I love sad songs in a major key. It doesn't get much grimmer than the message that everyone dies alone--yet this message is transformed into something hopeful, even joyful, by the quiet beauty Mississippi John Hurt's singing and playing.
It's hard to write about this song. I first encountered it in 2020 and it means a lot to me.
The road to me hearing and loving this song involved the first several months of the pandemic and a Bitter Southerner podcast episode on the blues. Listening to the artists and songs mentioned in the episode led me to Last Kind Words. I can't fully explain why it grabbed me and would not let go--part of it is Wiley's incredible voice and the expressive, rhythmic, and complex guitar accompaniment. The lyrics are part of it too--transcriptions vary but the story haunts.
Wiley, with guitarist and singer L.V. (Elvie) Thomas, recorded six songs for Paramount Records, in Grafton, Wisconsin, in 1930.
Last Kind Words, in particular, is widely regarded as one of the great classics of early American blues, and a number of blues historians, musicologists, and music critics have written about it. I would recommend the following two pieces to anyone who wants to learn more:
Classical music has a reputation as elitist and inaccessible--and so it can sometimes be. But I also wish that people who felt that classical music isn't for them had the chance to engage with the tremendous variety of classical music that exists: there's such an abundance of genres and instruments. Some music is literally meant to tell stories, to respond to particular events, or evoke particular visual or natural phenomena. Compilations of 'easy listening' classics are a great gateway--and there is so much more to enjoy.
Here is one of the pieces I would share with someone who was curious to learn more about classical music. Scaramouche is a duet for two pianos. The French composer Darius Milhaud (1892-1974), composed this piece at the request of his piano teacher, who wanted something for her students to play at the 1937 International Dog Show in Paris. (This is one of those facts that raises Many Questions. I'm not able to answer them, but I swear I'm not making this up.)
The piano piece is actually a reworking of incidental music Milhaud and written for two plays, one of which featured characters from the theatrical
tradition of commedia dell’arte, a form of European theatre in which the
actors, playing stock characters, improvise a show. In the eighteenth century, French playwrights such as Molière started to write out parts for stock characters like Columbine and Pierrot and Harlequin--one of my favourite historical novels, Rafael Sabatini's Scaramouche, is centered around this change. As Maureen Buja writes about the character of Scaramouche:
[He] is a stock clown, serving sometimes as the servant and sometimes as the henchman. He usually appeared in black clothing and was often beaten by his master, Harlequin, both for his boasting and his cowardice.
Milhaud's piece seems to take its title from the place where the plays he was writing for were first performed, the Théâtre Scaramouche, but I think the commedia dell'arte character also factors in.
My twin sister and I played piano from the time we were six until when we graduated from college--as pianists of similar age and ability we played a lot of duets. So many duets. Milhaud's Scaramouche was one of them. I have a photo of us performing this piece inside my violin case--it was a joy to learn and a perform together.
Here's a recording by the pianists Martha Argerich and Evgeny Kissin.
Robert Beaser's Mountain Songs--an arrangement of Appalachian ballads for flute and guitar--is probably my favourite work by a living composer. It was commissioned by Eliot Fisk and Paula Robison, who gave its world premier at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1985. Fisk and Robison recorded the piece a year later, and as a teenager I stole my mother's copy and listened to it over and over again.
One of the things that makes the recording so wonderful is the incredible vocal quality of Robison's performance--her flute sings. I loved what I heard so much that the fortuitous discovery of anthology of Appalachian ballads in my undergraduate university's music library led to me spending a semester break teaching myself to sing as many of the ballads in Mountain Songs as I could. The House Carpenter is the only one I can still sing today.
Anyway, Robison and Fisk's recording is on Spotify, here. Should you lack access to Spotify, Youtube has a few recordings, too.
One of the mindblowing things about teaching university students in the year of Our Lord 2022 is that many of them are too young to remember a world without social media. Meanwhile, I was a few years younger they are now when Youtube was becoming a Big Thing, and I remember the first time I encountered a fan vid for a TV show. The combination of music and clips from the show was absolutely perfect.
The song was Jethro Tull's 'Rare and Precious Chain' and the TV show was Robin of Sherwood. Such a good show, such an excellent song. Here it is.
I should also add: rather unusually for a rock band, Jethro Tull includes a flutist (the flute part is one of key ingredients that make this song so excellent). My mother is a professional flutist and I grew up reading her Flute Talk magazines. One of their issues in the early 2000s had a fabulous profile of the flutist of Jethro Tull, Ian Anderson. He seemed amused and delighted to be speaking about his music and career to a bunch of classical musicians.
NB: I'm trying to make sure that all the recordings I'm sharing are from the artists' official channels or have been licensed to Youtube by their record companies--that way they make money from engagement with videos and ad revenue (also, it respects their copyright rights as creators!) However, I want to share the Robin of Sherwood fanvid that introduced me to this song because I enjoy how the creator of the video has matched lyrics and footage from the show. Here it is.
In her book, Heifetz as I Knew Him, Ayke Agus writers about the great violinist's love of 'itsy-bitsies', short but musically rich pieces that could be played as encores or at the end of concerts. There is a great interview where Agus speaks more about these short pieces and her love of them here.
Edward Elgar's Salut D'Amor is one of my favourite of these. It has a lovely story behind it, too: the composer wrote it as an engagement gift for his wife.
Being introduced to great music by a friend is one of the true pleasures of life. When I was in high school, our friend Catherine introduced me and my sister to one of her favourite artists, the incredible American folk musician and songwriter John McCutcheon. I left my CDs at home when I moved to UK, and hadn't listened to McCutcheon for years--until the coronavirus pandemic hit and he played a regular concert over Facebook Live. The three of us got together to listen from three time zones and two countries, sharing our delight in what we were hearing by sending each other text messages.
Today is the New York City Marathon, and so this one also comes with a dedication for everyone who had a difficult day in today's hot and humid weather, and most especially to the back of the back runners finishing in the dark. Step by step, you got this!
