"I woke up this morning, to watch the rising sun,
Yes I woke up this morning, saw that rosy-finger'd morn....."
Two Blues Articles from Music Maker.
Article 1: THE BLUES
Between them, Paul Oliver and Sam Charters have contributed enormously to our knowledge of the blues and its history. I am indebted to them both; is was Sam Charters’ book, The Country Blues, borrowed from a library in rural Somerset at around the beginning of the nineteen sixties, that first inspired me to study and listen systematically to the real country blues, and helped me to broaden my musical tastes from rock ‘n’ roll and skiffle (although both types of music were themselves heavily influenced by the blues). I wasn’t one of the lucky ones who saw Muddy Waters on his first UK tour in 1958, but I was listening to John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins at least a year before I went to university in the early sixties.
So what are my credentials for writing about the blues? I lived and worked in Africa from 1971-1977. My collection of African musical instruments is in the Horniman Museum, together with a film I made and some field recordings. I have myself recorded in Memphis, sung the blues in Clarksdale, soaked up the music in the Mississippi Delta and in New Orleans. I have seen many of the great blues singers performing “live” and have talked with a number of them over the years. I started writing about the blues back in 1964, and made a student film with an original blues soundtrack commentary ( I wrote many of the lyrics) by John Lee Hooker in 1964-1965. I had my own weekly blues radio show in Sydney, Australia for two years when I was living there in the nineties; it was called “The Blues Is Back”. The Blues means many different things to different people! On radio you have to cater for many varied tastes.
My favourite singers of the blues are John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Big Joe Williams, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Blind Willie Johnson, Son House, Leadbelly, Sonny Boy Williamson (II), Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers (with Noah Lewis), Memphis Minnie, Big Mama Thornton, Ma Rainey, Tommy McLennan, John Jackson, Bukka White, Sleepy John Estes, Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, Magic Sam, Big Joe Turner, Ray Charles, Fred McDowell, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson- not all of them blues singers as such. Readers may be surprised that I haven’t listed Charlie Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leroy Carr, Bessie Smith or B B King in my top twenty. I love their music too, and in some cases their guitar playing is unparalleled, but I have prioritised those vocalists who have meant the most to me over the last 45 years. I haven’t listed my favourite boogie pianists, because that’s a slightly different genre, although closely related. These are some of the singers I plan to discuss and profile in my series of articles on the blues.
I also love the music of many white singers who sometimes sang the blues with great soul and feeling: Jimmie Rodgers, The Carter Family, Hank Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Billy Lee Riley, Doc Watson, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones.
I have sometimes wondered what role British song played in the development of the blues and spirituals. William (Billy Walker) was committed to the Welsh Baptist Church of his ancestors. Although born in South Carolina in 1809, his 1835 publication “The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion” had a huge impact on slave-owners and slaves alike.
The original British musical contribution to the blues, whether Scottish, Welsh, English or Irish, tends to underestimated- not least because of the near-monopoly that the British held over the slave-trade for considerable periods of time, a fact that weighs heavily on the mind of anyone born in the port-town of Bristol. There is a fascinating poetic account of a British transportee to Virginia, by John Lauson, in “The Felon’s Account of his Transportation at Virginia in America”, a mid eighteenth century chapbook about this Bristol boy’s convictions for theft, his conviction and transportation for fourteen years to Virginia to work as a slave in the plantations:
“My fellow slaves were five tranports more
With eighteen Negroes, which is twenty-four,
Besides four transports women in the house,
To wait upon his daughter and his spouse.
We and the negroes both alike did fare,
Of work and food we had an equal share,
And in a piece of ground that’s called our own,
The food we eat first by ourselves is sown
And when our hard day’s work is done,
Away unto the Mill we must be gone
Till twelve or one o’clock a grinding corn,
And must be up at day break in the morn.”
We can only imagine what interchange of songs occurred as white and black slaves and transportees hoed the tobacco plants or ground the corn side by side. Maybe some old West Country or Bristolian folk-songs found their way into the development of the earliest form of Virginia work-song and blues, much as old English folk-songs survived in the Appalachian mountains, as Cecil Sharp was to discover in 1916-1918?
Sharp had collected songs like “Hares on the Mountains” in Somerset at the very beginning of the twentieth century:
“Young women they run like hares on the mountains,
Young women they run like hares on the mountains,
If I were but a young man, I’d soon go a –hunting….
Young women they sing like birds in the bushes,
Young women they sing like birds in the bushes.
If I were but a young man, I’d go and bang those bushes…”
It’s hard to believe that songs like this didn’t have some influence on the way blues verses were composed, with that familiar repeated first line pattern
Some of the songs included in “English Folk-Songs from the Southern Appalachian Mountains”, many collected in 1917, are even closer to the folk-blues and songster tradition, songs like “John Hardy”, “Sinner Man”, “Pretty Peggy-O”, “The Gambling Man” (“Darling Corie”),and there must have been considerable musical interchange between the different communities. One of the singers who gave Cecil Sharp some good songs was Julie Boone from Micaville, Yancey County, North Carolina. Sharp notes in his MSS tune book (Sept 25 and October 3, 1918): “She evidently had a good deal to do with negroes at sometimes of her life. She sings many of their spirituals” (see “Dear Companion”, p. 36, EFDSS, 2004).
