmony.
The song was a substantial hit in both the U.S. and Britain, indicating that it worked as a song for its audience none-the-less.
***Hey, I’m a fan of Spinal Tap. Everyone is! And rating art is a fool’s game – but “It’s a Mighty Wind” is every bit as good, maybe better.
****The “read aloud” feature in the current versions of Microsoft Word is a huge aid to my self-proofreading. With my neuro-wiring, it lets me catch a great many errors I’d otherwise miss, and using the female British voice enhances the “hearing this anew, as if I didn’t write it” factor that makes it so effective.
*****The stuff I say in the middle of the satiric podcast concerning the Parlando Project is how I actually feel about the nine-plus years of stuff I’ve put out here.
There’s an undercurrent of grief beneath life. I don’t say this as a sentimentalist, it’s just there. This doesn’t preclude joy – it may in fact demand it.
I awoke at dawn today, August drizzle falling. I connected briefly with a livestream of the candlelight anniversary memorial service in Hiroshima,* and then shared a few tears with my living wife. Tears from each of us mixed on my face, shed for my late wife now dead for 24 years this morning. After she left for work, I took to my daily joy and hopped on a bike and rode to breakfast under gray skies without remaining rain.
I usually read the news with breakfast, a long habit – and I still do, though there’s little joy and much sense of loss in it these days. I took an old pocket music player with me (which no longer works except for the radio)** so that I could listen on air to the children of a recently assassinated state legislator memorialize her and her husband killed alongside her. They played their parent’s favorite songs mixed with sharing stories of hearing those songs in the back seat of a minivan while all sang along in flagrant voices. See what I mean: grief demands joy.
Perhaps you don’t. I express myself awkwardly, some will wonder what I’m on about. Let me look at it from the perspective of absent connection: the man who has gained some wealth by bamboozling someone or by force of power, often has the briefest of joys. The one who seeks joy in the suppression of others, has a meagre joy constructed out of a comparison to other’s pain inflicted. Grief for them might be a weakness, a sure sign of submission. I, a nobody in this world of power, can laugh at myself writing this and tell myself I should stop trying to be mistaken for Kahlil Gibran.
Today’s musical piece came about when someone shared a poem by Elinor Wylie called “Wild Peaches.” Wylie, a contemporary of Edna St. Vincent Millay, gained an audience during the last decade to be called The Twenties. She was born into a successful family steeped in political rectitude, but her love life became a national scandal. She eloped with the son of an admiral at age 20, but soon left him for a married, older lawyer by the name of Wylie.*** The abandoned husband committed suicide after she left him, and the lawyer Wylie and Elinor fled to England and lived undercover under an assumed name. Eventually the couple married and were able to return to the U.S. in time to have that relationship too fall apart.
Hanging out with the East Coast Modernists, the now Elinor Wylie launched her poetry career. The scandals likely helped and hurt that career, but Millay and some other women poets were writing with complexity in melodic verse about eros (and what surrounds it) – and for a while they found readers hoping to understand “the New Woman” of the 1920s. As it turned out their careers were helped and hurt by many of them writing rhyming verse in metrical forms. Even before Modernism, rhyming verse was already becoming associated with less serious poetry, and women writing about eros were judged less substantial than men writing about the supposed important things. The oncoming middle of the 20th century was to be very concerned with important things – many deadly through new bombs or other means.
“Wild Peaches” was published as a series of four sonnets, and I’ll link the full text here. My performance is only of the first one, which I think can stand alone and is representative. Rewardingly musical, the first impression one might have is of a poem that’s kin to the famous Yeats’ poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Instead of an Irish bee-loud glade and house of wattles made, the poem’s voice is describing an Eden, a locus solus, a blessed arcadia, in the south-eastern coast of the U.S.**** But wait, there’s an undercurrent.
This is the poem of a woman who had twice eloped – the second time was subject to an international “womanhunt” – and neither partner stuck. The voice of the poem knows full well flee and exile may the entry and exit point of such an Eden. I love the ironic turn the sonnet takes even within its octet when it goes all Frank O’Hara – though written before that poet or Disney’s Davey Crocket had come into existence – with the man taking to wearing a coonskin cap and the fleeing couture-debutante clad in homespun. The exultation of “We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown” is delicious, moving from Exodus past the parted sea to drowning.
Elinor Wylie, not wearing homespun fabric
The sextet seems to offer more Eden – but wait, the best season is Autumn, the season of The Fall, and we are left with the abrupt movement from wild fruity abundance to a subsistence bringing death, and a hunter whose shot will not miss.
