Copyrighting Your Work

In the past few months I copyrighted quite a number of my arrangements, 55 to be exact! Today, you can do this on the Internet by visiting http://www.copyright.gov/, and creating an account for yourself. Before you begin, prepare all of your music so you'll be ready to submit it at the end of the application process. I'll describe this further below.

You can copyright only the arrangement, declaring very clearly you take no credit for the melody or the lyrics. Through the process, the application forms make this all very clear. Be sure you are taking credit for original work on your end, not a recasting of someone else's work. If you adapt another person's work and change 20%, 30% or even 80% of it, it's really not original.

You'll need nothing more than PDF files of the sheet music. Be sure to include a copyright notice on the first page of every song before making your PDF files. Basically you sign up with copyright.gov and tell them what you want to copyright. If you have a number of songs, you can copyright a "book" for one low fee. You list all the songs in the book, and once the whole set is defined, make a payment using a credit card for the $35 handling fee, and upload each song at the end. Leave yourself plenty of time for this task, and don't worry too much about the sometimes cryptic questions. Humans receive and process all your information on the other end, and they're really quite good at figuring it all out.

Then what?

You wait. When you think you've waited enough, wait some more. There's a lot that has to go on on the Government side, and there is also a long queue of requests. So be patient and do not doubt. If something is screwy with your application, they will contact you and straighten it out. This is not like buying stuff at Amazon.com. In a few weeks or more, you'll receive confirmation by regular mail with your official copyright numbers for your stuff. It's not exactly suitable for framing, but it's pretty cool.

So what next?

More arranging and getting more of my stuff "out there". I am actively marketing my stuff to various choirs. This year, I expect to hear one of my new arrangements sung by the Society of Orpheus and Bacchus, and I am very excited about that! I sent it off speculatively to the new music director, Paul Leo, last spring, and he liked it a lot. We had a little discussion about arranging. He was looking ahead to his new role and wondering how he would rise to the occasion. As Orpheus, he is expected to introduce new, original material and keep the group moving forward creatively. Every director wants to contribute one or more new pieces of work, and they want them to become favorites for years to come.

Tools and Tricks

As I told Paul, I heard Deke Sharon is developing a book on a cappella arranging. I see there's another well reviewed book, "The Collegiate A Cappella Arranging Manual" by Anna Callahan. The Barbershop Harmony Society also publishes an incredible 450 page "Barbershop Arranging Manual" on the topic. References like these need to be within reach while you work.

But one of my main tools, as I told the new SOB director, is my MP3 player. First I hunt around for songs of interest to me. I suggest casting a wide net in the early stage. I buy a slew of versions of any interesting songs, and I load up my MP3 player with them. You can use your smart phone as I do (Palm Pre) or iPod or iPod Touch. It's great to have something pretty rugged, because the next step is to set aside a time to listen and for me that means while working out at the gym.

The goal is to play the list over and over, day in and day out, for 30-60 minutes a day while your mind has nothing else to do but let it sink in. When I was a student of Thich Nhat Hanh, I learned something called "deep listening", and this practice comes in handy here. You let the songs inhabit your mindspace, bounce around inside your subconscious, and eventually your ideas about how you "hear" each song begin to coalesce. Eventually, you can conceive your treatment of one of these songs from start to finish. This is not the same as knowing every note and rest; it is most likely a very broad brush conception with some parts in greater focus than others. But at some moment on the treadmill it will hit you as a complete concept after which you will find the momentum to direct 100% of your attention to realizing the concept with black dots, stems, rests and all sorts of other bits of ink on paper.

In Search Of...

Restoring the musical archives of the Society of Orpheus and Bacchus has led me on a journey into the past, back to the earliest moments of the organization. Very little is known today by most alumni or current members. The mists of time have been cast over the events of nearly 75 years ago, as the story has been told and retold like a parlor game of Chinese Whispers.

We recently conducted an interview with our founder, Irving Walradt, class of 1941. Irving still has all his wits about him. The words he used were simple enough, but we did not grasp what he was saying. It was so different from the myth we'd created, so different from the projections of our reality that we could not hear his message.

History Made Every Day

After more research, more discussion, unearthing some photographs and a few more stories, the mist has begun to clear and now we're beginning to get it. Not all of us, mind you: We've told another story to ourselves for so long we may not be able to supplant the myth with the reality.