Take, for example, a Holy Roller style folk-hymn like “Sinner Man”, also an Afro-American Spiritual (?), collected by Cecil Sharp in Kentucky on August 10 1917, sung by Mrs Florence Samples at Beach Creek, Manchester, Clay County ,
“O sinner-man, where are you going to run to?
O sinner- man, where are you going to run to?
O sinner-man, where are you going to run to
All on that day?”
But however much genuine interchange there was even in the early days before blues music was ever recorded on gramophone records or heard on the radio, we mustn’t forget the social segregation and oppression, perhaps reflected in another song collected by Sharp in Pineville, Kentucky in June 1917. It bears a now unacceptable title, best abbreviated as “Run,Run”:
“Run....... run the pat-e-rol will catch you".
Over the fence and through the pasture....."
That song can only remind us of the stark evidence of the utterly appalling documentary photographs, from around that same period, of lynchings and burnings of black people such as are reproduced in the Penguin book “A Matter of Colour” (1965) on pages 11 and 25.
Who knows how many British sea-shanties the poor slaves had to endure on the crossing from West Africa to America, if they could hear anything but the moaning of their fellow sufferers from down in the hold.
“What shall we do with the drunken sailor,
What shall we do with the drunken sailor,
What shall we do with the drunken sailor,
Early in the morning?”
What with sea-shanties and then Welsh Baptist hymns, it is hardly surprising that the rhythm of work-songs and field-hollers would soon get mixed up with the master’s hymn-tunes and the African songs and diverse West African rhythms the slaves brought with them, and passed on from generation to generation.
And then there was the railroad and the steam-engine! The Stourbridge Lion was the first locomotive to ride the rails in America. Built in 1829 in Stourbridge, England, it took the train-rhythm and the sound of the steam-whistle from England to inspire a thousand songs and rhythmic imitations of the clickety-clack down the track. Its first historic run was on 8 August 1829. It had been shipped in February 1829 and was unloaded in New York on May 14, 1829.
Some people date the blues to 1903 or 1907, I prefer to date it to August 1829, the first journey of The Stourbridge Lion in America! That was the true source and origin of all the honky-tonk, boogie-woogie train blues we’ve ever heard. This was followed six years later by the publication in 1835 of Billy Walker’s “The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion”, the most popular tune-book of sacred songs (335) in 19th century America, often claimed as the basis for the spirituals.
Scottish, English and Irish folk-songs, sea-shanties, Welsh Baptist hymns, train rhythms and African rhythms, it is hard to believe that it could take as long as seventy more years for the blues to develop.
I sometimes like to remind myself that the Brits had some influence on the later development of rock ‘n’ roll, too. After all, Bill Haley’s mother was a piano-playing English woman. Ella Mae Morse’s father was British. It was in the genes so it’s not surprising that it was the Brits like Lonnie Donegan, Mick Jagger, Alexis Korner, John Mayall, Eric Burdon, Paul Jones and Eric Clapton who helped to popularise the blues and “took it all back home”.
Just a few weeks ago I was listening to an Epirot stone-mason in the mountains of North West Greece singing a work-song to the rhythm of his hammer-blows on the stones he was dressing to build a wall. Only a few years ago I saw a chain-gang of black prisoners in Mississippi working on the highway with their pick-axes. The blues is born and reborn all the time. It is timeless and eternal. Much the same spirit appears in more modern Greek music like the “rebetika” songs, often referred to as the Greek Blues.
I once wrote a poem called “The First Lyre”. It was broadcast on BBC Radio 4, read by the wonderful Welsh poet, Dannie Abse, in a programme called “Time for Verse”:
The First Lyre
I know now when the blues was born.
When Hermes stumbled on a tortoise
He thought "That's just what I've been looking for",
And he tore out its flesh with a chisel.
He emptied the shell, scraped the carapace clean,
A natural sound-box, but somewhat obscene.
What other animals did he not hesitate
To murder in the name of music?
He made two arms from the horns of a goat,
He stripped hide from an ox, stretched it over the shell.
He made seven strings from the guts of sheep,
And tautened them over a bridge.
He shaped a plectron of ivory, another of horn.
When he struck the strings, the sound was sweet.
As Hermes played, Apollo listened,
And at once his anger died.
But the animals howled and moaned -
Not at all the Orphic effect.
Apollo accepted the gift of the lyre,
And composed a hymn of praise.
But the god of music
Could not appease
The spirit of the tortoise.
The sheepgut strings,
The wild goat's horns
And the skin of the ox
Refused to serve his purpose.
He discovered the sound of a desperate Muse:-
And Lyric Poetry was born with the Blues.
