Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  There have been many other settings of Housman’s poems by Australian and American composers as well as English ones, and the continuity between the earliest Housman settings and those being written a century later tends to have less to do with geography and landscape than with the enduring troubles suffered by young people wherever they might be. The American composer Jake Heggie has described his 2005 song cycle Here and Gone for tenor, baritone, piano and string trio as ‘a deeply personal journey of missed connections and unrequited love between two men’, and it sets Housman’s poetry alongside that of Vachel Lindsay. Heggie’s music draws upon the traditions of both the art song and music theatre, and it is his sure sense of narrative that makes this one of the most successful and moving recent cycles based on Housman’s poetry, one in which both the topographical and emotional landscapes of the poems have become universal.

  While composers such as Heggie honour the classical tradition of Housman settings, elsewhere in the musical world the poetry has been radically reimagined. In August 2008 Shpetim Zogaj, later a contestant on Albanians Got Talent, posted a video on YouTube ‘from the newest country in the world’, the Republic of Kosovo, which had declared its independence from Serbia six months earlier. Dedicated ‘to all those that are scared of being In Love’, Zogaj’s performance of his own setting of ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ for voice and electric guitar is accompanied by written onscreen exhortations to accept that relationships are often difficult but to persist with them anyway – something with which Housman might mournfully have agreed. As elsewhere, this particular poem has attracted popular musicians working in a wide variety of genres, and among other people who have set and sung it are Michael Nesmith (formerly of The Monkees), the young English indie singer-songwriter Joe Booley, the German band Black Eye, and the veteran Minnesotan folk singer Billey R. Rubble.

  It is unsurprising that poems linked to both the English pastoral tradition and old ballads should have attracted the attention of folk singers, but in some cases, the folk element more or less takes over. Dave Webber and Anni Fentiman’s 2002 album of unaccompanied songs Away from It All includes a track titled ‘Is Me Team a-Ploughing’, in which Housman’s poem is so thoroughly absorbed into the folk tradition that the friend is not ‘my friend’ but ‘me old friend’ and his answers to the dead lad’s questions all begin with the traditional chorus-introduction ‘It’s ay…’ rather than the poem’s ‘Ay’. Purists may blench, but this setting and performance show just how close the poem is to traditional folk song – so much so that it would not seem out of place on one of the albums of Fred Jordan (1922–2002), a Ludlow farm worker and singer of the kind Vaughan Williams or Butterworth might have tracked down, and whose discography inevitably includes a compilation album titled A Shropshire Lad (2012). Fewer liberties were taken by the Shropshire-based Polly Bolton Band, whose album Loveliest of Trees (1996) alternated readings of Housman’s poems by the actor Nigel Hawthorne with settings of them which employ piano, saxophone and synthesisers alongside more customary folk instruments such as guitar, violins and violas and Northumbrian pipes.

  Two years earlier the veteran folk duo Michael Raven and Joan Mills produced an album titled A Shropshire Lad. Also based in Shropshire, Raven (1938–2008) was a prolific writer, poet, photographer, publisher and musician, who wrote many books on local topography and folklore as well as collections of folk songs arranged for guitar, one of them titled Land of Lost Content (1999). Raven composed his own music for two of the poems on his Shropshire Lad album, but the rest are set to traditional Welsh tunes arranged for voice and guitar. For Raven there was an obvious fit between Housman’s poetry and the traditional music of Wales. ‘In the Dark Ages Shropshire was ruled by the Princes of Powys,’ he wrote, ‘and Welsh blood still flows through the veins of many a Salopian. There is a link, too, between the poetry of A Shropshire Lad and the pre-Celtic Iberians from over the border, namely a melancholy mood. Sombre, brooding melodies are as typical of the Welsh as jigs and reels are of the Irish.’ The Welsh band Fernhill included a setting of ‘Bredon Hill’ on their 1998 album Llatai, as did Hilary James on her 2011 album English Sketches, and this poem has, perhaps predictably, particularly appealed to folk singers.

