For The Season #9: "Good King Wenceslas"

One of the ongoing pleasures of the holiday season for me is revisiting Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, first in its original format as a novella - and a ripping good read it is and remains being - and then in looking at several of the almost 30 film versions out there today, most all of which make a commendable effort to translate to the screen a complex narrative replete with interior monologue from the storyteller. No single movie of the tale manages to relate the full work in all of its deliciously Dickensian asides and details, and directors inevitably must choose which aspects of the Carol that they want to emphasize. Should the redemptive transformation of an old curmudgeon take center stage, or should the more explicitly religious idea of a hell-bound monster derailed from that destination by the intercessory power of a loving God be the point of emphasis? The cute little crippled and dying  boy or the deeply loving nature of his devoted father and the clearer but tougher vision of his mother? The evils and injustices of the world and the society portrayed in the book (and this is, as we shall see, a large part of the author's intent) or the power of a right-minded individual to rectify some of those evils and injustices?

Like all great stories, A Christmas Carol speaks to each of us in different ways. If you haven't read it of late and/or if you mainly know it or only know it through one or more of the films, it might not be a bad idea at all to give the original text another look. It's not long, it's available free online at multiple sites, and you might well be surprised how much of the original story hasn't made it into any of the movies - and how much of the tale is spot-on relevant today and how thoroughly its importance and its value transcend the Christmas season. It is a book for all seasons in its attempt to wrestle with the same issues of social justice and welfare that have raised their heads into elections around the world in the last year or two, and it emanates from the exact same time, place, and cultural context of its analogue in popular folk music, the great (post) Christmas carol "Good Kings Wenceslas."

And "Wenceslas" most emphatically is a folk song. Its lyrics, characterized as they are by the call to works of charity in the closing couplet, were the sole work of High Church Anglican priest and composer John Mason Neale (1818-1866), but the melody was delivered to Neale by his choirmaster and collaborator Thomas Helmore (1811-1890), who had found the tune (a spring carol called "Tempus adest floridum" or "The time of flowers has come") in an already-ancient book of anonymous medieval songs from Finland. Now, Neale and Helmore together left a powerful and deep mark on the music of Christmas that we know in English today, having composed and/or re-worked the best-known Advent carol in "O Come, O Come Emmanuel," two very popular Christmas songs in "Christ Was Born On Christmas Day" and "Good Christian Men, Rejoice," and the only St. Stephen's Day carol that most of us have ever heard, "Good King Wenceslas."

Neale and Helmore published a truly impressive number of hymnals and other collections of sacred songs over the years of their collaboration, but our case in point here relates to their 1853 Carols For Christmas-Tide in which "Wenceslas" debuted and which appeared exactly a decade after the Dickens classic. "Wenceslas" and A Christmas Carol reach the selfsame conclusion, albeit via very different plot lines. The transformation of Ebeneezer Scrooge is confirmed not by word or by attitude but by deed - Dickens remarks at the close of the tale that

He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world...and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father.

Wenceslas, already regarded as a saint by his people, acts with sympathy and compassion to alleviate the sufferings of a poor man in the depths of winter, giving Neale the opportunity to moralize an explicit lesson in a lyric that becomes a sermon:  

Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing, 
Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.

It is that "wealth or rank possessing" note by Neale that draws him closest in theme to Dickens. Charles D. was most certainly a liberal reformer in his day, having been born into a middle class family that had fallen on hard times resulting in several nightmare years in his childhood that saw him living in workhouses (an enforced servitude of the homeless and jobless poor, notorious for their exploitation and harsh treatment of their residents) and even debtor prisons with his father. These experiences clearly became the grist for the plot lines of some of Dickens's best-known and most successful novels - David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Hard Times, and of course A Christmas Carol among many others. Dickens came to regard both Adam Smith's promulgation of unregulated capitalism and John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism as pernicious lies that ignored the realities of the lives and plights of his own childhood and of millions of others like him in the Industrial Revolution era of the United Kingdom.

Neale shared many of Dickens's convictions, but please. We are not talking here about bomb-throwing anarchists or even members of Britain's incipient Socialist movement. We are talking about a pair of Victorian gentlemen of the upper middle class, High Church Anglicans both, men whose response to the savage inequities of the 19th century capitalist economy would warm the cockles of even the flintiest of hearts of modern American conservatives. For Neale and Dickens both believed that poverty could be alleviated and economic injustices resolved by moral action from those of wealth and privilege, not in the patronizing manner of the French concept of noblesse oblige but rather in the high-minded understanding of the Christian imperative to care for those in need. Dickens's reformed Scrooge and Neale's Wenceslas are literary embodiments of that belief, deeply held by both writers.