Oh mercy, I’m going to go all Gibran again: death will surely win one battle, though love can win many battles. That’s what I’ve found – and though she died young, Elinor Wylie later seems to have found her most successful marriage the third time around.
After our last piece where I accompanied my speaking ghost with lots of electric guitar, today’s piece is full of bowed strings: cello, violin, and viola da gamba. In secret I’ll tell you I played most of the string parts for my Carolina Eve in Exile with my MIDI guitar. I’ve taken to calling pieces such as this “Punk Orchestral,” in that I’m not getting overly fancy with the rank and order of calling these instruments up. You can hear my song made from the first sonnet in Elinor Wylie’s “Wild Peaches” with the audio player below. No player? You’ve not been driven out of the garden, it’s just that some ways of viewing this blog will suppress it, and so I’ll supply this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
.
*For several years after my late wife’s death, I didn’t notice that it happened on Hiroshima Day, but I’ve found that linking a single death with the death of thousands underlines my point about humanity’s shared undercurrent of grief and loss.
**I could have Internet-streamed the children’s memorial radio program of course, but I decided to use the old device because it reminded me of the era I shared with my late wife.
***The imp of the perverse in me can’t help but think of the lawyer’s family name with the animated coyote and his well-funded Amazon Prime account who is none-the-less doomed. We find that funny.
****We can locate this poem’s Eden from its fruits. The wild peaches indicate it’s southeastern as that non-native fruit is only cultivated below the Mason-Dixon line. Wild peaches are the remains of abandoned orchards or animal-carried/buried/excreted seed-pit refugees of cultivated fruit. The poem’s other fruit, scuppernong, is a wild white grape native to the Carolinas.
August brings me this triple obligation: it’s the anniversary of the public launch of the Parlando Project, of my late wife’s death, and of the atomic bombings — three things varying in nearness, scope, and heart-weight. Two of them plainly have to do with grief — and poetry’s connection to matters of death and survival is there to be examined too.
Today’s musical piece isn’t exactly literary poetry, as its survival can largely be laid to singing, not printing and the murmuring eye.* “The Unquiet Grave” is one of those works from that prolific author Anonymous. Their publisher? The memories of people who wanted something to sing. The version of “The Unquiet Grave” that you can hear below was collected by Cecil Sharpe in Great Britain from the singing of a “Mrs. Lucy White at Hambridge, Somerset, 6 August 1904.” This is a portentous coincidence: I just went to the book where I saw that version to gather the note on its collection, and that date of the year is the very day my late wife died; the year of collection, the same that the house my late wife and I bought and I still live in was first occupied; and the place it was sung “Somerset,” says August in its sound.
With all the words flowing through the Internet, you still might want to pause and listen when the ghost begins to speak.
.
The story in the ballad is compressed, but it opens with a lover’s mourning. The next event, the dead partner becoming present and speaking is not just supernatural, it’s also an empirical report of what many of those in grief experience.
Just last week I was listening to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross interviewing podcaster/comic Marc Maron. As they talked, ostensibly about Maron’s career, the two bonded over their own recent partner’s deaths — Maron’s a couple of years ago, Gross’ earlier this year. They each shared that their dead spouse’s presence and voice had vividly returned to them, and each averred that this experience was not horror-show scary — rather it was, while remaining strange, comforting. I can remember one of my own experiences around a year after my wife’s death. I was becoming involved with my present wife around this time, and I felt it awkward that here was the presence of my dead wife returning. I don’t know if I spoke to my dead wife’s presence out loud, but then in such a spirit world our conversations likely needed no sound or syntax, only the sense, and that sense was a common realization between us that it was awkward, but that this new complexity was fine. More than speaking — do ghosts laugh? Do we laugh in their presence? I think we both might have that night.
I’ve always felt that “The Unquiet Grave” has a practical, darkly humorous, intent. If ghosts have additional knowledge, extra-existential wisdom, what the ghost in the song shares is that one can cherish the dead, even hear them speak, but that they are changed forever — and the living can, should, change too. When the ghost says that you wouldn’t want to kiss the corpse’s lips, the gothic joke on deadly “mourning breath” almost writes itself.
The words in Lucy White’s version, which I remained faithful to, somewhat fumble the lyric’s closing statement. What the final exchange the lovers share means to say is “When the autumn leaves fall from the trees/and (then) spring up green again.” I just sang what was on the page, but that fumble is, I now think, also exemplary of grief, it’s misdirection. Grief’s disruption, like a slight-of-hand magician: something is here (like what you meant to say), and then it’s, poof, gone.