  Jazz settings of Housman are, unsurprisingly, rather rarer, though there have been some notable examples. June Tabor’s recording of ‘The lads in their hundreds’ (2013), in which Butterworth’s tune is beautifully arranged by Iain Ballamy for voice, piano and saxophone, might be described as transitional: the song sits neatly between jazz and folk and does honour to both Butterworth and Housman. The Bulgarian opera singer Stanislava Stoytcheva’s wonderfully bluesy rendition of Samuel Barber’s ‘With rue my heart is laden’ (2014) similarly treads a borderline between jazz and classical music. Two decades earlier, the vocalist Jacqui Dankworth commissioned a major piece, Five Housman Settings, for herself and a jazz septet and classical wind quintet performing under the name New Perspectives. Among those who provided the songs was Dankworth’s father, Johnny, who had already set ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ for voice and clarinet for his wife Cleo Laine, and now set ‘Sinner’s Rue’ for his daughter. The other songs are Patrick Gowers’s setting of ‘Terence, this is stupid stuff’, a poem which for understandable reasons, not least its length, has been almost entirely left alone by composers (the only other known setting being Stanley Wilson’s in 1929 for men’s voices); Andrea Vicari’s ‘On the idle hill of summer’; and John Williams’s ‘When summer’s end is nighing’ – all of them showing Housman’s adaptability to a musical style far removed from that of the English art song. Less successful are more recent settings of three Housman poems for ‘a unique combination of extended composition and jazz instrumentation’ on Anne Mette Iversen’s 2012 album Poetry of Earth, in which Housman’s words seem wholly incidental to the music.

  Housman has also been reinterpreted in what might broadly be described as the rock music tradition, sometimes becoming the inspiration for entire albums. Matt Perzinski first came across A Shropshire Lad while teaching British Literature at a Catholic boys’ school in Baltimore. ‘The moods of the poems, the narratives, the cynical beauty, and inherent comical tragedy of The Melancholy Thinking Man’s Life really got to me,’ he recalls, and so he began setting them to music. He recorded ten songs in 2006 and, as The Agrarians, released them online as Selections from Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. The arrangements are relatively simple, with guitar and percussion accompaniment and the voice double-tracked. The Pennsylvanian singer-songwriter Peter Kurie was introduced to Housman’s work in 2001 while attending classes with the American poet Jeffrey Carson: ‘I was curious about the differences between lyrics-for-singing and poems-for-reading. I wanted to write verse that could be both sung and read. Jeffrey pointed me to Housman.’ Over ten years later, as a graduate student of anthropology at Princeton, Kurie met the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, who had written some lyrics for a local rock band. ‘He got me thinking again about the possibilities, and problems, of setting poems to song. Remembering Housman, I started rereading him. I realised there was an opportunity to “update”/reinvent/reinterpret Housman’s verse in the modern musical styles I enjoy: rock, pop, jazz, folk, electronica, etc.’ In the summer of 2013 Kurie took time off from writing his dissertation to spend two months composing and recording an album released later that year as Housman Revisited. Musically the album is both sophisticated and engagingly eclectic, running indeed through several musical styles but remaining true to the poems, demonstrating how they are open to a variety of musical interpretations.

  Back in England, Wild Billy Childish & The Spartan Dreggs included a song titled ‘A Shropshire Lad’ (a setting of ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’) on their 2012 album Coastal Command, and released it as a single that same year. Childish’s music is hard to categorise, since he tends to move from genre to genre, but this song has a raw, garage feel to it. This may not seem the most obvious genre for setting Housman, but Childish went on to record a six-tra
ck EP of songs derived from A Shropshire Lad. A Tribute to A.E. Housman (2013) features the Van der Weyde portrait of Housman on the sleeve, and its tracks are fairly similar in their approach to the earlier setting, propelled by driving rhythms on guitar and drums against which Housman’s words are chanted just as if they were rock lyrics.