It likely doesn't matter that the Wenceslas story is entirely apocryphal or that the actual man was a Duke of Bohemia with the familiar Czech name of Václav who was murdered by his own brother. What bothered some of Neale's 19th century critics was that he and Helmore had co-opted the melody of a perfectly serviceable religious song about God's glory reflected in Spring and turned it into what one Grinch-like writer referred to as "insipid sentimentality" and "Christmas doggerel." No matter; "Good King Wenceslas" is doing quite well, thank you, more than 160 years after it first appeared. However, in the interests of fairness and full disclosure, here is that "Tempus adest floridum" root song in all its pristine glory:



There is much to like here, and the sprightly, even optimistic rhythm and melody fit perfectly with the lyric's joyful evocation of the wonders of Spring:

Spring has now unwrapped the flowers, day is fast reviving, 
Life in all her growing powers towards the light is striving: 
Gone the iron touch of cold, winter time and frost time, 
Seedlings, working through the mould, now make up for lost time.

For a sense of how this may have sounded in the era of its 1582 publication, here is Ernst Stoltz playing an authentic Renaissance lute with an anachronistic but charming and unobtrusive modern guitar:



For a solid pop-folk rendition of "Wenceslas," we turn to the Kingston Trio:



This is the longest-running iteration of the group that will celebrate its 60th anniversary next year, the configuration that has been touring together since 2005 and that features Bill Zorn doing the lead with the King's dialogue and George Grove and Rick Dougherty harmonizing beautifully with the page's lines. That kind of antiphony is characteristic of much medieval music, even if Grove's tastefully understated banjo line is not.

My good friend George, however, is not the only performer to see the possibility of an Americanization of this most English of carols via the inclusion of the banjo. Here is Dr. Josh Turknett, a neuroscientist and major proponent of clawhammer banjo music, with a delightful frailed version of the tune:



And if you were never quite sure what the difference was between the folk/clawhammer/frailing style of banjo playing and modern bluegrass banjo music, take a listen to Banjo Ben Clark with his instructional video in bluegrass rolls and fills - using this ancient carol as his model:



You can find scores more experimental versions of the song all over YouTube and other video sites, including reggae and blues and jazz and fiddle renditions. I love them all for their innovativeness and originality, just as I remarked above that I love the many cinematic versions of A Christmas Carol, however far they may stray from the author's initial intent. But "Good King Wenceslas" is in its own origins a stately English carol composed for Helmore's choir, so our last version today will be a recording of the great Robert Shaw Chamber Singers performing the traditional song as most of us first heard it:



Shaw's always tasteful arrangements and disciplined direction are here enhanced in this 1990s recording by baritone Victor Ledbetter singing the King's lines and mezzo-soprano Katherine Murray as the page.

The poor we have always with us, as Scripture reminds us, and both Charles Dickens and John Mason Neale use the Christmas season and its attendant joy to inspire people of good will everywhere to do what they could to meet the challenge of dealing with that sad fact. Their solution may not be mine and may not be yours, but it is an idea worthy of the earnest men who propounded it a century and a half ago. May we all feel blessed enough this Christmas season to share some of what we have with those who have less and bring the reformed miser and saintly king to life once again in our own world.

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*The first eight songs in this series of holiday-related folk tunes include #1 - "We Wish You A Merry Christmas"; #2 - "All Through The Night/Ar Hyd Y Nos"; #3 - "When Was Jesus Born/The Last Month Of The Year"; #4 - "Gloucestershire Wassail Song"; #5 - "Sing We Here Noel"; #6 - "The Bitter Withy/Mary Mild"; #7 - "The Coventry Carol"; and #8 - "The Cherry Tree Carol." Other Christmas-themed articles on CompVid101 include "The White Snows Of Winter", "Children, Go Where I Send Thee", "The Virgin Mary Had A Baby Boy", "Riu Riu Chiu/Guardo Del Lobo", and "Go Tell It On The Mountain".

For The Season #8: "The Cherry Tree Carol"

One of the most charmingly poignant of all English Christmas carols is also one of the oldest, a fitting companion in both its age and its source to "The Bitter Withy", which was the subject of my Christmas post two years ago. Both carols date at least to the middle of the fifteenth century and almost surely even earlier since each song appears in both handwritten and printed copies in Middle English, that odd hybrid of Anglo-Saxon and Old French that was the percursor of the Modern English that emerged around the time of Shakespeare. Yes, as an English teacher for 40 years I am well aware that lots of people think of Willie Shakes as "old English," but his work really isn't that at all. Most of us can make easy sense of at least half of what Shakespeare wrote simply by listening closely to good actors perform his plays or recite his poems. How hard is "To be or not to be..." or "But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun" to understand, grammatically at least? Want a bit of genuine Old English to chew on a bit this fine Christmas morn? OK, try this on for size:

  Fæder ūre, ðū ðē eart on heofonum,
  Sī ðīn nama gehālgod.
  Tō becume ðīn rice.
  Gewurde ðīn willa
  On eorþan swā swā on heofonum.

Got it, right? Plain as day, no? OK - even in Shakespeare's time, those five lines were incomprehensible to the average person and were translated from that 9th century Old English to this, although with slightly different spelling:

Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed by Thy name.
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.

As grad students like myself decades ago could attest, Middle English is tough but much less of a challenge. For example, here is the opening of "The Cherry Tree Carol" in one of its earliest printed versions, from about 1478, shortly after William Caxton brought the first Gutenberg printing press to England. Jesus' mother-to-be Mary speaks first:

A my swete husbond, wold ye telle to me
What tre is yon standynge upon yon hylle?