We have member rosters going back to the class of 1940, and we considered those men sang with the group in the year or so previous to graduating. In my day, we had an oral history that pinned the group's founding to 1939. Today, the group's oral history has backed that up to 1938. But Irving told us a story that made it look more like 1940, although he said there was an informal group singing with our name the previous year. But, he said they would never have endured without him founding the group to, in his words, "last forever".

Where Did We Begin?

So, what to make of this? Perhaps the group had been around as an informal organization when along comes our "founder" to establish some order that carries us to the present day. Isn't this just a man saying he added essential structure while clearly another kind of founding, of equal importance, had preceded his contribution? Didn't Irving just join those guys and augment what was already there? When was the moment of inception? Was there such a moment, or did we begin in a more organic and evolutionary way?

That's where we were after reading the extensive interview with Irving. After all, he told us the men we listed as our first members were singing together the previous year, but asserted it was he who had really founded the group. Reading his interview, we assumed that the group already existed in 1939, a story consistent with our shared myth, and along he comes, the first true Orpheus/Pitchpipe and sets a structure in place.

It Didn't Happen Like You Said

But it turns out that's not what happened at all. Over the last few months I've been digging into the deep past, reading histories, pumping the alumni for stories and photos and generally shaking trees to see what fruit falls out of them. As part of that process, I wrote to Irving at his home to request any old photos he might have of himself or the group. For weeks I'd heard nothing.

A couple of weeks ago, I took a day off to visit New Haven and archive some Whiffenpoof music in the Whiff Alumni office in Mory's and met Barry McMurtrey, SOB alum of the class of 1988, for lunch. Barry works at Yale's Sterling Library. As we waited for our meal, Barry showed me the "oldest known photograph of the SOBs". It was extraordinary, of extremely high quality, with 4 guys looking very dapper, and quite hip, singing a song in the open sun next to a 50 pound bag of oranges hanging on a hook. Barry told me he'd been given the photograph by Bill Oler, founder of the modern Spizzwinks and class of 1945, whose elder brother Wesley appeared at far left in the photo. Bill Oler had told Barry it was the oldest known photograph of the Society of Orpheus and Bacchus and had been taken on the historic Glee Club trip to South America.

The photograph had a sort of cover page wrapped around it, printed with the words Yale Glee Club Spring Trip of 1940, and noted the names of the men in the photo, calling them the Orpheus and Bacchus Association, also abbreviated, "OBA". We both knew of the historic trip to South America, and here was a shot in some tropical climate with what must have been the original name of our group: the OBA rather than the SOBs.

Who Are These People?

In it we saw what we wanted to see: four of our guys, maybe the very first guys Irving had described, singing informally together before he came along, before the group's name was "improved". Barry promised to scan the photo and send it to me. But after I returned to Boston, he wrote me that the names of two of the men were not in our official roster and so he no longer knew what the picture represented. We were suddenly very confused. I mean, hadn't Irving joined these guys the following year and formalized the organization? Barry was asking the right question: How come we didn't know who these guys were?

The OBA Quartet

I convinced Barry to send me the photo so I could send it to Irving and ask him to explain things to us. Once I got it, I checked in Tim DeWerff's "Louder Yet the Chorus Raise", a history of the Yale Glee Club to see whether these names were in the rosters Tim included in the appendices. Sure enough, all four men appeared in the roster for 1940. I thought, "it's merely an oversight - just add the names to our roster and move on".

The next morning I was at the gym and ran into a friend of mine from Polymnia and we started talking. Somehow the conversation turned to his father and he mentioned he was reading his father's journal from his trip with the Yale Glee Club to South America in 1941. Wow, I said, I was just looking at a photo from that trip and probably your dad knew these guys! But something stirred in my brain - the photo was marked as 1940 and my friend had said 1941. When I got home I check in DeWerff's book once more and saw the SA tour was in the summer of 1941. These were two different trips!

What Year Is It?

Then I looked closely at the Glee Club rosters in DeWerffs appendix, listed neatly year by year: 1939, 1940, 1941... and noticed that any given name only appeared in one list. The veil was slowly lifting from my eyes as I realized the Glee Club was run like college sports in those days. There was a Freshman Glee Club, then the Apollo (Junior Varsity) Glee Club and finally the Varsity Glee Club. Basically you had to rise up in the system to make it into the Varsity Glee Club, typically as a senior. Aha! These guys were all class of 1940, and they were all in that list. Irving was class of 1941 and appeared in the next list. Slowly the fog lifts a bit more...

