Louis Roney: Traveling far in song

“I have traveled much in Concord,” wrote the great transcendentalist poet Henry David Thoreau. I was 17 when I first read those Thoreau words in a Harvard lecture course I was taking my freshman year. The next morning I got out my trusty ancient Pontiac and drove some 15 or so miles out to Concord, Mass., to see Concord Bridge for myself. I stood alone in the middle of the small structure and looked down several feet to the gentle stream flowing under it. This was the “rude bridge that arched the flood” when the small stream flowed copiously as the spring thaws flooded its banks.

I had once before in my life done something similar when I stood on the banks of the red Chattahoochee River outside Atlanta, and thought about the words of Sidney Lanier who, my great-grandfather had told me, was a distant kin of ours. Lanier’s poem “Song of the Chattahoochee” is good enough to be printed in anthologies of American poetry:

“Out of the hills of Habersham, Down the valleys of Hall, I hurry amain to reach the plain, Run the rapids and leap the fall.”

Both Thoreau and Lanier were artists who saw a great deal close-up in what was around them. One can easily walk around Concord’s Walden Pond, but Thoreau’s eyes looked at every blade of grass and every sapling along the way. He didn’t miss a discernable trick, and it takes a bit more time if you are examining all the notable minutiae while meandering.

My own thoughts on the shores of the Chattahoochee drifted toward the many pre-Civil War Indian tribes who used their canoes to travel far and wide on the willing waters of the Chattahoochee. Sidney Lanier’s poem “The Marshes of Glynn” celebrates the southern seacoast of Georgia and its most famous marshes.

The fact that Lanier had taught himself to play the flute expertly led to his professional musical engagement as first flute in Baltimore’s Peabody Symphony Orchestra. Lanier also taught poetry and English literature at Johns Hopkins University. The important similarity of meter in both music and poetry was of particularly contagious interest to Lanier.

Foremost of 20th century African-American songwriters was James A. Bland, born in upstate New York and educated at Ohio’s Oberlin College. Bland wrote more than 700 songs including “In The Evening By The Moonlight” and “O Them Golden Slippers,” but it was perhaps “Carry Me Back To Old Virginny” that made him beloved and brought him his undying popularity:

“Carry me back to old Virginny, There’s where the cotton and the corn and ‘taters grow, There’s where the birds warble sweet in the springtime, There’s where this old darkey's heart am long'd to go.”

A pair of New York musicians, George Gershwin and his song-lyricist-poet brother, Ira, spent much time on the Charleston seacoast accumulating the proper Southern aura for their outstanding opera “Porgy and Bess.”

I have traveled far in public in my life of song— and I have sung wherever I have traveled. It has been a life of giving of myself and the songs I wished to perform unforgettably. A singer and his songs are a musical love affair and a singer sings songs with a musicality that springs from his deep affection for, and understanding of them. Most of the many songs I have sung, even in my own country, have been in languages not my own. When I sang in France, Italy or Germany, I sang plentifully in French, Italian and German, eschewing English most often. Singing in foreign languages is a good way to pick-up the meanings of foreign words and phrases, and to embody the musicality that each language exclusively inspires.

The most important thing when singing is to tell the story. Therefore, a singer must, perforce, sing with great care as to the diction that is transporting a song’s meaning. Words with music can accomplish this artistic end most successfully.

“There are no casual notes in music. If this is not the way you choose to speak; if you cannot say more this way than you can with words, do not be a musician,’ said violinist Isaac Stern. And the poet John Masefield opined: “Laugh and be merry, remember, better the world with a song.”