*It’s hard to date the ur-versions of folk songs, though many were printed in the 18th and 19th centuries, first by commercial broadsheet publishers and then by collectors and song-catchers like Cecil Sharpe and Francis James Child. Child collected “The Unquiet Grave” in America in the late 19th century and numbered it 78 in his ballad collection. It’s always seemed to me that “The Unquiet Grave” (also known in versions as “Cold Blows the Wind”) is an extended variation of one of the oldest fragments of English language poetry“Westron Wynde,” which has been dated to the Middle Ages, plausibly to quite early in that era.
It took me an extra beat or two to continue this series, because I soon see myself as inappropriately going on too long about myself — this recounting influences and small events, even if personally meaningful, starts to seem out of proportion. I don’t know if there’s another way to write memoir than to engage in that “objects closer to the mirror” distortion, but I can’t help but think it’d be more appropriate if there was some greater payoff in achievement. The simple fact of the matter is that these are not stories of a performer’s early days before finding a notable level of success with audiences — more its opposite.
I’m grateful for the hundreds that might read one of these posts, for the thousands of times someone has listened to one or another of the audio pieces over the years. I try and honor your attention by being respectful of your time. I’m not so much afraid of embarrassing myself as I’m afraid of wasting your time.
A number of bands that came out of Minnesota in the Eighties did gather national attention — the scene punched above its weight — but as in most artistic or commercial activities, even a successful scene had many more failures-to-thrive than notable acts.* This band of poets, Dave and I, wasn’t going to be one of the notables. Today’s performance was an inflection point for that.
We’d recorded our official album, which was released on cassette tape for lack of capital funds to get LPs pressed.** The local alt-weekly, The Twin Cities Reader, reviewed it, and its cover linked us, the LYL Band, with a new record from The Time.
The Time article promised on the front page teaser was a longer feature in the same issue. Great, but too forgotten too often local rock band Fine Art and their guitarist Colin Mansfield gets mentioned here too.
.
As reviews go, Paul Fishman Maccabee’s “So engagingly out-of-tune and cheerily offensive: it could well become a cult item” wasn’t exactly Robert Sheldon’s “Bob Dylan is one of the most distinctive stylists to play in a Manhattan cabaret in months,” but it allowed us a modicum of creditability. We were trying to evolve from a pair of acoustic folkies to an electric rock band (the recording was largely played on electric instruments), but we were doing that in a meandering way. A neighborhood guy, Jonathan Tesdell played electric guitar — and, we were assured, conga drums. I hoped he might become our analog to the Fugs Ken Weaver as he joined up with us.
At the time of that Reader review we got an offer to play at the University of Minnesota. We took them up on it. We were practicing regularly now, trying to solidify our repertoire. This could be, if not our break, our foot in the door.
A small blip in our ascension dropped before the show date: the University called and asked what kind of music we should be billed as. I think Dave gave them a capsule description of our weirdness — and Dave’s an articulate guy — whatever he said it included the genre label “Punk Folk.”
That week as I walked across the never-named-that John Berryman bridge to the U, I noticed the posters along that span and on into the campus. They said “local PUNK FUNK.” Typo? Mishearing? I don’t know, but if Punk Folk wasn’t yet a common genre category in the early Eighties, Punk Funk was a term Rick James was using at this time for his work, and in the less-commercial indie scene the term was used to describe acts like James Chance’s NYC No-Wave skinny-tie-white-guy James Brown extrapolation. We were a trio expanding from acoustic instruments to electric ones without a bass player or a drummer.
Okay.
Photo in the poster by Renee Robbins. L to R: Dave Moore holding my tiny CasioTone that was my first synthesizer (it was also a calculator). Jonathan Tesdell, the new guy in the group and 25th Century Quaker, and Frank Hudson trying to look like he had Jazz chops, which he didn’t. Yes, our backup singers “The Cookies” did serve cookies and cider to the audience. The Replacements confounded audiences at key times in their career, but they never tried that.
.
The day of the concert came. We loaded Dave’s newly purchased used Farfisa combo organ and my homemade speaker cabinet for it, Jonathan’s Firebird electric guitar and Roland amp, my sound-hole pickup 12-string acoustic and heavily modified Japanese Sixties’ electric guitar along with my Fender Princeton amp into our rattle-trap old cars. On arriving, we found the concert location was a broad stage, the width of the room in front, with audience seats for a few hundred.*** The venue had supplied a full-sized Yamaha grand piano for Dave to play. I recall it had a paper band across the keyboard, which I joked was like the “sanitized for your protection” bands on a hotel toilet.