John Lee Hooker told me back in 1968, in a recorded interview, “Nowadays, it don’t matter what nationality you are or who you are, if you got it, you got it- because you’ll find more young people now singing the blues, all nationalities- it don’t matter whether you’re coloured or white, or Indian or Mexican, if you got the know-how, if it’s in you and you got the feeling, you sing the blues; you find a lot of white people were born with soul, just like we were- you don’t find it in many of them, but there’s a whole lot of them born with soul and they won’t play nothing but the blues…”
In his first great 1948 hit, “Boogie Chillun” John Lee put it even more clearly. In earlier centuries you can imagine one of his ancestors wanting to say much the same thing to the slave-masters: “Let that boy boogie-woogie, it’s in him and it got to come out”.
However hard the slave-owners or, later, TV stations, tried to suppress the African rhythms or to ignore and ghettoise the blues, “Race Music”,as it used to be called, it was bound to fail. John Lee Hooker has sometimes been called the most “African” of blues singers and guitarists. He may have passed on, but partly thanks to him, all over the world we’re all still boogie’n anyhow!
Article 2. Down in the Dumps- or Losing the Blues
“I can’t keep from worryin’, ‘cause I’m down in the dumps.”
(Bessie Smith, “I’m Down in the Dumps”; words, Leola P Wilson).
“So deeply drowned I was in this dump…”
(John Skelton, Garland of Laurel)
“What heaps of heaviness, hath of late fallen among us already, with which some of our poor family be fallen into such dumps”
(More, 1529)
“When griping grief the heart
doth wound,
And doleful dumps the mind oppress,
Then music with her silver sound….”
(W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet)
“Sing no more ditties, sing no mo
Of dumps so dull and heavy.”
(W. Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing)
“To their Instruments
Tune a deploring dump”
(W. Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona)
“With every woman is he in some love’s pang.
Then up to our lute at midnight, twangledom twang;
Then twang with our sonnets, and twang with our dumps,
And heigho from our heart, as heavy as lead lumps”
(N. Udall, Ralph Roister Doister)
“Are poets then the only lovers true,
Whose hearts are set on measuring a verse,
Who think themselves well bless’d , if they renew
Some good old dump that Chaucer’s mistress knew….”
(Sir Philip Sidney, Certain Sonnets, 17)
“What heart of stone
Can hear her moan,
And not in dumps so doleful join?”
(Joseph Addison, Rosamund)
Had I been alive in the Tudor or Elizabethan eras of 16th Century England (or at least from about 1523, the first recorded use of the word), I might have picked up my lute to sing a slow, mournful song, a “dump”, and to complain of being down in the dumps - in the “doleful dumps”(as in the later song, Chevy Chase, from c.1600). I would have been singing and playing “the Dumps”, expressing sad and melancholy sentiments, playing my lute in a mournful minor key with a repeated bass line, sighing, lamenting and moaning my “love-plaints”.
I would certainly have been ‘singing the dumps’ if I’d been a member of the first colonial expeditions attempting to create settlements on Roanoke Island, on Croatoan, in Jamestown or around the Chesapeake Bay, Virginia. I might have met the fate of the members of the Lost Colony, leaving no traces whatsoever. I once wrote a “Going to Croatoan Blues”, to commemorate them: the first American Blues- anachronistically, at least!
To be “down in the dumps” meant to be suffering from a gloomy, dazed, melancholic or oppressive state of mind, to feel sad , downcast or dejected; depressed and in low spirits - having the blues, just like Bessie Smith in her song, “I’m Down in the Dumps”.
Both Sir Thomas Wyatt and William Shakespeare were often down in the dumps, it seems, like many other poets and lute-song lyricists of their periods. The first recorded use of the word in English seems to have been around 1523.
The gap between Sir Thomas Wyatt and Hank Williams is not as great as we sometimes imagine: as song-writers they had much in common. They both knew how to “moan the blues”.
The point of singing spirituals or blues-songs is to get out of the dumps, to lift up your spirits, to stop feeling gloomy, to get some relief, whatever the cause of your depression or oppression, economic, social, psychological or emotional.
In some ways Ma Rainey and Blind Lemon Jefferson said all that there was to be said about having the blues, but everyone has his or her own way of being down in the dumps and losing the blues. Nearly everyone experiences woman or man trouble, money trouble, booze problems at one time or another. It’s universal and all too human, and that’s why blues music conquered most of the globe in the course of the twentieth century.
I can listen to hundreds of blues songs by a singer like John Lee Hooker a hundred times a year and seldom get bored. Musically, melodically, lyrically they may all sound (superficially) very similar and perhaps simplistic in harmonic, if not rhythmic, terms, but the best of them burrow deep down into the soul- some as deep, emotionally and spiritually, as a late Beethoven string quartet, and as profoundly cathartic in their own way.
A number of writers have also explored the poetry of the blues, and many songs can be shown to feature striking and original imagery, as in all great poetry. More often, the simplest words sometimes attain a depth of meaning through sheer intensity of expression and intonation, which makes them resonate in the mind.
I’ve always liked the words of Jean Paul Sartre, in “Nausea” (Penguin Books, 1965, translated by Robert Baldick; originally published in French in 1938). I once quoted them in an article I wrote in 1964. Here they are again:
“Another few seconds and the Negress will sing. It seems inevitable, the necessity of this music is so strong….The last chord has died away. In the brief silence which follows, I feel strongly that this is it, that something has happened.