A few days later I received Irving's reply to my request for photos. It came in a large manila envelope and included a two page, typewritten letter and an 8x10 B&W photograph of 8 men in white tie and tails. In the letter, Irving repeats his founder's story again and describes the 8 men as the first SOBs. Those other guys before "us" might have been SOBs, but that stood for you-know-what. His group was made up of seniors, juniors and sophomores, and had received their name "Sons of Orpheus and Bacchus" from the great Marshall Bartholomew himself.

Dawn Over Marblehead

Now my eyes opened fully and the light came shooting in. For a year or maybe more a bunch of seniors in the Varsity Glee Club had formed a pickup group and had some fun singing on the Glee Club tours. Perhaps they operated under the working name of Orpheus and Bacchus Association, a name inspired by their love of drinking and singing or maybe had been loosely given them by Barty.

But these guys graduate each year and are gone. Maybe a new pickup group repeats the following year or maybe it fades into oblivion. That's how the OBA was working, and that's who is depicted in the photo Barry had gotten from Bill Oler.

But Irving is admitted the Varsity Glee Club in the fall of 1940, and because he was not tapped for the Whiffenpoofs, has decided to start his own a cappella group. He picks guys from the underclassmen in the Apollo Glee Club so they will have longevity, puts together some cool arrangements for them, among them "Pretty Girl" and "Old Gray Bonnet". Marshall Bartholomew is thrilled and dubs the group "Sons of Orpheus and Bacchus". It is an historic moment. Up until this time, the Whiffenpoofs and senior pickup groups like the OBA perform break out numbers or sing to entertain one another on Glee Club tours. Now an a cappella group including undergraduates is included in the fun. Barty often invited the SOBs to tour with the Glee Club for the rest of his tenure. And "Pretty Girl" is still sung to this day to close every SOB concert.

The first SOB's

Irving chooses his voices with care, but also sizes up his lieutenants and establishes a leadership succession. It turns out to be enough to last forever.

The Whiffenpoof Blue Book

One last note before I sign off. As you know, I do archive work for the Whiffenpoofs. Many years before I got involved, the first archivist for the Whiffenpoofs was the aforementioned Bill Oler, 1945. One of the things Bill did, in addition to re-founding the modern Spizzwinks, was gather up all the music the Whiffenpoofs were singing and put it together into a book that came to be known as the Whiffenpoof Blue Book (WBB). In the process, he consulted with his older brother Wesley, from the OBA, and probably got manuscripts from him as well. Wesley and Bill were not able to establish who had arranged many of the songs; sometimes Wesley was able to tell him. There are notes on several of the WBB manuscripts to substantiate what I'm saying. But to this day most are still "Arrangement: WBB" meaning, "we don't know", including such songs as "Pretty Girl" and "Old Gray Bonnet".

In the interview with Irving, we also collected some of the first songs sung by the SOBs, including Irving's arrangements of "Pretty Girl" and "Old Gray Bonnet" and added them to our archives. These two songs are also in the Whiffenpoof archives, part of the WBB. In a court of law, under oath, I'd have to testify Irving Walradt '41, could well deserve the credit for arranging both of them.

Blue of a Kind sings National Anthem at Fenway Park

Here's the live video of the performance:

Arranging 101, Semester 2: A Case Study

Back in 1954 or 1955, one of the great musical directors of the Society of Orpheus and Bacchus, whose first name is Pete, arranged a classic piece the group sang for the next 20 or 30 years. We're not sure whether Pete made a chart of the song - if he did it was lost well before 1958 when another great director, first name of Chan, was singing it. It appears to have been passed on entirely by oral tradition. I sang this song with the O's & B's in the early 70's and I could swear we had charts for it, but nobody has yet located a copy. I went looking for records of this arrangement recently, and luckily we found something.

It turns out one of the O's & B's from the 90's made a project after graduation to pull together the ragged archives and bring some order to the chaos. He noticed the music for this particular song was missing, and contacted Chan to ask him to work up a sketch. This sketch is what was found a few weeks ago, and was sent to me.

So What's the Song?