The audience arrived, accumulating to not a full-house. My memory isn’t clear on this, perhaps just a third or a quarter of the seats. Even so, that could mean at a minimum there were 80 people there, and unlike the shows at Modern Times, most weren’t folks we knew from the neighborhood. I don’t know what Dave or Jonathan felt, but I was hoping to put on a good show, to put forward our intent: some satire and civic points, some music with the not-necessarily-perfect, but perfectly-necessary energy of the still underground indie music movement that was also called around then “College Rock.” How well would we go over with this barely-Rock, with this audience, at this college?
I was on the stage performing when my nerve started to fail. That came during the song that the audience showed the most response too: four-songs-in we played a number that I think we informally called “Booker T” or “Memphis Thing”, an instrumental based on a nice riff I’d come up with as something of a concession to new-member Jonathan, the non-poet who wasn’t much of a lyrics guy. I could sense the audience perking up with that piece’s groove, hopes out there in the seats that things were going to lock in for more of a Rock show. Did some of the audience come for the poster’s Punk Funk? Did they at least expect something more like the other young Twin Cities rock bands that would play the Longhorn, 7th Street Entry or Duffy’s? Whatever, I knew “No, it’s not going to lock in. We’re going to do more folk songs about social issues and weird observations from two poets.” Not being able to change that, however true the set list was to our concept, dismayed me — yet I needed to carry on, while confidence was draining away.
I recall those feelings hanging on after the concert. Rather than having stubborn pride in presenting our band and its shambling, eclectic, cabaret setlist, I felt I’d let the band down. If Dave, the better performer felt any of this, he didn’t show it, and Jonathan , as ever, was by nature a quiet, pacific guy. I remember sitting in the car after loading back out immersed in a sort of punk folk funk, and on the radio — of all things — came Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile/Slight Return.” I, the guitar-playing poet. heard him in my mood not as the obligatory guitar-great Hendrix, but as the lyricist Hendrix, the kid who’d scrawled spaceship doodles and poetry in his school-lined notebooks.
I stand up next to a mountain
And I chop it down with the edge of my hand
I pick up all the pieces and make an island
Might even raise a little sand
That’s what artists do. We are at essence pretentious, that thing we fear, that prideful sin we are sometimes called on. And the charge, that indictment, is sometimes true: we fail, or sometimes certain audiences fail, sometimes we lack conviction, sometimes we are convicted, a just verdict. Still, we think we can raise mountains, raise up islands from our imagination. Sometimes that imagination lets others climb on those mountains, take shelter on those islands — other times we fall through our dreams. When nothing is beneath our feet, are we falling or flying? Hendrix continued, singing:
I didn’t mean to take up all your sweet time
I’ll give it right back one of these days
When I took up your time today with the continuing shaggy dog story of my band of poets, I asked if it was worthwhile telling this story about a band that didn’t make much of an impact. Here’s a plausible reason: despite that outcome, I’d do it again — maybe harder next time— and the music-making with fellow poet Dave Moore continued, continues. I know some of my readers are younger and are making music or other art within a career that doesn’t yet know it’s apogee. Have courage: you’re falling or flying.
Here are two pieces from a lo-fi tape of that U of M concert in 1981: Dave’s adaptation of a poem by Kevin FitzPatrick “Bugs in the System” and my own Surrealist summer meditation “China Mouth.” You can hear them with the graphical audio players below, but if you don’t see those players, the highlighted titles are links that when clicked on will open a new tab with an audio player.
And here I am singing the third song in the concert’s set list, “China Mouth”, a song of Summer discontent. The “Memphis Thing” groove-oriented instrumental I write about above was the next song we played.
.
*An off-the-top-of-my-head Eighties Twin Cities list: Prince, The Time, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Soul Asylum, Babes in Toyland, Alexander O’Neal, The Jayhawks, Flyte Tyme (Jimmy Jam/Terry Lewis, largely as important producers). And like most scenes, the above acts are a quick list of those someone elsewhere might have heard of, when there’s a list at least as long of good acts that remained at local hero status. Given the LYL Band’s penchant for satire, I could also have mentioned that the Eighties saw the Twin Cities grow a substantial comedy scene, one participant in that became our bass player for a while.