You scarcely need me to tell you that Mary is saying "Ah, my sweet husband, would you tell me/What tree is yonder standing upon yon hill?" Even at that, Middle English was a thing of the past a generation or two before Shakespeare's 1564 birth - but its grammar, syntax, much of its vocabulary, and certainly its aural rhythms were so close to our own language that a) most of us could go back to 1478 and after a few days of adjusting our pronunciation and adding some now-archaic words to our repertoire, we could make ourselves understood, and b) many poems and songs like "The Bitter Withy" and "The Cherry Tree Carol" transitioned fairly easily from Middle to Modern English.

The source for "The Cherry Tree Carol" is likely the same Apocryphal  Gospel of  Pseudo-Matthew that also provided the major plot points for "The Bitter Withy," though as with that song as discussed in the article linked above, the English composers adjusted the stories and their details to the landscape of Britain. But just as "Withy" conflated some details of the apocryphal story and changed others outright, "Cherry Tree" alters the time, place, and circumstance of the earlier tale. Cherry trees were as uncommon in the ancient Middle East as they are common in England and across most all of northern Europe, and the analogous story in Pseudo-Matthew has baby Jesus commanding a much more geographically-correct palm tree - a date palm, presumably - to bestow its fruit in his mother's lap. Virtually no one in late medieval England would have ever seen a date or a palm,  so cherries made an admirable and familiar substitution, with the added advantage of a kind of archetypal fertility symbolism as well.

"Withy" and "Cherry Tree," however, part company to a degree in the nature of their emphases. "The Bitter Withy," you may recall, has a little boy Jesus building a bridge of sunbeams with which to entice some disdainful rich lads to play with him. Jesus' divinity enables him to do this and to prance across the bridge, while the other boys plunge to their deaths when they try to follow him. Now, the divinity element was a given in any Jesus story that appeared by the eighth century date of  Pseudo-Matthew, but even then the question of whether the infinite God could be truly a finite human was still a matter of (secret) debate. "Withy" comes down emphatically on the "yes" side, with little Jesus experiencing and reacting to some very recognizable human emotions: desire for companionship, sadness over rejection, anger, and resentment of his mother's punishment of his misdeeds. "Cherry Tree," however, invents a non-canonical miracle when infant Jesus, still in utero, commands the aforementioned cherry tree to yield its fruit to his mother, who is suffering the scorn and rejection of her husband, who has just learned that she is pregnant with a child he knows is not his. Little fetus Jesus is thus shown to have the full power of the God of Nature and a preternatural ability to talk, and the net effect is to stress that this is no ordinary mortal boy.

The first version of "The Cherry Tree Carol" that I recall hearing remains my favorite. It was Mike Kobluk's solo on The (Chad) Mitchell Trio's 1965 LP, Typical American Boys:



Kobluk is a marvelous interpretive singer, as this track demonstrates. His lead on the CMT's ensemble performance of Ian Tyson's "Four Strong Winds" is a large part of why I believe that cut to be the finest version of the song ever recorded.

"Cherry Tree" is arguably more deeply embedded in the English aural landscape than it is in the American, so it is to me no surprise that Gordon Sumner/Sting does as fine a job with it as he does here:



I had liked Sting's work fronting The Police in the early 1980s, but with the release of his Ten Summoner's Tales album a decade later, I became a major fan as I realized both how much of a genuinely literary background this former secondary-level English teacher had, and how skillfully he had integrated significant elements of British Isles balladry into his writing. "Fields Of Gold" from 1993's Summoner's Tales is a nearly perfect amalgam of a kind of Romantic-era poetic sensibility with the structure of a 14th century Middle English ballad. Quite an achievement, really - and a key to how he can translate this old song into his own vocal style and idiom.

Now I don't need much of an excuse ever to include a Judy Collins performance in these posts; she is one of the greatest singers of my lifetime, and like her contemporaries Linda Ronstadt and Joan Baez, she has worked her vocal magic across a variety of genres and styles. But Collins brings something special to ballad-based folk tunes, most especially I think when she deals with a protagonist in the lyrics who is a female, often one in some sort of travail. "Anathea" and "In The Hills Of Shiloh" from her early repertoire spring instantly to mind. That sensibility lends an immediate and striking pathos to the lyrics of "The Cherry Tree Carol," with Collins here in a 1996 performance at the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina:



The source story in Pseudo-Matthew creates a different context for the miracle than does "Cherry Tree." Instead of the latter's journey during Joseph and Mary's betrothal period, the Pseudo-Matthew context is the Flight Into Egypt, when the Holy Family as it came to be termed is fleeing from the murderous wrath of King Herod (see last year's "Coventry Carol" post for more on this delightful character). Both J and M are suffering from thirst and hunger, and that prompts infant Jesus to command the palm tree to bow down and give them its fruit and to "open a veyne" to supply them with water as well. There is no recrimmination here regarding the parentage of Jesus, and it is that aspect of the cherry tree tune - emanating as it does from Joseph's moral rectitude - that adds the element of pathos to Mary's silent suffering of an understandable but unjust accusation, as well as her wonder at the miracle and her resolute determination as she "went home with her heavy load" of cherries. Judy Collins' sensitive reading captures all of that quite effectively here.