Oh, yeah - almost forgot.... The song is a medley of two great American classics. First, "Sweet Sue" by Will Harris and Victor Young. The second is "Honeysuckle Rose" by the great Fats Waller with lyrics by Andy Razaf. Pete found a way to combine these, creating a duet by combining the two songs at once, what is generally called a fugue. Fugues are never easy to construct, but they are absolutely delightful to the ear. So our lost piece is remarkable in this respect, making it even more worthy of attention.

Chan's sketch represents to a great extent how his group had learned the song via oral tradition. If you've sung in an informal group like the SOBs, you will know this means they singers have improvised their parts over the years. Often times, the original complicated ideas are lost. There are really two reasons why these things get munged. First, the more complicated ideas are often hard to sing. The singers struggle with these sections, get them wrong, and they end up turned to mud or into something that sounds more familiar to their ears. Second, they may get altered by design, to firm up the core of the original concept in a way the singers can latch onto. They get rearranged, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.

I'm not going to get into how singers wing it through these difficult sections. It's a complicated, non-directed, organic process that rarely produces a remarkable or stable result. But arrangers who introduce their work to singers and identify these sticky wickets need to react quickly to redesign them before they are transmogrified to perpetual mud.

Chan's sketch also represents an extension of the arrangement beyond the way it was sung by his group in 1958 or so, because Chan is always working on solving problems and he's always learning new tricks.

Restoring 101

If you have such a sketch and some old recordings, as I also did, you can begin the work of restoring a piece like Sweet Sue/Honeysuckle Rose, and begin to see all of these dynamics at work. You also a learn a little bit of history on the way. I have a 1954 recording with Pete and his group singing the song. I also have a 1961 recording of Chan and his guys singing a somewhat different rendition. In addition, I have my own experience singing it in 1970.

First, I started with Chan's sketch and punched it up to a full-fledged manuscript. Then I compared it very closely to the recording his group had made, looking for embellishments and changes he'd added due to his basic creative nature. Essentially, this turned the clock back from the 1990's back through 1970 when I sang the song, all the way back to 1958.

Then, I took that version and tried to line it up with the recording of Pete's group singing in 1954. I stripped away embellishments of a few years, reverse engineered a few things and arrived a very good guess at Pete's original construction. Yes, nothing more than a good guess, in spite of having a decent recording.

The Rosetta Stone?

You think it would be, but in truth, the 1954 recording is not the decoding ring we seek. Why? Because Pete was darn clever and the guys just could not sing what he'd put together. In the recording, they fudge the tricky parts, which come out like pure mud. Pete was not able to get these passages under control. Look, in those days the charts were all prepared by hand, and the singers' copies were also recopied by hand. True, Xerox copiers were invented in 1938, but not available for sale until 1958. So arrangers stuck to what they written and were not able to react quickly as one might do today.

So along comes Chan in the summer of 1958, and he transcribes pretty much the entire repertoire, including pieces only in the oral tradition. One reason he's able to do so is the College has copiers! Let's look at two of those tricky spots, and see what Chan was able to do to get the mud out of them in 1958.

Dissecting Clever Rearranging

There's nothing better than concrete examples! I'll be using examples set in the key of F below. Since the key signature is clipped from the images, don't forget the B is flat by default!

First, measure 41 and following, where the ensemble sings, "Don't buy sugar". You'll see first what Pete was trying to do, something I've guessed at from the muddy section of the recording. Reminder, we're in the key of B flat here:

You can see the progression he uses is:

F/C - Em7b5/D - Ddim7 - Adim/C.

This is my best guess, mind you because there is no manuscript, and the singers are winging it all over the map. Now, take a look at Chan's rework of this passage:

Chan takes this section, extracts the key voice leading ideas, alters them slightly to strengthen them and harden up the chords. What do I mean by hardening up the chords? Look at those chord names above and you'll see there are quite a few modifiers and qualifiers to express a couple of the chords. These are Chan's chords in the same passage:

F7/C - Cm7 - Ddim7 - F7

First of all, the simplification of the 2nd chord to Cm7 helps, and Chan gets that Pete's summation chord, the Adim/C is really an F7, so he firms that up. The sequence is cleaner, the voice lines less tricky and more definite. This makes it easier for the singers to audiate their lines, and to follow the less ambiguous chord progression. Take note of something interesting: on the piano, both passages sound almost equally good.