Silence.
Some of these days
You’ll miss me honey!
What has just happened is that the Nausea has disappeared. When the voice sounded in the silence, I felt my body harden and the Nausea vanished. All of a sudden: it was almost painful to become so hard, so bright….I am in the music.”
How often have you found yourself in the music to this degree?
It is a rare experience, to feel so inside the deep, deep blues. I feel like that when listening to some songs of Ma Rainey, Blind Willie Johnson, Son House, Tommy McClennan, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker. I think of Ma Rainey’s “Grievin’ Hearted Blues”, Blind Willie Johnson’s wordless “Dark Was the Night, Cold was the Ground”, Muddy Waters’ “Louisiana Blues” Son House’s “Walkin’ Blues” and “Death Letter Blues”, John Lee Hooker’s “Tupelo, Mississippi”, Howlin’ Wolf’s “Goin’ Down Slow” and “Smokestack Lightnin’, Robert Johnson’s “Come On In My Kitchen”, Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Help Me”, to name a few.
Try playing one of these, next time you feel the “Nausea”, or down in the dumps.
The Blues is a Healer, as John Lee Hooker also sang. Shakespeare would have loved the Blues! He would have incorporated them in his plays, for sure, “for the rain it raineth every day” (Twelth Night).
Jim Potts
Article 3:
“DEAR COMPANION” : BOOK REVIEW BY JIM POTTS
“Dear Companion, Appalachian Traditional Songs and Singers from the Cecil Sharp Collection”, EFDSS (The English Folk Dance& Song Society, in association with harp’s Folk Club), London, 2004
It was a pleasant surprise to be invited to review this book, as I have been the proud owner of the five series of “Folk Songs from Somerset” for a quarter of a century, and of “English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians” (1932 edition), collected by Cecil Sharp and edited by Maud Karpeles, for almost as long. I think it was The Yetties folk group who alerted me to the Somerset collections, as they knew I’d grown up in Castle Cary, Somerset, not far from their native Yetminster in Dorset, and they also introduced me to the Dorset dialect poetry of William Barnes, possibly the poet I have come to love most of all the English poets.
I always loved the introduction to Series One of “Folk Songs from Somerset”, by Charles L. Marson, Vicar of Hambridge:
“Meanwhile the folk-song dies with the rapid mortality that is horrible to contemplate. The clapperings of the steam-binder have killed it from the harvest-field; the board school master, a perfect Herod among the Innocents, slays it in the children by his crusade against all dialect but his own…….Folk-song, unknown in the drawing-room, hunted out of the school, chased by the chapel deacons, derided by the middle classes, and despised by those who have been uneducated into the three R’s, takes refuge in the fastnesses of tap-rooms, poor cottages and outlying hamlets. It harbours in the heathen kingdoms and the wilder parts. It is a treasure to be sought and found in nooks and corners, underneath much mental and some moral lumber. It comes out shyly, late at night, and is heard when the gentry have gone home to bed, when the barrack-room has exhausted its Music-hall menu. It is to be found when men have well drunk. The parson hears of it, but rarely hears it”.
In Maud Karpeles’ introduction to the 1968 Faber and Faber paperback of “Eighty English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians”, with specimen piano accompaniments by Benjamin Britten and chord symbols by Pat Shaw, she says that “The country we explored included the ranges of the Great Smokies, Black Mountains, Blue Ridge and Cumberland Mountains….At the time that Cecil Sharp and I were there it was a very difficult country to get about in. There were hardly any proper roads, but just rough tracks over the mountains or alongside the rivers; and often the only roadway for some miles would be the actual bed of the river…..The people lived in primitive log-cabins dotted along the banks of the rivers, or creeks as they were called. They were very nearly self-supporting, building their own log-cabins, spinning and weaving the wool for their clothes and growing their own food…”
They spent forty-six weeks in the mountains, according to Maud, fifty-two according to Mike Yates. If it sounds all too idyllic and like a rural paradise (and not just a paradise for folk-song collectors), it is as well to remember how much has changed since that period of 1916-1918. I’ve visited parts of their area myself, and it remains very beautiful country. Even then (1918), they found the Blue Ridge region of Virginia quite comfortable (“Civilisation had made further progress there than in many other regions we had visited”, p.18).
“The only enemy to the folk-song is the religious preacher…they fall an easy prey to the travelling ‘Holiness’ preachers who abound here”, wrote Sharp.
“Dear Companion” does a splendid job of presenting the reality of life in the Appalachian Mountains, through the reproduction of many of Sharp’s fascinating photographs of the singers, their log-cabins and other scenes of hard rural life. Compiled and edited by Mike Yates, Elaine Bradtke and Malcolm Taylor, with a preface by Shirley Collins, this is a gem of a book. As Shirley Collins writes, “Dear Companions”, with its previously unpublished excerpts from autobiographical writings, diaries and letters by Sharp and Maud Karpeles, gives an even more vivid insight into the singers themselves and their lives in the Appalachians.”