For something entirely different, here is The Mark O'Connor Bluegrass Band with an instrumental rendition:



O'Connor's group is adept at creating the more usual blazing bluegrass sound in the rest of its repertoire, but I think that it takes a stroke of imaginative musical genius to recognize the idea that the standard bluegrass instrumental blend could be put to so quiet and moving a rendition. "The Cherry Tree Carol" not surprisingly does appear here and there in southern Appalachian folklore, though not at all as O'Connor and his band present it.

There are scores of variations on the lyrics of "The Cherry Tree Carol" across the English-speaking world, and a YouTube search will turn up more than a hundred recording and performance videos of the number, a significant percentage of which are by large chorales and classical orchestras. But "The Cherry Tree Carol" came into existence as an acoustic folk song, as we would term it today, and that is why I greatly prefer the simplicity inherent in these four renditions. The ancient roots of the song and its hauntingly beautiful melody make it a companion worthy  to stand with its better-known relatives in the body of music associated with Christmas.
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*The first seven songs in this series of holiday-related folk tunes include #1 - "We Wish You A Merry Christmas"; #2 - "All Through The Night/Ar Hyd Y Nos"; #3 - "When Was Jesus Born/The Last Month Of The Year"; #4 - "Gloucestershire Wassail Song"; #5 - "Sing We Here Noel"; #6 - "The Bitter Withy/Mary Mild"; and #7 - "The Coventry Carol."   Other Christmas-themed articles on CompVid101 include "The White Snows Of Winter", "Children, Go Where I Send Thee", "The Virgin Mary Had A Baby Boy", "Riu Riu Chiu/Guardo Del Lobo", and "Go Tell It On The Mountain".

Nick Reynolds And "Goodnight, My Baby, Goodnight"

The late Nick Reynolds was allotted by Providence with a greater range of talents and interests than most of those mere mortals among us could ever imagine. He was best known, of course, more than half a century ago as a singer and percussionist with the Kingston Trio in its heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s; the high harmonies that he generally created himself became an integral part of the group's signature sound. And because he could play a bit of guitar and needed to find a rhythm instrument whose sound could cut through that of the booming rosewood Martin guitars of his bandmates Bob Shane and Dave Guard, Reynolds adopted the all-but-forgotten four-string tenor guitar, so effectively resurrecting the instrument in public awareness that when the national Tenor Guitar Foundation opened a hall of fame in 2011, its first inductee was Reynolds - even though there were many other distinguished tenor players from earlier generations, including actor Scatman Crothers and Mousketeer-in-chief Jimmie Dodd.

In the picture above, Nick's original Martin tenor had been modified to an eight-string version of the instrument, with the extra four strings being doubles and octaves, much as you would find on a 12-string guitar. Holding the instrument in this photo from about 1962 is Nick's son Josh, himself now an accomplished professional in advertising and communications and the chief proponent of his father's musical legacy as well. And "Goodnight, My Baby, Goodnight," a sadly little-known Christmas tune from an excellent but largely forgotten record album, is a song whose inclusion on that LP is precisely because of Nick and Josh.

The record itself was The Last Month Of The Year, released in early October of 1960. It was a startlingly different kind of holiday album, as Bill Bush notes in his 2012 book Greenback Dollar that chronicles the earliest years of the Kingston Trio:



What the album did include was a genuinely eclectic mix of songs: a medieval French carol, an ancient Welsh lullaby, a couple of seventeenth century English wassailing tunes, two African-American spirituals, and more, all masterfully arranged to stay within the musicians' somewhat limited vocal and instrumental ranges while at the same time respecting the traditions from which the songs sprang and in the process creating as memorable and original a holiday album as U.S. pop music had ever seen to that point in time.

But Last Month was a landmark KT album in other and less positive ways as well. It was the Trio's sixth studio album, with the first five reaching #1 on the Billboard 200 album charts and attaining gold record status. Further, the Kingstons had had the top-selling album in the country for 18 weeks in 1959 and a fairly astounding 24 weeks in 1960. Last Month's top chart position of #11 and eventual sales of 200,000 units may not have been chopped liver and well may have been a signature effort for less dominant performers - but it was so disappointing for a group that had sold about five million recordings in the previous two years that the band's label, Capitol Records, pulled the LP off of the market and offered it for sale for only two more years during the holiday shopping season.