Just a couple of bars later, there's another muddy passage on the 1954 recording, at measure 46 and following, where the ensemble sings, "You're his sugar." This, is my best guess at Pete's 1954 version:

Note, we're still in B flat, and Pete's chord progression there is G - D7 - Edim7 - G7/D.

Now, look at Chan's rework of this passage to bring it into better focus:

Chan's chords are not that different: G - D7 - F#7 - G7. But the third chord is quite different and has less modifiers - it's less ambiguous and works to clarify the harmonic sequence. And the summation chord is a solid G7, with a real rather than an impled G, and without the 5th in the bass. The main thing it allows is for the bass line to trace the roots of more definitive chords as it ascends. This anchors the singers in the unfolding harmonics.

Again, notice that on the piano, both voicings sound almost equally good. Chan has grasped something about these two passage that solves the observed problems singing them.

Spiff it Up

So today you have a computer, rather than pencil and paper, and not only is it easy to make copies for your singers, it's also easy to rework a section that's too clever for words, and can't easily be sung. Take advantage of this technology and make your adjustments early on, before your singers turn things to mud and invent some less than acceptable accommodation that will never sound right.

Arranging 101?

In the past couple of weeks, I had a lot of new work to look at and had the chance to reflect on what I've learned about voice arranging together with a couple of other arrangers who have been doing this for years and years. Here are some of the key points we touched on, a sort of Arranging 101.

Hobo Nickel of a Barbershopper

It's not about the talent of the arranger

Your whole job is to create an experience for an audience. They need to be thrilled, overjoyed, psyched up, get goose bumps, laugh, cry.... If you want to dazzle them with your musical prowess, they may be impressed, but not moved. This is not what you want. If you impress them intellectually, they will say, "Well that was interesting," and you'll be lucky if that's the worst thing they say. But when you've touched them emotionally, they will never forget you.

Don't over complicate things

When you have developed a new piece of work, always make several passes over it to reduce complexity and bring out the core idea single-mindedly. The core of what you are trying to express should always be your main focus. A song has one point, one message and it must be relentless to drive that home.

Chords with lots of voice splits hitting the 6, 9, 11 and 13 will sound really cool on the piano, but often don't have the same effect when sung. Use discretion to simplify and abbreviate. What are the essential colors you want and how can you get that with the least divisi? I've said this before, when you thin the ranks with a lot of splits, there is often a weakening of the overall effect and a muddiness can result. Use fewer arrows, and put more wood behind each.

Beware of over-ornamenting. If the baritones are singing a different figure every time through the verse, the overall orchestration better be be significantly different each time. Variations that change without great effect don't get noticed. In fact, if they are too subtle, your singers won't even remember them.

Use ornaments and cliches always, but with discretion. Let them stand out so as to have a powerful effect. Just as with singing loudly - the audience won't even notice your forte unless you've given them real pianissimo. Ornaments must pop out of an un-ornamented background.

Ring the chords

Barbershop arrangers follow rules to get their chords to "ring". Pay attention to these rules and use the technique to your advantage. There's nothing better than the magic of overtones creating phantom voices that expand your sound. A chord with root, fifth, octave and mediant above (1-5-8-10) will produce a phantom note another octave above the 8 being sung. It's magical.

Last week, Blue of a Kind was rehearsing an old Barbershop number, "Kentucky Babe". It's a classic arrangement originally performed by The Chordettes, and arranged by my great hero and sometime mentor, the late Walter Latzko. We were working on "singing on the breath", producing a well supported pianissimo and matching our vowels with one another. As we did, another voice was suddenly in the air. You would swear that one of the guys was pretending to be a soprano. We fooled around holding some of the chords and dropping out one or two of the sections to hear the phantom voice disappear. This is a wonderful effect, and it has the power to touch the audience emotionally. Use it.

Lead the voices

Vocal orchestrations should be singable. Each line can offer a sort of sub-melody, and go somewhere - create tensions and resolve them, leading from point A to point B. Some arrangements have voices plugging holes in chord progressions and can present big challenges for singers. The lack of fluidity will be evident. Yes, sometimes you want this, but by and large, this is not what you're looking for.

I always feel each voice part should be singing their own little song. Make a duet between the melody and another voice part. Then make another duet with the melody and still another voice part. Now put all three together. Then work with that, iron out the difficulties and see where it leads you. The bass should touch often on the root and the fifth, but also let it walk from here to there the way bass players in bands and orchestras do, creating another duet, and counterpoint against the melody. If a line seems too angular, spend some time making the dots connect here and there, smoothing it out, and see what happens.