**I believe it was the first cassette-only release in the Twin Cities scene. I duplicated the cassettes myself, and Dave made the packaging for them. I got the idea from ROIR in New York City who in 1981 put out its first cassette-only release (James Chance and the Contortions). Their release and ours followed the introduction of the Sony Walkman, a small battery-powered portable cassette with headphones that was a cultural artifact of the era. I wrote a press release for our recording that exclaimed “Teach your Sony Walkman to crawl!”
***Looking online today I see there are two possible Wiley Hall rooms, one that seats just under 700 and another 362.
It’s known that Emily Dickinson played piano, but my scattershot scholarship doesn’t inform me if she played any other instrument, or exactly what kind of music she played or appreciated. Many of her poems use hymn or ballad meter, and I was still a young person when I first was told that you can sing many a Dickinson poem to the tune of “Amazing Grace,”“The Yellow Rose of Texas,” or “The Theme to Gilligan’s Island.”
That factoid tells us that her metrical musical inspiration is hard to pin down, for in her 19th century a great deal of music followed that form. By our time, ballad meter is heard as presenting a certain kind of old-timey folk-music vibe — in Dickinson’s 19th century a wide variety of more or less contemporary music used it.* Did she ever sing her poems, or perhaps noodle a tune on piano while composing poetry? I know of no accounts. Still, when I ran into this early Dickinson poem, written by her as a twenty-something before the bulk of her poems followed during her highly productive thirties, I couldn’t help but think of it as being made to be sung.
“I had a guinea golden” is a poem about loss of friends or lovers, and it’s not hard to think it a characteristic work of someone in their twenties. Dickinson grew up in a dynamic time, in a small college town. Her school-and-college-age friends would, as they likely would today, be due to scatter to occupational and romantic opportunities during that decade of life, and the biographic data on Emily Dickinson would give us a goodly number of separations from meaningful people in her life during this time. From memory, I can think of only one who was separated by death in this part of Dickinson’s life (Benjamin Franklin Newton) — and I mention that because it may be impossible to be certain about how seriously Dickinson took this poem’s lament at losses.
My suspicion is that “I had a guinea golden” is layered. That it catalogs more than one loss (the guinea coin, the singing robin, the bright star) and takes time to note that each of these losses are not generally the loss of wealth, bird song, or a starry firmament seems to say to me that these losses are less serious than they feel. In letters to those Dickinson longed to hear from, she often takes a stance that she feels betrayed or onerously deprived of contact from her separated friends. In the informality of friendly correspondence that reads as playful there, and so it could well be here in this poem too. As we reach the poem’s — now song’s — conclusion, I suspect this lawyer’s daughter (unlike our country’s mad king) well knows that unforgiveable treason is not actually indictable just because someone has traveled away from Amherst. But even if playful, the piece does speak to how these losses feel, and in performance I chose not to wink at the pain of the symbolic losses portrayed.
Back in 1775 this mad king was taxing and tariffing Americans out of spite, and sending government troops to “protect” American cities that wanted no part of his chaotic misrule. This was the gold guinea coin that might have paid those troops.
.
Well frankly, I was glad to be able to use the limited instrument of my voice once again to record anything. Since late June I have had some kind of flu or respiratory bug that had me greatly fatigued, coughing, and so brain-fogged I could read only superficially. I’m not sure that intentional irony has yet come back fully online, so I performed “I had a guinea golden” as a serious lament. I’ll let Dickinson’s words and the listener provide the layered context. You can hear my performance with the audio player gadget you should see below. No player visible? “Treason!” “Exile!” “Avicide!” No, it’s just that some ways of viewing this blog suppress the player, and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
.
*Poets too, including ones we know Dickinson read, used the format for literary ballads not necessarily meant to be sung.
Poet William Butler Yeats had interests and a life that spanned times and poetic styles. His earliest poems whole-heartedly exhibit 19th century romanticism and prosody, but like the English Pre-Raphaelites he sought to vividly revive elements of the deeper past while doing so. His interests beyond poetry ranged as well. Last time I performed Yeats, I mentioned he had deep interests in esoteric magic, and yet the same man had a firm grounding in civic poetry while supporting an Irish cultural revival and independence from England. A poet with an already established style, he crossed paths with the American and British Modernists early in their revolution, and his later poetry shows that rather than getting his back up about their changes, he adapted some of their make-it-new approaches. Yeats employed influential American Modernist critic Ezra Pound during Modernism’s rise, and while he dipped his toes into fascist movements,* unlike Pound he seems to have drawn back from that.