That is a large part of the reason why pretty much only the hardest core of Kingston Trio fans have ever heard "Goodnight, My Baby, Goodnight." And a pity that is. Bill Bush remarks above that each Trio member volunteered suggestions for songs to include on the album, and "Goodnight" was one of Nick Reynolds' two choices, with the Welsh "All Through The Night" being the other. Reynolds claimed copyright for both of those numbers, though it would have been for the arrangement and some slight modifications to the lyrics for "Night," which is hundreds of years old. The case isn't so clear for "Goodnight, My Baby," though. Josh had been born a few weeks prior to the early summer recording of Last Month, and Reynolds remarked to Bush that "I was just knocked out by having a kid." If there had been an antecedent melody from which Reynolds derived "Goodnight, My Baby, Goodnight," it is still clear that Reynolds reshaped it and supplied lyrics that conformed to his characteristically emotional reaction to new fatherhood. I believe that those emotions are audible in Reynolds' vocals here:



While some of the arrangements and performances on this LP are most assuredly more intricate - and nine of them appear in other CV101 articles - none is more heartfelt, and for some people whom I know very, very well who are intimately familiar with this album - this is their favorite track - new parents, many of them, and that is not surprising.

Nor is it surprising that today's KT of George Grove, Bill Zorn, and Rick Dougherty also regularly include "Goodnight, My baby" in their annual series of holiday concerts, as they did here in their 2008 Christmas CD On A Cold Winter's Night:



Lead vocal here is by Dougherty, who owns the sweetest and truest tenor voice of any of the singers who have ever been a part of the group - by which no disrespect is intended toward Nick, who was actually a high baritone with an amazing and elastic upper range.

The other professional folk group still performing the number also has roots deep in the 1960s pop folk revival. The Makem and Spain Brothers originally included three of the sons of Tommy Makem, who was one of the greatest experts on and performers of traditional Irish balladry - and though contemporary with the KT, a major influence of the latter group's selection of Irish material as well.


This was from a December 2012 show in Boothbay, Maine.

"Goodnight, My Baby, Goodnight" remains among my favorite contemporary Christmas songs for its simple innocence. I was about ten years old when I first heard the tune, a bit past belief in St. Nick but only growing into the adult's appreciation of the magic created by that belief in the ready imaginations of so many little children. I watched as my seven younger brothers and sisters grew into and through that belief and all that it entailed, and no memories of my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood remain more precious and vivid to me than those of Christmas Eves long past. Our family ritual was always the same: following an early light dinner, the youngest four or five would be bathed, pajama-ed, and brought downstairs to the living room for the ceremonial taping of the socks to the fireplace mantel, to be followed by all of the children sitting around my mother, each clutching one of the figurines of our Nativity set, moving them toward the stable as my mother intoned her greatly simplified retelling of the Gospel of St. Luke - and thence to bed, with the little ones in a hyper state of excitement for the five or so minutes it took them to fall asleep. Something about "Goodnight, My Baby, Goodnight" takes me back to those times like virtually nothing else can.

Upcoming in a couple of days - the eighth edition of a "For The Season" articles on a traditional carol.

A Brief Note On CV101

For most of this year nearly past, I have used these blog pages to post radio shows and podcasts and have drifted rather far afield from the original intent of the venture - which was to use what was still the fairly new phenomena (in mid-2008 when we started up here) of YouTube and other video sites to explore the ways that acoustic folk and roots and singer-songwriter tunes transform themselves over time and in the hands of different interpretive artists. As of today, a bit short of eight years into the project, Comparative Video 101 has 203 posted articles (exclusive of this year's 12 radio/podcast pieces) with just under a quarter of a million posts viewed/accessed since Google started keeping stats in May 2010, with readership since January 2013 in 161 countries worldwide.

Needless to say, I have been delighted and gratified by this response. However infinitesimally small these numbers may be in the vast universe of the worldwide web, they are beyond anything that I ever thought either possible or likely, especially for articles that are actually personal essays on songs and performers who for the most part enjoyed their greatest popularity more than half a century ago. There is often a bit of background in the pieces (and as an academic myself, I wouldn't call it "research" per se), but the writing in these pages with which I am most satisfied is that which details emotional connections - mine and others' - to the songs and the manner in which they have resonated with me, often in fascinatingly evolving ways, through all the decades that I have known them.

All of this is simply preparatory to a relaunch of the song and performer articles, in addition to a continuation of the podcast and radio show postings. One of the constants here over the years has been an annual "For The Season" publication in the last seven Decembers of a profile of an often lesser-known traditional Christmas tune, in addition to five more articles about other songs with at least a tangential relationship to our Christian solstice celebration. I have two such essays in process now and will post them during this upcoming week, signalling (I hope) a return to form for this blog in 2016. To paraphrase John Paul Jones - I have not yet begun to write - or as Shakespeare notes in The Tempest - "What's past is prologue."