On page 54 we are introduced to members of the Fitzgerald family, for example, “Philander Fitzgerald, 76 years of age, was an old Confederate soldier who lived alone with his blind wife. Philander was head of a large family, numbering some 120 in all, including 10 great-grand children and 65 grand-children.”
Cecil Sharp himself had a wife and four children to support in England, and his wife suffered a major heart attack during his first fund-raising trip to the States in1915. Nevertheless he was back in America in July 1916, accompanied by his secretary Maud Karpeles. When people get the collecting bug, nothing else matters! In 1916, his son, Charlie, was wounded in the war. The mountain ballads “kept him sane”, but he was often in ill health (attacks of asthma, neuralgic headaches and fever). In Virginia, they were even suspected of being German spies and that “noting tunes was merely a blind to hide our nefarious actions, which included the poisoning of springs amongst other things”. They had no sympathy for the sanctimonious missionaries who’d persuaded the people that “it is unchristian to sing secular songs”. It’s not just the Blues that was considered “The Devil’s Music”, but even the old English ballads and folk-songs! But Sharp had no interest whatsoever in “the strumming of ragtime” such as he heard in Virginia and North Carolina towards the end of his stay. What with Victrolas and composed sentimental songs, the world was really changing fast and the tradition of pure, uncorrupted oral transmission would be deeply affected by the spread of the gramophone record and the radio.
According to Sharp, the people of the mountains had been “completely isolated from outside influences since they settled there and have heard no music except their own”.
Maud and Cecil would walk fifteen or more miles a day, over very rough and muddy, boulder-strewn tracks. Some critics have argued that the region was not as isolated as Sharp believed, and that he was culturally naïve. He obviously had his blind spots and prejudices, and seemed to be unaware that black singers sung many of the same songs, and that there was considerable exchange and interchange. He often overemphasises the English (ie British) origins of the songs and the perception that he has discovered a preserved slice or Lost World of 17th or 18th century Britain (ie including Lowland Scotland). He collected few songs from black singers: what a pity he didn’t stumble across some early folk-blues, or proto-blues! He seems to have largely “avoided contact with the black population” according to Mike Yates in his outstanding introduction.
Sharp does in fact note, about singer Julie Boone from North Carolina (p. 36) that she “evidently had a good deal to do with negroes at sometime of her life. She sings many of their spirituals”. He did collect two songs from black singers: hardly representative, since 280 people sang to him, and considering Maud Karpeles says they collected about five hundred songs, or over 1,600 including variants. He was of course really more interested in songs of clear British origin, and rather less interested in native American songs or more recent compositions.
But in terms of proto-blues lyrics, how far is this song from a blues lyric? It’s called “Every Night When the Sun Goes In”:
Ev’ry night when the sun goes in, (x 3)
I hang down my head and mournful cry….
I wish to the Lord that train would come, (x 3)
To take me back where I come from.
It’s once my apron hung down low, (x 3)
He’d follow me through sleet and snow….
Or, from “The Ground Hog”:
“Children all around, they screamed and cried,
Children all around , they screamed and cried,
They love a ground hog stewed and fried.
Ground hog.”
The spirituals Sharp collected, like “Hold On” (Karpeles described this as a Holiness hymn, heavily influenced by negro spirituals, p.125) and “Sinner Man”(not included here) also bear testimony to the cultural interchange. The editors say, on page 36, that the negro spiritual “Jacob’s Ladder” was published under the title “Sinner Man” in Sharp’s “English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians”. But in my 1932 edition, the two songs are quite distinct (numbers 208 and 212), and the “Sinner Man” variant published there was collected from Mrs Florence Samples in Clay County, Kentucky, on August 10, 1917.
“Sharp was a man of is time and his views and beliefs were typical of his generation”, writes Yates.
One of the few areas, which I know personally, where one could still collect traditional mountain music and folk-songs in this way, in spite of the impact of radio, TV, electrical amplification and commercially recorded music, is the Pindus Mountains of North West Greece. There must be even more remote ranges and villages in other parts of the Balkans, in Southern Albania, for instance. So all you aspiring folk-song collectors, get your note-books and mini-disc recorders, and head for the mountains!
Anyone who is interested in folk-music, British or American, has to read this book. The 53 songs are all wonderful, the photographs add a completely new dimension to the account, the extracts from diaries and note-books are deeply fascinating, the notes on songs and the biographical notes on the singers extremely valuable -and the authoritative introduction is essential reading. I hope Bob Dylan has a copy.
3) Theodorakis, Britten and Dylan: Who Did Most for Poetry?
A paper given at the Greek Cultural Centre, Stockholm, 2004
"THEODORAKIS, BRITTEN, DYLAN: WHO DID MOST FOR POETRY? "
In April 1982 I was invited to give a talk at the University of Athens Dept of English Studies on “Poetry and Song Lyrics”, or rather on “Poetry and Artistic-Popular” Songs”. I prepared tapes and handouts and tried to cover a lot of territory from the medieval troubadours to Tudor lute-songs, Elizabethan madrigals and Shakespeare’s songs to German Lieder and 20th century settings of poems by James Joyce, John Donne, Lawrence Durrell, Lord Byron, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Barnes, W B Yeats, John Masefield , Robert Louis Stevenson , Robert Burns and A.E. Housman- and the settings of a number of poems by Greek poets.
