I hope you've been enjoying the bountiful crop of new musical pieces this month during our celebration of National Poetry Month. All the poems I've set to music this April were found in Louis Untermeyer's between-the-wars anthology Modern American Poetry, and today's selection is by another of the poets that Untermeyer noted but that time then has forgotten, a Pennsylvania school-teacher named Roy Helton. More than any other poem I found in Untermeyer's literary anthology, this one seems as if it was intended as a song lyric, though information on Helton is hard to come by. Untermeyer wrote that Helton had spent time in the hill country of Kentucky and North Carolina. and this poem is a mysterious tale from that region written in dialect.
The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 900 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org