Today’s piece, “Meru,” is a late poem in Yeats’ career. I find it balancing the worldly and spiritual, and on no more authority than my own necessary to come to grips to perform it, I see it as commenting on the rise of rapacious authoritarians contemporary with its composition in the 1930s.** Here’s a link to the poem as Yeats published it.
“Meru” is a sonnet, a rather regular one structurally. Though the word we use for this lyric poetry form literally means “little song,” many sonnets are hard for me to perform with music. Their length is good, and lyric poetry in this context means that they focus on a compressed scope of time and experience — but the form rarely uses refrains, a powerful, almost indispensable, tactic for song attractiveness. Seeking a good musical structure, I divided Yeats one-stanza poem into four verses, with refrains after verses two and four.
The song form I reformed Yeats’ sonnet into. Note the chords shown are what I fretted on guitar, but I used a capo on fret 3, so the piano, bass, and the song song sound in Eb.
.
What do I think, as I chose to perform this, the poem conveys?
I like Yeats opening here, with its circular word-choice of “hooped,” for describing civilization’s shared beliefs. I’m unaware that this is any kind of established British Isles idiom, and the choice of this scene-setting word seems to invoke something like a key-ring or perhaps a wooden barrel or cask — and in the last image, that’s a construction that can fall apart. The opening statement continues to say civilization’s order is only an illusion, but the first three lines end by reminding us that such creations of the human mind are none-the-less great movers of reality and life. I’ll come back to that at the end today.
The second, four-line, group is remarkable in its ferocity, and I think it’s a description of mankind’s often perverse desire to gather more power, more wealth, and perhaps something they vaingloriously ascribe as rough justice while doing so. The ending line of this section serves as my first refrain: “The desolation of reality” that results from this.
Third segment, as I read it, brings in a distinct element of Yeats’ occult beliefs, starting by reminding us that the “desolation of reality” is a repeating motif of history and the fall of empires. But what’s with the two mountains introduced? Everest is Earth’s highest mountain, but it’s remoteness and location in Tibet links it with a late 19th century form of occultism: Theosophy. Theosophy is too large a subject to go into here,*** but its founder posited that certain Ascended Masters located in Tibet held onto ancient secret wisdom becoming super-human in the process. Mount Meru is more obscure to most readers I suspect: it’s a symbolic mountain, and like other symbols such as Mount Ararat, the Garden of Eden, or the entrance to the underworld, it is not an actual fixed map point, but is often referred to as being in some part of the Himalayan region. Some read the poem’s plural hermits as two hermits, one-per-mountain, and Theosophy holds to two current Ascended Masters.
I suspect these Theosophical details were in Yeats’ mind as he wrote his poem, but I don’t know if he ever wrote about the genesis of this sonnet. And luckily for most readers (and listeners today) you don’t need to know any of that. After a description of desolation of nations, I think the image of two or more hermits, ascetics living naked in snow and ice shelters in famously remote places stands as an image of the other-worldly mystic surviving with nothing but belief and the knowledge that the world’s disasters are part of some reoccurring process driven by human greed for power and wealth. Is this removed survival our fall-back in today’s world of raging authoritarians, blinded in their ravening?
And once more, I suspect the aged Yeats was thinking of his own age, of the rising of fascist authoritarians then, not just specifics of Theosophy — as a poet, one uses the images in one’s cupboard. This aged singer certainly thinks of those men and the desolation they cause as I sing Yeats poem this month. The poem ends — and I refrain on this — with a twist on the old saw: “it’s always darkest before the dawn.” Chillingly, naked in the snow, Yeats has as his dawn consolations that all tyrants (and alas, all mankind’s) glory and monuments are gone.****
Is this fate? Is this prophecy? Is this inevitable? I’m no Ascended Master — if you are, you tell me. I’m just a composer drafted by words and asked to sing them. But I promised I’d come back to the “manifold illusion” of peace, of some sustainable rule without unleashed tyranny. “Man’s life is thought” the poem said. A diverted American poet turned President once spoke of a conception, a particular manifold illusion, imagined on: “Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” If enough believe, the mage’s trick works. I’d rather it be a kind trick.
You can hear my musical performance of Yeats’ “Meru” with the audio player gadget below. Has the audio player become subject to the desolation of reality? No, just some ways of reading this blog suppress it. This highlighted link will conjure up a new tab with it’s own audio player so you can hear it.
.