It is a commonplace that many mediocre poems have been made into beautiful and successful songs, and that on occasion a mediocre composer has destroyed a great poem in the process of trying to set it to music.
As Alfred Lord Tennyson is reported to have complained:”Why do these damned musicians make me say a thing twice when I said it only once?”
In school assemblies and Anglican church services children and congregations still sing carols and hymns set to words by Blake, Herbert, Milton, Donne, Cowper and Bunyan, without always being aware of the original poems.
People of my generation are more likely to know the words and tunes of Bob Dylan’s songs than the settings of poems by Sir Arthur Sullivan or Benjamin Britten (the analogous situation in Greece is very different).
In earlier centuries, composers like William Cornyshe set poems by John Skelton, and of course many poets in the 16th century wrote songs to be accompanied by the lute, and they expected their lyrical poems to be set to music as AYRES or MADRIGALS. Shakespeare wrote wonderful songs for his plays, “It was a lover and his lass”, “O Mistress Mine where are you roaming”, “When that I was a little tiny boy”, “How should I your true love know”, “Under the greenwood tree” and the willow song in OTHELLO.
Many of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s songs and lyrics were clearly written to be sung. I sometimes think of him as the Hank Williams of his day!
That is also the case with some of the poems by John Donne, such as “A Hymn to God the Father”. But complex metaphysical poems or linguistically complex, dense or experimental poems, may not lend themselves so well. What do we really think of Britten’s settings of Donne’s “Holy Sonnets”; “Batter My Heart”? He succeeds in capturing and complementing the dramatic urgency of the poem, but is it ultimately satisfying? Perhaps the poem works better on its own. It is not as approachable as his setting of W B Yeats’ “Down by the Salley Gardens”, a simple Irish folk-song, or the more fully orchestrated cycle of songs which make up his setting of Rimbaud’s “Les Illuminations”.
The most successful and popular settings are often from poems or lyrics which stay closer to the folk-song and ballad forms, eg Vaughan Williams’ setting of Barnes “Linden Lea” – and that holds true for many of Theodorakis’ settings too- although Theodorakis’ “flow-song” (tragoudi-potamos, song-river) settings of Sikelianos’ March of the Spirit, or Seferis’ Raven, as well as Britten’s “Les Illuminations” by Rimbaud) need special consideration.
It does seem perverse for a composer “to do violence to the verbal accent” of a poem, of a poem clearly not intended to be sung, when there are so many lyrical poems in English and Greek which are either written in song or ballad form (with or without refrains and choruses).
Many famous German composers have been accused of altering the speech rhythm and metre of a poem in order to satisfy the elements of musical time; sometimes they alter the shape and structure of the poem, setting the same stanza twice or ignoring pauses and punctuation marks (as Seferis complained about Theodorakis). The novelist E M Forster, writing about Britten’s opera “Peter Grimes” with a libretto based on the poem of the same name by George Crabbe, and the changes that were made to the poem, said:
“They had every right to make them. A composer is under no obligation to stick to the original: his duty is to be original himself.”
Are we all comfortable with that, I wonder ? Mitsakis, in the introduction to his anthology “Modern Greek Music and Poetry”,refers to instances where a composer radically changes or rewrites a published poem without the approval or co-operation of the poet, or possibly with the cooperation of the poet. He cites a setting of a poem by George Themelis: the connection between the sung version and the printed version is slight.(page 34).
Hegel said that the most suitable material for music is “lyrically true, of the utmost simplicity” and that “it is the simple, terse, deeply felt poem which most stimulates the composer’s imagination”, Not poems which are “too burdened with thought, too philosophical and deep”.
It seems that Britten, Theodorakis and Bob Dylan all tried, at different times, to prove him wrong. At other times, they went for simplicity.
Composers sometimes avoid poems which are already too well-known and loaded with their own innate melody. S S Prawer, in the Penguin Book of Lieder, cites Weber who avoided poems which contained “too much music to start with”- preferring minor poems to work on. But this doesn’t stop someone like Joan Baez singing an attractive setting of Lord Byron’s poem “So we’ll go no more a roving”, that most musical of lyrics in itself.
Does that setting, and her interpretation, add very much value to the lyric as recited without accompaniment? Perhaps it simply helps to bring it to new audiences.