In Memoriam Rod McKuen: "Love's Been Good To Me"

Rod McKuen's death on Thursday at the age of 81 was another one of those all-too-frequent-these-days John Donne moments, as in Donne's famous meditation on the connectedness of all people that climaxes with "Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee." That funeral bell tolls perhaps rather more loudly for McKuen than it may well do for many of the rest of us, because for several decades McKuen was a major force in U.S. popular culture, with his songs selling tens of millions of copies (generally recorded by higher-profile artists than McKuen was like Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams, Judy Collins, Glenn Yarbrough, Madonna, and many more) and his books of simple, emotional poetry appearing ubiquitously for some years on high school and college campuses throughout the land. By his own count, McKuen had recorded over two hundred albums and earned 63 gold and platinum records worldwide. In television and film, McKuen also racked up an impressive list of credits, as his IMDB page indicates HERE, and I recall seeing him quite accidentally and surprisingly one late night as an actor in a B western from the late 1950s. Yet though his death was treated as a major event in national newspapers and websites, it was often accompanied by the sort of "I always wondered what happened to him" reaction, or less kindly, "I didn't even know he was still alive."  This was due in part because McKuen's fifteen minutes of fame had expired decades before, but also because a major bout of clinical depression stemming from an abusive childhood engulfed him in the 1980s, in his early mid-life when he had been at his most productive, and he disappeared from the public eye for some time. He emerged from that shadow later in the decade, but times and styles had passed him by. McKuen continued to work - to write, to score, to perform - right up until shortly before his death, though on a smaller stage and with less public acclaim.

McKuen's name has appeared in the posts on this site with some frequency, primarily because the pop-folk groups of the late 1950s and early 1960s like the Kingston Trio, The Limeliters, The Brothers Four, and others were the first to record and attract wide attention to his songs, including tunes profiled on this site "Seasons In The Sun," "Doesn't Anybody Know My Name?", and "The World I Used To Know".  I'd like to crib from myself a bit here from those earlier articles because they express better than any rewrite could what I have thought of McKuen through the decades. First -

While I am not a fan at all of McKuen's attempts at poetry, I hold him in high regard as a composer and lyricist, one whose musical vision in both songs and orchestral compositions was so idiosyncratic and so out-of-step with the pop culture of his times that an artist whose songs sold tens of millions of recordings (and "Seasons In The Sun" as done by Terry Jacks is one of only a handful of single records with certified worldwide sales of ten million or more units), who had arguably the greatest pop vocalist of the last century record an entire album of his compositions (Frank Sinatra's 1969 A Man Alone), and who sold millions of books when a genuine bestseller scores in the tens of thousands in hardcover - this artist is nearly anonymous today, despite being a healthy and active senior citizen. So much for the glory of the world....Part of the problem with McKuen's legacy, and here I mean the fact that this artist whose works in different genres were wildly popular in their day (even though he never evolved into a leading performer himself) is so largely unknown to younger generations today and forgotten by his own, is that McKuen's music was never quite either fish or fowl - never traditional-sounding or protest-oriented enough to be remembered as folk but never quite complex enough to bear comparison with the work of great pop songsmiths like Cole Porter or Johnny Mercer.

And more to the point of today's song - 

I always thought that McKuen the composer was at his best when, as with French writers like Brel, his lyrics and melodies were tinged with a kind of fin de siècle melancholy, a sadness as gentle as an autumn mist. Think, for instance, of the lyric derived from William Butler Yeats in McKuen's "Isle in the Water" - the subtle changes he makes to Yeats' poem and his original lines make even this love song quietly wistful. "Love's Been Good To Me" is one of the 60s best reflective ballads...

"Love's Been Good To Me" is as fine a song as McKuen ever wrote at expressing quietly a sense of  passing time and its attendant loss, and as such makes a fine eulogy for its composer. It is in its chord structure and lyric sensibility most definitely a mainstream pop number, and of course the best-known version was as a middling hit for Frank Sinatra, recorded for the aforementioned A Man Alone album.  Yet interestingly, the song comes across most effectively in the roots-y performances below by Johnny Cash and the Kingston Trio, both of whom respect the song's pop origins but present it with minimal instrumentation and without the lush orchestrations common to most other versions - and as we will see at the end, it is this simpler and less ornate approach that McKuen himself took with the song in his later years.

McKuen first recorded his song in early 1964:



McKuen was self-taught as a musician, and in his early years as a performer in the late 1950s in San Francisco's North Beach clubs like The Purple Onion, he accompanied both his singing and his poetry reading with a simply-played guitar. However, his time in Paris with Jacques Brel from about 1960 through 1963 became for McKuen a kind of education in music theory and arrangement, and when he returned to the U.S., he did so with sufficient knowledge to score the orchstrations on many of his albums, as he did here.

The first cover version of the tune was by the Kingston Trio, at the end of 1964 about six months after McKuen's original:



The lead here is by Bob Shane, quite naturally since he had the best voice in the group and because he was the member most comfortable with pop numbers and Broadway tunes and the like. The Kingstons had never liked being characterized as "folk," and from their first album six years prior to this recording and on from there, the Trio had always included pop-styled selections, sometimes to the chagrin of their record labels Capitol and (here) Decca, which were trying to market the band as "folk." As wrong-headed as that was, it did have its advantages for the companies: neither label had to hire anyone to score and play orchestral arrangements to back the group, and the guitar-only accompaniment for this track enhances the effect of McKuen's quiet if sentimental lyricism.