  There are many other examples of Housman rocking around the world. In 2013 Quieter than Spiders, a synthpop band based in Shanghai, freely adapted ‘Into my heart an air that kills’ for a number titled ‘The Land of Lost Content’, while the first track on the Swedish rock-noir band Les Fleurs Du Mal’s Concrete Ravings (2013) is ‘A Remorseful Day’, prefaced by a reading of the last stanza of ‘How clear, how lovely bright’ and incorporating phrases from the poem (‘Oh, I drove off a cliff alright / past human touch and sound and sight’) throughout. The Russian electronica musician Barrytone’s 2011 album Argonauts contains an instrumental track titled ‘Land of Lost Content’, and the acoustic German group Treigbut perform their own version of ‘Loveliest of Trees’. Most unlikely of all, in 2015 ‘a group of dudes (currently in high school) that just want to make boring school projects a little fun and interesting’, and calling themselves Ghoul Industries, posted a video on YouTube in which a beret-wearing youth introduces performances of two songs he dubs ‘A.E. Housemusic’. It’s a nice pun, and while the setting of ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ is nearer energetic hillbilly bluegrass, ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’ shows that if the words are read in an exaggerated rhythm and to the right accompaniment it is possible to rap Housman.

  The latter poem inspired a different kind of tribute when an American rock group that had started out as Army of Strippers changed its name to Housman’s Athletes. This was done on the grounds that Housman’s poem ‘is about an athlete that wins all of his races and abruptly dies at the top of his game; never defeated, never growing old, never fading away’. As the band’s guitarist D.J. Foley puts it: ‘Our goal as a band is for our music to have some longevity. We want to never get old. We want our music to stick around forever.’ Given the band’s name, it seems wholly appropriate that their 2008 debut album, Race to the Finish, should include a track titled ‘Unrequited’.

  While Housman’s words are used by a wide variety of bands, the musician who most embodies the poet’s spirit is Morrissey. In 1995 The Smiths released a compilation album, Singles, with an image of Diana Dors on its sleeve. The images for the band’s albums were always chosen by Morrissey, becoming a gallery of his personal icons, and the image he selected of Dors was a still from Yield to the Night, a 1956 film in which she plays a convicted murderer called Mary Hilton. The film was based on Joan Henry’s best-selling 1954 novel of the same name, through which ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ runs as a constant motif, and lines from the poem become Mary’s last thought as she is hanged. This motif is carried over into the film, in which at one point Mary picks up her lover’s copy of A Shropshire Lad and reads the poem in full, and so the still Morrissey selected for Singles salutes Housman as well as Dors.

  Morrissey was himself one of those troubled lads for whom Housman’s poems held a special appeal. Growing up in working-class Manchester, he was a book-loving boy who felt that he didn’t fit in, didn’t make friends easily, and stood apart from his easy-going peers. Asked in August 1998 during a phone-in on KCXX Radio, San Bernardino which poets had influenced his songs, Morrissey replied: ‘Well, the poet who means the most to me is a poet called A.E. Housman. Have you ever heard of him?’ The listener, who had been taking a literature class at the California State University in Los Angeles, replied that indeed he had: ‘I am a fan of A.E. Housman as well, so that’s great to know. What poems in particular?’ Morrissey did not answer this directly, but described the poems in general as ‘really, really sad and really powerful but beautiful’. The listener recognised at once why such poems might appeal to Morrissey, replying: ‘Well, I think it would be an understatement to say that your lyrics are very sad and very powerful.’

  The bands appearing on small, independent record labels in the 1980s produced what became known as ‘music for misfits’ because it found its audience among young people who stood apart from the mainstream, tended to be introspective, and were often fluid or confused in their sexuality. The Smiths rapidly emerged as the most popular and enduring representatives of the Indie scene, and the songs Morrissey and Johnny Marr wrote for the band have occupied a similar position in the youth culture of the past thirty years that the poems of Housman did for W.H. Auden’s generation: they seemed ‘perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent’. As a young Scottish admirer put it in an online fanzine, using an appropriately Housman-like metaphor: ‘As a teenager, I had felt at times that I was ploughing a lonely furrow, but Morrissey’s music became my constant companion.’

