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!
No comments:
Post a Comment