Each part does not have to be too complicated, but when you put them together the interweaving can be quite delightful. This is what you're going for.

Save the best for last

Keep your best and coolest doo-dads for the last verse, for the conclusion. Barbershoppers always have these mind-blowing tags to accomplish the coup de grâce. The conclusion is the summation, the defining moment when you and the audience must be on the same page, and you've driven your arrow straight through their heart. Competitive barbershopping can take this to an extreme where they show off how long the tenor can hold a note without turning blue. Audiences love that! Here's my pal Danny Fong doing a cool song with a classic example of what I'm talking about:

How does he do that? And doesn't it do something to you?

Reserve your best ornaments, rhythmic figures whatever for the summation. Don't tip your hand too early in a piece. If you have a great ornament that appears repeatedly, create a reduced variant to use in verse 1 and 2, and then pull out the stops in verse 3. Put that key change before the final verse and push your listeners over the edge. Drive your point home and don't be afraid to go all out.

Practice, practice, practice!

I have a friend, one of my mentors and also a favorite voice arranger, who recently described his learning process doing voice orchestration. He likens it to the Elliot Wave principal used to predict market movements. Stocks tend to follow a pattern of 5 distinct phases: Up 1, down 2; up 3, down 4; and then up 5 before reversing the trend. As my friend points out, learning processes follow a similar progression. Here's how he described it:

"You start out and develop an increasingly more complicated skill set, but then have to step back and find you've gone off on too many tangents. You then take what you have and simplify by cutting out what doesn't seem to work. You find that you've cut out some chaff, but still aren't anywhere near an ability to really create something great, so you start to experiment once again. This also produces extraneous stuff which has to be 'dumbed down', but by now, after you do that, you've reached a point where you can tie everything together and add what else you need while sanding the edges. In the process, you develop your own style, much of which is 'borrowed' from the work of others that you have learned from along the way, but hopefully full of some stuff that is your very own."

You can't go through this process without trial and error, without repetition, evaluation and reevaluation, and giving it time to develop. Basically, it's practice, practice, practice!

Note: This blog is published on The A Cappella Cookbook. Click the link to visit the source of all this madness and fun.

De Wind Blow Ober Mah Shoulder

There may be some good copies of this arrangement "out there". Maybe they will now turn up, but some friends have asked to see what I'm dealing with. A picture is worth a thousand words, so check out a copy just below. You'll see why I passed over this manuscript in 1971, and why I waited almost 5 years before trying to figure it out. Luckily, it's a simple song and I have sung dozens of Bartholomew arrangements of sea chanties and spirituals.

As you can see, this is one of those manuscripts that looked a lot like spots on a Jersey cow. Oftentimes, I can find coherent lyrics published in other sources, but not so here. With some squinting, I was able to decipher the lyrics:

A dark cloud a-risin';

Poor sinner begin to tremble.

Massa Jesus come from Galilee,

De wind blow ober mah shoulder.

Oh come mah lovin' brother/sister,

An' let's go down to Jordan.

Take up your cross an' 'ny yo'-self,

An' join de band ob de Angels.

In case you're wondering, that's "... your cross and deny yourself". If anyone knows this song or has other copies of it, please let me know. I think it's probably quite old.

Coded Messages in Spirituals?

There is some scholarship saying spirituals carry a coded message underneath the outward religious message. The message details the path of escape to the North, here coded as the River Jordan. Slaves could safely sing these songs publicly, broadcasting the message and the roadmap among the community. The band of Angels might be the folks helping escapees make the journey. If this song carries such a message, the ominous dark clouds, the Massa Jesus and the wind coming over the shoulder might represent the danger behind as one takes flight, adding quite an unexpected dimension. If you have any thoughts on that, please share them.

The Joys of Restoration

Every once in a while, something really amazing happens. I engrave a lot of old music that's been kept in moldering folders, shoeboxes and the like. It's music that's been passed on for ages. Some of it is too old to sing today, some of it is racist and doesn't deserve to be sung by anyone, and some of it is downright historical, but much of it is nearly unintelligible. And the facts about who created it and when are lost. That's where I come in.

What's In the Shoebox?

