Stephen Foster: How Song Opened a Door on History

You can’t research and write a novel about the Civil War, or anything else set in the mid-19^th century, without quickly running into the songs people sang. As I researched what would eventually become my novel Brookhaven, I came across war songs, anthems, sung by the Irish who came to America and enlisted, hymns, songs by the home folk, and more.  

I went looking for a book about music in the Civil War, and I found ta small volume published by the Library of America in 2010, Stephen Foster & Co.: Lyrics of America’s First Great Popular Songs. It’s a small, eye-opening gem. I discovered that songs I learned in elementary school had been around for more than a century.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweestepak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

English Poet John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ and 3 Great One-Liners – James Sales at The Epoch Times.

 

What happens in the space of absence – Padraig O Tuama at Poetry Unbound.

 

John Deane’s Poetry of Praise – Cyril O’Regan at Church Life Journal.

 

Reading Rilke with the Catherine Project – Jordana Rosenman at Front Porch Republic.

 

Tu Me Manques – poem by Michelle Ortega at Every Day Poems.

 

“The Waste Land (Part 1: The Burial of the Dead),” poem by T.S. Eliot – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

"Irish American Civil War Songs" by Catherine Bateson

My thoughts, lately, have been turning toward the green. Not environmental green, but Irish green. 

A couple of years ago, my brother did one of those “Spit in a tube and mail it in” DNA tests. We’d always understood our heritage to be (in this order) English, Irish, French, and German. The results mostly corroborated that, except in the order: Irish (County Cork, Irish, in fact) led the blood pack, with 38 percent of our DNA. English (Midlands) was in second place at about 18 percent, followed by English (London) at about 10 percent. French (Alsace Lorraine) was there, to be sure, and so was German (Saxon). We even had a surprising 7 percent Scandinavian, which I suspect went back to the Vikings conquering England and Ireland. 

 

The Irish, as it turns out came from our father’s side of the family, through both of his parents. On his father’s side, it likely came sometime in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries, on his mother’s, mostly the 19^th century.

 

The Irish had been emigrating to North America for a considerable period of time, likely as long as European emigration has existed. But it was in the 1840s that Irish emigration became a flood to America, following the Potato Famine. By the time of the Civil War, Irish immigrants accounted for 1.5 million of the total U.S. population (slave and free) of 31.5 million. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

“Songs from the Heart” by Tim Riordan

What if the psalms in the Bible are meant to be sung?

What if that’s how they were written and first heard?

Tim Riordan, author and pastor at SonRise Baptist Church in Newman, Georgia, makes a strong case for singing and studying the Psalms in Songs from the Heart: Meeting with God in the Psalms, originally published in 2014. He could have taken a more theological bent, but he didn’t. Instead, Songs from the Heart is engaging, approachable, and fascinating, as he takes the reader on a journey through the psalms.

Riordan begins by telling a fiction story of some 2,500 years ago, how the psalms would have been enmeshed not only in formal ceremonial and worship events but in everyday life. Then he provides a “big picture” view of what the psalms are about, the different kinds of psalms, who wrote them, and how they would have been used. Why is this important? “Psalms is one of the most loved and most read books of the Bible,” he writes. “It is difficult to fully grasp the impact that this central book of God’s Word has had upon humanity.”

Psalms is a book of poetry, he points out, but it’s more than that, and includes a number of literary sub-genres. The word translated as “psalm” comes from a Hebrew word that “literally means ‘to pluck a strong,’” Riordan says, meaning that from the beginning, the psalms were poems meant to be set to music and sung. And there are seven different kinds of psalms – hymn, lament, processional, royal, thanksgiving, reflection, and wisdom. They are organized in the Bible in five different groupings, believed to be aligned with the first five books of the Old Testament, or the Pentateuch.

Tim Riordan

The bulk of the Songs of the Heart is an extended discussion of how the psalms can be used today. Riordan takes 30 of the 150 psalms and explains what they mean, how they were likely used, what was their context, and how they apply to basic questions (and often struggles) people still have today. And that’s a bedrock theme of this book – people still struggle with the same questions and issues that they did when the psalms were written.

Riordan, in addition to his SonRise pastoral duties, received a degree in music from the University of Georgia, a Master of Divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, and a Doctorate of Ministry degree from the Baptist Theological Seminary in New Orleans. He is also the author of Immovable: Standing Firm in the Last Days (2014), The Published Pastor – Book One: Expanding Your Ministry Through Writing and Publishing (2015), and The Published Pastor – Book 2: How to Write and Publish Books (2015).

Songs from the Heart is an engaging overview of why the psalms are important and how they apply to worship and faith today.

Top photograph by Bryan Minear via Unsplash. Used with permission.

More than a Broken Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen: songwriter and poet.

Cohen has a song that is perhaps one of the most haunting songs ever recorded, appealing to a multi-generational audience. It’s always a new experience to hear those first few notes with the words, “Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord…”

Leonard Cohen

The song is “Hallelujah,” first recorded in 1984. Cohen, who occupies his own place in the rock pantheon somewhere in the vicinity of Bob Dylan, is best known for this song, and the best-known version of it is the one recorded by Jeff Buckley in 2009, which has had more than 74 million views on YouTube. If that weren’t enough, there’s even an entire book on the song, The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley & the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah,” published by Alan Light in 2012.

While Buckley’s version may be the best known, singer Rufus Wainright’s version in the soundtrack for the movie Shrek (2001) introduced the song to tens of millions of people. And earlier this summer, Wainright recorded a version of the song with 1,500 people in an abandoned power station – and it’s one moving video.

To continue reading, please see my post today at TweetspeakPoetry.

Photograph: The last Jeff Buckley performing "Hallelujah."