Although many “serious” modern classical composers set hundreds of English poems to music in the 20th century, not many of them enjoyed mass popular success (Linden Lea being one exception, even re-entering the folksong tradition as if an authentic folksong, as with many of the songs and poems of Robert Burns). Many have disappeared and it’s hard to find lesser known interpretations or settings on CD or included in recitals (again a very different situation in Greece). Since the 1960s Greek composers have shown us what is possible. Theodorakis set out to write music “for the Masses”, partly for his own ideological reasons. He wrote in “My Artistic Credo”:
“In the beginning was the Word!....From the beginning, I have intentionally declared that I placed my pride in faithfully serving primarily modern Greek poetry, so that when one listens to one of my works, one could not imagine the music with another text nor the poem with different music”. We know from Savidis and Beaton that Seferis didn’t always like what Theodorakis had done: Beaton, p. 362, quotes Seferis complaining that Theodorakis had “garbled” his poem and “missed the meaning”.
Theodorakis very consciously and politically set himself the task of communicating with “the Masses”, deliberately making use of voices and instruments to make the people “feel at home”, in order to “gain their trust”. In so doing he brought great poetry (Seferis, Elytis, Lorca) to the lips of common people, something that Benjamin Britten didn’t do, or even try to do on that scale, although he certainly wrote wonderful music for children and young people, for choirs , opera and festivals, for radio and films. He provided piano accompaniments for folk-songs, but he never thought of using an authentic Irish folk-singer, for instance, to interpret W B Yeats “Down by the Salley Gardens” or other folk-songs. Yeats, in that poem, had tried to reconstruct an old Irish folk-song he’s once heard an old village woman singing, although he only remembered three lines).
Theodorakis, on the other hand, used Bithikotisis. Britten tended to write for a more sophisticated musical audience, of the sort that Theodorakis originally addressed, an audience that would put a premium on the composer’s originality and the fine diction of a highly-trained singer like Peter Pears, or operatic voices in an opera like Peter Grimes.
So we seem to have two fundamentally different ideologies: Theodorakis committed to “the Masses” and the use of “popular” voices and instruments in order to reach them, Britten not making any compromises towards popular art in that sense. Tippett might have made use of black American spirituals (in “A Child of Our Time”) but on the whole we have had very little in the UK which we could describe as “artistic-popular” song compared to the extensive and rich Greek repertoire in this cross-over genre- however artistic the Beatles and others can be argued to have been. Settings of poems like Stevenson’s “The Vagabond” and Masefield’s “Sea Fever” remain, however popular, essentially part of the world of classical and chamber music.
When “serious composers” adapted folk-songs (and many were very interested in collecting and studying folksongs) they “dressed them up in evening dress” (Karpeles, Fox Strangways, Reeves) by providing piano arrangements and harmonisations which rendered the songs almost unrecognisable to the people who created and sang the songs originally.
Bob Dylan, on the other hand, when he appropriated or adapted old blues or folk songs, stayed fairly true to his roots and traditional sources and his voice was always “recognisable” to blues singers, country and folk-singers alike.
Hadjidakis, Theodorakis and Marcopoulos were not afraid to marry poetry to the folk and rebetika traditions (already capable of original poetry in the hands of Tsitsanis and others) – and to quietly educate public taste in the process.
But in some of his works, Theodorakis has much more in common with Britten: eg a work like “Raven” , a setting of the Seferis poem.
Words stimulated them both. The 5th Edition of the Grove Dictionary says this about Britten:
“Words seem not merely to stimulate but to challenge his ability to absorb intractable verbal stuff into music….For a long time he chose obscure words….He believed that music can be a solvent of all words from the highest poetry to the more colloquial small change of dialogue.”
Theodorakis wrote in 1979: “Some poems lend themselves to a musical setting and others simply do not. But who is to judge? (Preface to Modern Greek Music and Poetry).
How DO we judge the following works?
Britten: Les Illuminations, of Rimbaud.
Britten: Holy Sonnets, of John Donne.
Theodorakis: March of the Spirit, of Sikelianos
Theodorakis, Raven, of Seferis.
Not all poems in a cycle, not all parts of a long poem, seem to lend themselves to musical setting, but in my view most of these settings succeed and in some cases they actually improve or bring life to the original texts. That is true, for me, with Les Illuminations and March of the Spirit. Controversial ? I expect so.
It is surely better, some might say, if poets write lyrics with the express intention that they should be sung. Elytis did this, Gatsos and Ghanas did the same, in addition to their poetry written for the page.
Consider Bob Dylan, poet-composer, troubadour, modern minstrel, folk-singer, rock-singer. What has he contributed. Now that he is over sixty, and Theodorakis over 80, it is time to make some comparative assessments.
W H Auden offered some advice about poetry and song. He was opposed to complicated metaphors, didactic messages, mixed or ambiguous feelings. He thought poems intended for songs should be short: “the poet who would make songs is denied many poetic virtues, but he is also guarded from many poetic vices; he cannot be prolix or private or preachy or obscure.”
Auden may have been partly right: no one would have welcomed it if Mantzaros had set every stanza of Solomos’ Hymn to Freedom to music, or every line of Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations! Theodorakis revisited Seferis’ Epiphany to turn it into a song-river, setting every line rather than a small selection of a few key lines as he had earlier done. People prefer that earlier version, I think!