  That Morrissey should embrace Housman is no surprise, since the singer has always toyed publicly with the idea of his own buried emotional and sexual life. He has described Housman as ‘Vulnerable and complex […] a complete mystery even to those who knew him’, and this is precisely what Morrissey himself projected both on and off stage while with The Smiths. Morrissey has always divided opinion, but whether you loved him or loathed him, you could see exactly why he was drawn to Housman when he wrote of him in his Autobiography: ‘A stern custodian of art and life, he shunned the world and he lived a solitary existence of monastic pain, unconnected to others […] The pain done to Housman allowed him to rise above the mediocre and find the words that most of us need help in order to say. The price paid by Housman was a life alone; the righteous rhymer enduring each year unloved and unable to love.’ This is more or less how Morrissey has portrayed himself in the book. His refusal to declare himself sexually led to a great deal of speculation about his love life, or lack of it, just as Housman’s reticence had provoked curiosity; but his fans were always very well informed about other aspects of his life, and while he was touring America in 1992 to promote his solo album Your Arsenal a devotee hurled a copy of A Shropshire Lad onto the stage. Thereafter Morrissey’s musical collaborator Boz Boorer would sometimes read aloud from the book during concerts. In an online fanzine in 2013 Morrissey chose the words ‘If by chance your eye offend you’ as the headline of an announcement that a proposed tour of South America was being cancelled for lack of funding. This led a fan to post the entire poem, presumably to provide a context for such a puzzling appropriation.

  It is evident that Morrissey has done a good deal for Housman’s popularity, since eager fans seek out any literary work their idol recommends. Some of these fans might have avoided poetry altogether until led to Housman. ‘I thought his poems would be drivel about babies and flowers,’ one fan wrote, ‘but it’s really good stuff about suicide.’ The image of the young Morrissey assuaging his loneliness with literature and music has struck a chord with many of his followers. ‘When I was growing up, books and records had always been my refuge, and again I shared this in common with Morrissey,’ wrote the Scottish ploughboy of that lonely teenage furrow. ‘And, through the years, he has encouraged me to read so many writers whose work I now love and admire, such as Oscar Wilde and A.E. Housman.’ There is plenty of evidence that Morrissey has spread Housman’s fame far and wide. One fan posted ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ online on the grounds that Morrissey had ‘quoted the last line – more or less – while appearing live in Japan’, while another posted one of Housman’s most comically despondent poems, ‘Yonder see the morning blink’, because Morrissey had quoted lines from it during a concert in Honolulu. For some, Housman and Morrissey have become inextricably and distractingly entangled: ‘Whilst sitting in my English Literature exam this morning,’ one young fan wrote, ‘I came across a poem which I had not read before (even though I have been studying the book all year) entitled “Here Dead We Lie”, containing the line “Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose”. I had “Mama Lay Softly On The Riverbed” stuck in my head for the rest of the exam. If I fail, I bla
me Morrissey.’ The song in question, from Morrissey’s 2009 album Years of Refusal, contains an abbreviated version of Housman’s line. Such is Morrissey’s assumed expertise in Housman Studies that it has even been proposed that he turn his hand to biography: ‘I wish he’d write biographies on his faves,’ writes Eurydice. ‘I couldn’t put down the Autobiography when he wrote about Housman.’

  The Morrissey-Solo website is particularly abuzz with Housman. Two regular contributors post comments under the handles ‘The spirit of A.E. Housman (once a writer)’ and ‘A.E. Housman (A Shropshire Lad)’. Other fans simply post Housman’s poems, and the reasons for doing so are sometimes not hard to guess: ‘Baker Street Queen’ selects ‘He would not stay for me’. It is on this forum that one Morrissey devotee recommends Housman’s work as ‘Incredibly poignant verse if conventional in form. Like all great poetry, it expresses the seemingly unexpressible.’ Morrissey appears to have done something similar in his songs, putting into words feelings that some of his fans have had difficulty articulating, and in doing so eliciting the same kind of recognition and gratitude among his generation’s ‘luckless lads’ that Housman did.