Several weeks ago I acquired a new shoebox-worth from someone's attic. One of the SOB alums from the class of 1951 did some digging and found some sheet music going back over 60 years. When I say sheet music, I am talking about hand-copied manuscripts that had been xerox copied numerous times and then have sat in someone's attic for 50+ years. This is not the stuff you buy from Hal Leonard or SheetMusic.com.

You look at this music and the staff lines are all but missing. Sharps cannot be distinguished from flats or naturals. Sometimes it looks more like spots on a cow than actual music. Over the past 6 years I have learned a lot of tricks to restore music like this, and find out who created it.

Today, I worked on a song I had seen in the SOB shoebox in 1971 called, "De Wind Blow Ober Mah Shoulder". The manuscript had a frightening appearance even then - the scrawl of the copyist gave me the shakes, and the breakdown caused by xeroxing only added to the overall creepiness. Trying to parse the notes was nigh unto impossible, so I turned the page and moved on to the next song. In 1971, this piece had already become inaccessible.

Now I approach a scan from someone else's shoebox of the same old song. In the meantime, I have engraved hundreds of other songs in poor condition going back 40, 50 and 60 years or more. I might not want to consider singing this song, but I want to know how it sounded and preserve that for future generations.

Old Songs: Some Better Left Dead

Among the recent find, one of the racist songs was attributed to someone named Goodale, but I could find no mention of him in the SOB records. We also got a couple of arrangements done by Horace Taft, an SOB musical director from class of 1950. Taft had been tapped by the Whiffenpoofs and turned them down. He'd also been on the Manhattan Project before returning to Yale, and was Dean of Davenport College when I was a freshman, although we did not meet. Taft was classmates with other musical geniuses at Yale, including Herb Payson and Edwin Wolff. These guys were among the most prolific arrangers and directors the Yale a cappella groups have ever seen, and their music is still performed down to this day.

One of the Taft songs had his name on it, and the other did not. But it had his signature all over every measure of the music. After going through hundreds of songs note for note, you get so you can recognize the marks of the arranger. But I ramble. But why? Because the interconnections are what I am really talking about. That's why I could recognize the second song as another Taft arrangement.

Ok, back to ground. "De Wind Blow Ober Mah Shoulder". I decided to search the Web using plain English. Bingo - I found the song.

De Wind Blow Ober Mah Shoulder: Found!

Ok, I found it, but this is a song that is nearly lost to the whole world. I found exactly one reference to the song, but it was enough. It was sung at The Orpheus Club of Philadelphia in 2009 to honor Bruce Eglinton Montgomery, director of the Penn Glee Club starting in 1956 who had passed on in 2008, and a counterpart and friend of Marshall Bartholomew of the Yale Glee Club. In his early days at Yale Bartholomew, also known as 'Barty", had visited a lot of chapels in the South looking for spirituals and gospel music, and had collected one song that was a favorite of Montgomery's, and you've guessed which one, haven't you? It's about the wind blowing....

This manuscript was copied by Robert F. "Missing" Link into a handmade songbook called "Songfest", which somehow ended up in the SOB archives many years before I went to Yale. A similar songbook was assembled by Bill Oler, also an SOB, for the Whiffenpoofs that has come to be known as "The Whiffenpoof Blue Book". Many songs from both books are in both repertoires of the two groups, and many are also in the "Songs of Yale".

In the top, right corner of this manuscript is a notation, "arr. by Barty", which we could not read very clearly and up until today had thought said 'Borty'. Today, the light came on and now we know whence this song came. So I share it with you.

Armed with this realization, I scoured my "Songs of Yale" books (various editions), but did not find the song published in any. However, I did find documentation of previous Yale Glee Club directors, and Barty's predecessor was one G. Frank Goodale. Remember the racist song I mentioned earlier? This is the Goodale who arranged it. It is a meaningless camp song, the equivalent of "One little, two little, three little Indians", and appeared in "Songs of Yale" in 1906, called "Three Little Darkies". The title is the worst part of it, so if you read that and survived, you're good. But the good news is we got the song nailed down right to the attribution, because of interconnections. It may not be worth singing anymore, but it's worth documenting.

Getting Over the Shivers

This song that gave me the shivers in 1971 is important in its own way. It's a song you won't find anywhere - it's one of those songs that is not sung by anyone anymore and it's pretty much dead and gone. But I restored it today and heard it and it is beautiful!