Auden seems to have got it wrong with respect of Bob Dylan: Dylan does all the things Auden warns against. He uses complicated metaphors, he’s at times didactic, ambiguous, private, prlix, obscure and preachy; his songs are often long, eg Desolation Row, A Hard rain’s Gonna Fall, Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, Mr Tambourine Man, Like a Rolling Stone, It’s Alright Ma I’m Only Bleeding Visions of Johanna….veritable song-rivers, to use Theodorakis’ terminology.
As a poet or poetic wordsmith, Dylan has been taken seriously by distinguished professors like Christopher Ricks and other poets and academics. He’s variable as a poet and not all his songs, by any means, can be read as poems: but at times he’s a great poet, who has brought the poetic word to millions of people. I avoid saying “the masses”.
Whereas Seferis could complain that Theodorakis ‘ setting of his poem was “a bit garbled, missing the meaning” (Beaton p.362) and Tennyson could complain about composers saying things twice which he only wanted to say once, DYLAN, as a songwriter, composer and performer can ensure every word is stressed and intoned, every pause is made exactly as he wants it and hears it, and in different ways on different occasions.
All three have made major contributions to music and poetry, on a global scale, and they have advanced the cause of poetry, of bringing the poetic word and the sensitivity and insights of poets to ordinary people, to young people as well as to professional soldiers and politicians, to people who didn’t read much poetry on the page.
Theodorakis reached the masses, primarily the Greek masses whose historical fate and destiny he shared, even if it can be argued that at times he reached them too manipulatively and programmatically, motivated in part by a strong political agenda: Dylan reached a mass audience without needing to conceive of “the masses”, in fact he hated being cast in the role of generational spokesman, guru, or prophet, and resisted it. He writes in Chronicles vol 1, p. 115-119
“The big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation….I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of…Being true to yourself, that was the thing…It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat-someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn’t the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never any more than what I was- a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded yes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze…I wasn’t a preacher performing miracles.”
Theodorakis, on the other hand, did step up and volunteer to lead the charge, against the Greek colonels if not the Roman or American empires. He saw his historical role differently, as an engaged political spokesman, forced by circumstances to lead the charge.
Dylan sought his own “house arrest” and “exile” in Woodstock, to escape the pressure. Theodorakis had no choice about exile or house-arrest.
Dylan recognises his lyrics “struck nerves that had never been struck before” but he hated the way the meaning of his songs had been “subverted into polemics”. Theodorakis embraced the polemics.
Ultimately it’s the songs and the music that matters. Which would I chose to take to a desert island?
Theodorakis “Dromoi Palloi” (Anagnostakis)
Dylan “Mr Tambourine Man”
Britten “Les Illuminations” (Rimbaud)
Frankly, I couldn’t choose. They’re all part of my life.
Does it matter whether one is considered “higher art” than the other?
Is there such a difference between them, if we listen to an operatic bass like Christoforos Stambogli interpreting Theodorakis (or the mezzo-soprano Agnes Baltsa), or Peter Pears interpreting Britten’s songs ?
What is the relative impact of songs when interpreted by classically-trained singers and/or untrained popular or folk singers with gritty, vernacular voices and regional accents?
Are there issues of authenticity when comparing Bithikotsis and Stambogli, Peter Pears or Bob Dylan, Dick Gaughan, Billy Bragg or Hank Williams?
Do “the masses” really feel more comfortable and at home, more trusting and accepting with one type of singer rather than another?
And what about the poets, how do they feel?
My guess is that MOST poets would initially be delighted and flattered to have their poems set to music by a sensitive and talented composer- in order to reach a wider audience (if not “the masses”) or to secure some lucrative royalties.
But rather like an upcoming playwright who is thrilled to have his or her play performed on stage, but who is then disappointed or dismayed by the way an actor or director misinterprets and distorts, cuts or throws away the most significant or best lines, the perfectionist poet may be dismayed by the slightest changes or verbal omissions made to the words and lyrics; rhythm and stresses, even the most subtle pauses and punctuation (cf Seferis) can change or reverse the meaning. So it’s a mixed blessing, unless the interpreter is an artist as sensitive and attuned to the poet’s intentions as Aliki Kayaloglou, for instance.
Otherwise we may conclude that it is better if poets write song lyrics expressly to be sung, like Dylan, or like Gatsos, Elytis and Ghanas. There are many ways to MURDER A POET, the subject of a 1982 Greek newspaper article by G Skabardonis (Thessaloniki, 27.2.1982) that I have always kept.
If we are too prescriptive, there is the danger that we may discourage creative experimentation, and lose the longer, durchkomponiert flow-songs, song-rivers, oratorios, cantatas and song-cycles.
When it comes to “the masses” it is probably the case that the “people” tend to remember, sing and love individual songs like “Aprili”, “Marina” “Ena to helidoni” rather than complete song cycles or oratorios, regardless of the artistic intentions or grand structures of the composer who creates a work as a sequence of inextricably linked and sequenced songs
To sum up: in terms of their contribution to the wider acceptance of the poetic word and successful communication of the poetic word, I’d put all three composers on an equal footing: Britten, Theodorakis, Dylan.
Jim Potts,
Living Arts Exchange.