*I’m not a Yeats scholar, and there are surely many who know more about the man and these political matters. While disappointing, I was not surprised to see he found some connections in fascistic groups, as trappings of cultural nationalism and nostalgia for some mythic past were widespread then, just as they remain in the fascistic nationalists now crowding under the aged wings of my country’s self-fancied mad king.
**Because of the later date of publication, this poem may not be in the Public Domain in the US, and this entirely non-commercial project almost always uses work in that class out of respect for author’s rights. I’m making an exception here out of a renewed commitment to civic poetry in the current world.
***Here’s more info on Theosophy if you want to wade in deeper. Having had some interest in esoteric beliefs as a young person, I carried some knowledge of it as I encountered this poem. As the Wiki article points out, Theosophy continues to influence various “New Age” ideas, but I’m not a believer.
****Some readers of the poem hold the “His” in the last line to be a godhead. I’m not sure why that would be. Could it be the then traditional capitol letter at the beginning of the poetic line leads to that reading? Or is it some element of Theosophical mythology? There’s another, non-cap, “his” in the poem, and I read that pronoun, along with its partner, to refer to elements of mankind.
It occurred to me: should I try to sing a version of Bob Dylan’s “I Pity the Poor Immigrant?” Afterall, I, without a plan, seem to be performing songs from Dylan’s 1967 LP John Wesley Harding recently, and that song is one of the more noted ones from the album. And immigrants, and immigration, are currently a preoccupation of my country’s inept and callous administration.
Dylan might have been writing of his own family’s immigrant history in this song — being second-generation from his grandparents emigration from the Russian Empire and Turkey. Furthermore, he grew up in the iron-ore mining area of Minnesota, a place full of folks with wide-ranging immigrant backgrounds. Given Dylan’s, and folk-song’s in general concern for the underdog, one might expect this to be a song of empathy for these close-in immigrants.
Yet when Dylan sang his song in 1967, still a young man,* there’s a duality in its presentation. The immigrants within it are portrayed then as poor not only in wealth, but also in spirit. For all of Dylan’s genius, the voice that sings this song largely speaks about how the immigrants, who’d be the elders of his town and family, are stunted in their outlook. Dylan may be a genius, but this could be the disappointed vision of a young person who sees the faults and failures there. That’s what many young people, even those who aren’t geniuses, do, and it’s an important task.
His singing on this 1967 version is calm, not accusatory — at moments even sounding concerned as he decries the immigrants fallen state. If the harmonicas play the skeleton keys to the song’s interior, the passionate timbre of his playing on that instrument in the song may well be saying he feels sorrowful about the situation. The performance doesn’t lay any blame on poverty, exploitation, or the hard road of feeling the need to leave one’s homeland to find succor with strangers. Dylan, whatever he’s expressing here, likely knows these factors. Perhaps he assumes we do too.
I think Dylan’s aim was to confound the expected here — to write a great song instead of a good one, some mere piece of civic songcraft.
I’m not a young man, and I would have to go back to relatives I never knew, and who therefore can’t be blamed for imperfect mentorship or spiritual poverty. And I know from my life, and in my time, what immigrants contribute to my country. Some of course are noticeable success stories, but I think too of the many who do the hardest and least-rewarded work of the nation. I’m hesitant to pick a bone with the quality of their spiritual insight while they are trudging through unglamourous work — but even more so in 2025 when they also get slammed by disreputable politicians as criminals, scofflaws, swindlers, and parasites. I’m sure there are some immigrants who are those things, but I’m also quite sure that those slathering on those broad charges include in themselves a good measure of those failings — and are so eagerly pointing at immigrants to divert focus on that.
So, this is how I came to create this new performance of Dylan’s song, one for our time and situation. I changed only a few words, but by phrasing and refocusing my aim from Dylan’s original performance, I tried to illuminate those opposing scapegoating forces to the immigrant’s lot.** I may not even have made a (downgraded) good song of it, but I got some things off my chest I felt I had to say.
I can’t identify all the sources for the pictures used here. Alas, my stock photo library was bereft of any suitable pictures.
.
.
*When he wrote this, Dylan had only young children, ones not yet able to judge him and his generation’s failings. Has an older Dylan, now a grandfather, revisited this song? AFAIK, no. Expert Dylanologists may have more info, but Wikipedia says it was last performed during the latter legs of the Rolling Thunder tour many decades ago, and then as a bizarre rollicking up-tempo jaunt.
