81. THE SONG OF THE WANDERING AENGUS/ THE LAKE ISLE OF INISFREE – Hamilton Camp/ W B Yeats

Not until my second year at university did I discover the poetry of WB Yeats. And what a fabulous treat it turned out to be, getting to know his work! Some of the poems felt more searching and stimulating than anything I’d read – I’m thinking of things like the Byzantium poems and ‘The Second Coming’ – which revealed more layers and perceptions on each successive read: far too complex to be interpreted in song, I thought (though many years later Joni Mitchell had a pretty good stab in her ‘Slouching Into Bethlehem’). The earlier, more lyrical and pastoral pieces were another matter though. I was learning to put more than just two or three chords together on the guitar, and also at that age (oh that it were ever so!) melodies just seemed to be there, ready to be snatched from the air! And so it seemed natural to try and make some of these poems singable!

Scene change: college holidays: home town. At this same time I had a girlfriend whose parents had a piano in their front room. I had no piano training of course, but I knew I could plonk out a melody one-fingered with my right hand, while making simple chord shapes with my left. Poor Margaret must have endured many an hour of me ‘finding’ tunes to poems. Actually, tackling WB Yeats required slightly more courage; I/we ‘practised’ first on a copy of the complete poems of W. H. Davies (I can still recall my cringingly jaunty melody for ‘What is this life if all of care/We have no time to stand and stare..’).

During this period my parents’ house also finally regained a piano (the family of a college friend were getting rid of theirs. I jumped at the chance!). I say ‘re-gained’ since in my very early years, until I was about five, perhaps, we had possessed a piano – my elder sisters had both been sent for piano lessons, my elder brother not for some reason, and by the time I was old enough to sit at the piano stool… one-day I woke to find that that wonderful and mysterious instrument had been chopped up by my father for firewood! I seem to recall vague talk of woodworm. I won’t say I was resentful but in some measure I felt its absence right up until that replacement was procured, when I was 19, and on which I could practise and play around during college holidays.

So, with those two pianos, and the guitar, and more time than I seem to have these days, and certainly more melodies available to pluck from the air, having desecrated enough of W H Davies’s poems, I cracked on more confidently with Yeats – ‘When you are Old and Grey’ was one of the first to get the treatment – ‘The Pity Of Love’, ‘Down By The Salley Gardens’ followed, and a few others. They weren’t good, but at least it taught me that any valid musical adaptations of these beautiful poems would have to be very special indeed.

Enter Hamilton Camp. Or to be quite precise I suppose I would have to say enter Judy Collins, again, since she has appeared in these little essays an embarrassing number of times. The thing is, she was at that time such a brilliant song selector, discoverer and interpreter. Her second album –much more easily available today than it was then –showed that she was beginning to feature ‘composed’ songs not just old traditional ballads; it not only featured Hamilton Camp’s setting of Yeats’ ‘Song Of The Wandering Aengus’ but made it the title track of the album – calling it ‘Golden Apples of the Sun’, and perhaps deliberately dropping the reference to Celtic mythological characters and folklore. But that suited me fine –it seemed and it seems now a more universal little pastoral fantasy about love and longing, loss and search. And Camp’s tune is a suitably subtle, haunting one.

Some years further on, several albums further on, Judy Collins picked up on another of Hamilton Camp’s settings – this time ‘The Lake Isle of Inisfree’ on her ‘Living’ album. The same respectful delicacy of melodic interpretation, a tune which couldn’t handle the words any more subtly and sensitively than it does. Again, something as romantic as moonlight, another idyll whose natural images say much about the human longing for connections with the earth, but also (more internally) for peace – even when we are ‘standing in the roadway/Or in the pavements grey..’

Love this one so much that it has become my ‘go to’ song when I sit down at the piano, howling out to a few lugubrious minor chords ‘And I will have some peace there/ For peace comes dropping slow…’ But it’s not everyone’s cup of tea! I sang the song unaccompanied once, as an ‘opening number’ for a little set of songs in a disastrous concert when I was opening for Frank Hennessy.(or perhaps it was ‘Let’s snog’ that the audience didn’t find too tasteful.) I wasn’t invited to repeat the experience. Ho hum.

So I take my hat off to Mr. Hamilton Camp, who has done so exquisitely what I failed to manage in all those compositional efforts of my student years! Strangely enough, it’s only recently –through the wonderful power of Deezer – thanks Deezer – that I’ve got to hear the originals and to discover the man himself, an old sixties’ Greenwich Village Guthrie-ite folkie if there ever was one. Oh and while we’re at it, let’s also hear it for his too often unsung lyricist –Mr. William Butler Yeats. Go, guys.

March 30, 2018September 20, 2018 by jeffhankins01 Categories: celtic, Contemporary Folk, Folk, the 60sTags: Greenwich Village, Hamilton Camp, Judy Collins, poetry, WB Yeats 1 Comment