Johnny Cash had long been an admirer of McKuen, which might strike one as strange at first given Cash's identity as a country/rockabilly/roots artist - but The Man In Black responded most strongly to and recorded many of McKuen's earlier and folkier creations, and Cash featured McKuen several times as a guest on the former's long-running and highly-rated television show. It is no surprise then that Cash included a couple of McKuen tunes in his last studio sessions, the widely-lauded "American Recordings" for the label of the same name. In fact, the fifth album in the series is A Hundred Highways, the title clearly derived from the lyric of this song:



Cash's aged, craggy voice at this late point in his life and career is perfect for the lyric, and I find it singularly affecting, as are many of Cash's other tracks from those last years of his life.

Clearly, you can't talk about "Love's Been Good To Me" without including Frank Sinatra's rendition. Sinatra was so taken with McKuen's compositions that the A Man Alone LP includes only RM numbers, and "Love" was chosen as the flagship single from the album:



The 45rpm reached only #75 on the Billboard Hot 100 but scored a number eight position on the adult/contemporary charts. The orchestration here is somewhat muted by Sinatra standards; Ol' Blue Eyes generally went for accompaniments that in many cases might today be described as over-done or schmaltzy...

....which is why I especially like what McKuen is doing with his song here, in the television show from 2009 at Royal Theatre Carré in Amsterdam:


There is a clear connection here to what Johnny Cash did with the tune. McKuen's vocals had always been throaty, but the addition of a few decades of wear and tear to his voice helps here to transform a ballad that might have seemed to be the superficial sentiments of a callow playboy when sung by a youth into a far more moving and reflective retrospection by an older man on a life now all-but-over. That is why for my money this last version and Cash's are the best ones ever waxed and help to transform a middle-of-the-road pop composition into something deeper and more satisfying.

McKuen enjoyed a career that could be fairly described, like the artist himself, as bi-polar. He sold over a million books of poetry in 1968 alone - in an industry in which even then selling fifty thousand units would make a book a number one bestseller - but he was excoriated by serious critics with a savage vituperation that I have seldom seen launched at any other artist in my lifetime. As a lifelong devotee of poetry, I have never had much use for McKuen's verse - but did he deserve this, a day after his death?

"Rod McKuen, The Cheeseburger To Poetry's Haute Cuisine"

I think not. Neither his music nor his writing might be to everyone's taste, but his compositions of both spoke deeply to millions of people throughout the world, and that counts for something in my book - quite a lot, really. And so it was that I was pleased to see that McKuen may well have written his own epitaph in an interview in 2001 when he observed that, "I battled my way back to some kind of sanity by finally realizing I had absolutely nothing to be depressed about...I’ve had and am having a great life and I’ve never been happier. Besides, who knows how much time I have left on this earth? I have too much to do and too many things started and unfinished to afford the luxury of being unhappy."

For that - good on ya, mate.

For The Season #7: "The Coventry Carol/Lully, Lullay Thou Little Tiny Child"

(L -  François-Joseph Navez, 'The Massacre of the Innocents,' 1824)
The seasonal celebrations that occur around the winter solstice, psychologists tell us, are for many people fraught with an anxiety and sadness that is usually incomprehensible to those who have never endured it. It seems contradictory at first: this season that across religions and cultures and millennia is the joy-filled welcoming of the return of the sun and the lengthening of daylight hours through the newly-minted winter and into the spring just does not seem to correlate with a darkness and despair that would appear to be more appropriate to autumn. But that "black dog" of depression, as Winston Churchill termed it, bides its time in the deepest recesses of the mind and heart, awaiting its chance and any excuse to pounce and to tear at the peace and well-being of the lonely and the fragile.

It may be Seasonal Affective Disorder; it may be a bit of good old Kierkegaardian existential angst; it may be simply a consequence of the dissonance between the perceived happiness of others and the quiet desperation of one's own soul as the year draws to an end. But whatever its source, this profound sadness affects millions during the solstice celebrations, a melancholy counterpoint to the joys and reunions and feasts inherent in the holidays. And perhaps surprisingly, this dark thread through the red and gold fabrics of Christmas extends itself even into the music of the day, nowhere more so than in "The Coventry Carol," whose  tragedy is derived from scripture and theology but that I do believe bears some relation, however apparently obliquely, to that Yule-related black dog. More on that connection later.

"The Coventry Carol" is very, very old, dating back in all likelihood to the middle of the fourteenth century, a point immediately evident to anyone with even a smattering of familiarity with late medieval music, since "Coventry's" musical setting in a minor key resolving into a final major chord is typical of much of the other music that survives from that long-vanished era. Some sources erroneously report the song as a product of the 16th century, but that results only from the fact that the lyrics were first published in 1534. There is reliable evidence, however, that The Shearmen and Tailors' Pageant, the play for which the piece was composed, was performed as early as the 1370s and perhaps even earlier.

The so-called "Massacre of the Innocents," the Biblical tale that provides the inspiration for the lyrics of the song as the mothers of Bethlehem mourn the approaching murders of the babes to whom they sing, is itself an oddity. The story appears only in The Gospel of St. Matthew, strange because Matthew is one of the three "synoptic gospels" whose plots and incidents are nearly identical and which may well be derived from an older proto-gospel - and neither Mark nor Luke, the other two Synoptics, make mention of the event. The "raging Herod" motif is common enough, befitting a character who in history was ruthless and desperate enough to have his own sons executed for fear they would usurp his throne, and that bit of unpleasantness may well have given rise to this otherwise unsubstantiated account of the slaughter of male babies whom Herod feared might replace him.