As I said recently when a reader/listener pointed out that I may have completely misread Blake’s “Holy Thursday,” my theories about what was behind Dylan’s creation of this song are in no way meant to be definitive. They are just what I hear in it, and feel free to think my new recasting of the song is a sacrilege. I’ll plead that one part of Dylan’s genius is that he sees fit to approach his own work in highly different ways, and I’m just doing what I learned from the master. You should feel something to sing a song, and this is what I felt. Feel different? Sing the song yourself.
**Even fewer words in my plan than you’ll hear in the video, as some other different words slipped in by accident while singing. Here’s a link to the original lyric. Changing the song’s concluding couplet is the only indictable premeditated felony, and the video underlines my approach to make the sins that Dylan’s 1967 performance directed at only the immigrants as more of a dialectic. An accidental, unintended, change that I regret in this version: “Shatter like a glass” is inferior to the original “Shatter like the glass,” and looses the possible intra-album connection with the glass that has fingers pressed up against it in “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.”
Unlike its Songs of Innocence partner, William Blake’s other “Holy Thursday” poem has no plausible ambiguity in its view of childhood poverty. One reader wrote to remind me that the Songs of Innocence “Holy Thursday” poem shows a peaceful, happy scene that I misread. They could be right! Allen Ginsberg famously thought Blake appeared to him and instructed the later poet by reading “Ah, Sunflower” to him, but what instructs me to see undercurrents in the first Holy Thursday poem is reading more about what we believe we know about Blake’s beliefs. Reader Alan also reminds us the two poems’ connections should be examined — and that’s what I’ll do today, along with sharing a performance of Blake’s second song about Ascension Day.
As Blake illuminated and printed these two poems. One of the things I always admired about him: he was a self-contained, DIY, artist who learned what he needed to do to manifest his art.
.
Let’s jump to the second poem, the one from Songs of Experience.* Childhood poverty is an undercurrent in the first — would Blake even expect his readers to know that the children in the first poem are charity cases (many modern readers do not) — but poverty is foreground in the second. Blake takes on the mode of a Biblical prophet in this second poem and charges against the civic and/or religious state pour down from the start of it. Holy Thursday happens in springtime, but it’s “eternal winter” here. Its final stanza is preaching that this is not the natural order, and that in a polity of mankind’s natural state, the Earth’s fecundity would provide food for all.
I’m not sure we invariably think of Blake, for whom a spiritual element is clearly present, as a writer of civic poetry, as a political creature — yet modern scholars have subsequently delved into that element of the poet. Ginsberg, a civic poet of my youth, recognized a fellow civic poet in the prophetic Blake, and to deal with that is not to deny the spiritual element. I myself am no more a fine scholar than I’m a fine musician. In both professions, I’m simply and old man who does what he can in those fields haphazardly because he cannot wait longer at this point in my life to perfect those arts.
How do I currently think the two “Holy Thursday” poems connect? I don’t want to put words into Alan’s mouth, he’s likely sharper than I can draw him, but he or others may believe that first poem is happy, innocent children in safe, supportive clerical care, uttering praise to their religious saviors/supervisors and that institution’s godhead and nation. And the second poem? Perhaps either a progression or another facet degraded from that? I’d say there’s no reason not to think that the two poems are happening at the same time in the same Britain — so, the two situations simultaneously comment on each other. The wards in the first poem may live better than the utter misery of the poor in the second, but they are part of the same civic system, the same “land of poverty.” The thunder within the ward’s song that ascends briefly to heaven in the first, is the fecund rain that feeds all in the yet to be manifested world of the second. I’d summarize that Blake thinks that poverty and its partial charitable mitigations aren’t in opposition, but rather that poverty is a civic construction like the imperfect charity schools were. What Blake sees as opposition (in both poems) would be some Rosseauian natural state as the proper order of society. Yes! I realize that’s idealistic, that’s there’s no actual political party or plan ready to implement such an Eden. You can call it a fantasy. You’ll have good arguments to do so.
In my country, in my time, we’re at one of those political moments where forces in power wish to remind us that the poor are a disreputable burden, feeding off the productive citizens, wasting our resources of freedom and pleasure. You can call that a fantasy too. You’ll have good arguments to do so. But unlike the former view, this one’s on offer, even in the process of being implemented.
I’ve “progressed” from acoustic guitar to electric guitar in today’s “Holy Thursday,” along with piano and percussion. You can hear it with the audio player below, or if that player is obscured in a field of thorns, you can get a rain check with this alternative highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
.
*Text linked here in case the picture of Blake’s original illuminated plate is too hard to make out.
Frank Hudson 