As with most of the physical events described in the New Testament, the jury is still and probably permanently out as to the historicity of this event. Guided by faith, literalists will accept it as fact; guided by doubt, skeptics will scoff. Most middle-of-the-road scholarship leaves the factuality question alone in favor of trying to understand the metaphorical significance of the story in the larger context of the gospel message - which also creates some problems, as below.

But the peasantry and yeomanry of 14th century England (and not coincidentally the scores of medieval and Renaissance painters who used the motif)  had no such confusion; for them, the Massacre was a real event, a fitting reminder of the degenerate nature of sinful humankind, and one deserving of memorialization in this lovely but heart-rendingly tragic carol. I think we can catch a sense of the original sound of the song in this acoustic instrumental solo by Trond Bengtson, performed most appropriately on a medieval-styled lute:



Bengtson has chosen a slow and measured rhythm for his performance, fully in keeping with the pace of most medieval pieces and accentuating the deep, despairing sadness of the event. Likewise, The Robert Shaw Chamber Singers, an offshoot of Shaw's famous Chorale, here in 1993 deliver the lyric with similar pacing:



Shaw breaks one of his own precedents here. His arrangements were often built around the male baritone section singing the lead on the melody; here, in keeping with the plaint of the grieving mothers, the lead belongs to the sopranos. My friend, the late Joe Frazier of Chad Mitchell Trio fame, had been one of those aforementioned baritones in this group in the years before he joined the CMT.

"The Coventry Carol" quite naturally lends itself to female voices and interpretations, and scores of the popular music world's best sopranos like Joan Baez and Hayley Westenra and more have recorded excellent versions, for the most part with full orchestrations. Given my preference for the simplicity of acoustic folk music, however, the soloist I want to present here is a 20-year-old amateur who looks rather younger and who lives in Indonesia. Her real name is Saskia Kusrahadianti and her YouTube username is ScheherazadEify. Either way - you really need to hear this:



That's a lot of voice coming from so diminutive a person. Her lyric interpretation is outstanding, and she makes the interesting artistic choice to end each verse on a minor chord without the resolution to the major heard in most every other arrangement.

Most, but not all. This next is the track that leads off the Kingston Trio's highly original and now-classic 1960 Last Month of the Year holiday album. Beyond creating an instrumental setting that employs a celeste and bouzouki, the Trio makes an interesting thematic choice for the verse-ending major or minor decision:



The Kingstons are splitting the difference, so to speak. The last chord of each of the first two verses is a minor, with the attendant sadness implied by that. The third and final verse, however, ends on the major - a resolution, as it were, from dark to light. Given the lyric, this cannot quite be termed a happy or uplifting conclusion; rather, it sounds as if it is intended as the one ray of possibility in the stormy nightmare that the song describes.

And that would be entirely fitting, given the Massacre's strange place in the canon of Christian lore. Some scholars suggest that it is simply a literary device employed by the author of Matthew to effect a kind of fulfillment of prophecy from earlier scriptures. Others, as I note above, regard it as an example of an inherent evil, the "total depravity" of the individual soul that necessitated the birth of a savior who was destined to endure a savage and sacrificial execution in order to redeem unrepentant humanity. That dark thread of death pervades other Christmas carols, ancient and modern. The myrrh of the funeral appears in nearly every Three Kings carol, and the savior's death itself is referenced in others, like the more modern "I Wonder As I Wander." "The Coventry Carol" implies this as well: a world so brutal that innocent children can be murdered at the whim of a sociopathic monster is one in desperate need of salvation, a salvation hinted at in the final major chord of the original song and the Kingston Trio's arrangement.

In a larger sense, too, "The Coventry Carol" glosses in a way on the seasonal despair with which I opened this essay. The mothers in the song articulate their grief over the coming loss of their sons and in so doing express what is always most tragic about death, for the survivors of the departed, at least. It is not simply the end of another's life; it is the ultimate and permanent separation from that beloved other that induces the wild grief we all know too well. Those among us who suffer loneliness and alienation and disaffection at this time of year do so largely because of isolation and separation, and we could wish that, just as the birth of the baby in Bethlehem promises the possibility of eventual reunion with those now gone, those who so suffer can find their own major chord resolution into light at some time during this, the season of light.

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*The first six songs in this series of holiday-related folk tunes include #1 - "We Wish You A Merry Christmas"; #2 - "All Through The Night/Ar Hyd Y Nos"; #3 - "When Was Jesus Born/The Last Month Of The Year"; #4 - "Gloucestershire Wassail Song"; #5 - "Sing We Here Noel"; and #6 - "The Bitter Withy/Mary Mild." Other Christmas-themed articles on CompVid101 include "The White Snows Of Winter", "Children, Go Where I Send Thee", "The Virgin Mary Had A Baby Boy", "Riu Riu Chiu/Guardo Del Lobo", and "Go Tell It On The Mountain".