[March 10, 2006] Songs happen. There I was, just sitting peacefully munching my dinner and reading a little John Masefield, and the page starts to hum. And then the hum gets rough and fades in and out like static, and I can ALMOST hear it but not, not just yet...and the tune boils up out of the words and throws a line around my neck and hauls me over to the piano, and then there are chords. Whole banks of voices in the fog, whole choruses that already know this tune and all I have to do is listen to it and catch it as it goes by. And the tune steams itself onto the words like planking over a frame, and it has phrasing, and cadences, and harmonies, it's all THERE, right under my hands, though I can't even PLAY the piano. And I have to leave for a meeting anyway.

 

But it sticks in my head, and keeps singing itself, harmonies and all. So I have to go home after my meeting and grab the book and take it over to a friend's house because someone HAS to hear this, I don't know why, it's not like this song even really exists yet, or maybe it already exists, because this is John Masefield for heavens sake, there have got to be SCADS of settings of the Salt Water Ballads even though I wouldn't know them if I fell over one (which is why I bought this book anyway) but someone's got to have done this already. Someone male, and English, and maybe dead. But it's too late, it's there, in my head and under my hands, and there's this song, and it's alive.

 

[April 25, 2006] So there I am at NEFFA with Ken Mattsson and Ed Softky at our Power Harmonies workshop. And I start this song, that's never been sung in public before, and there, THERE are the voices out of the fog. The whole room swells with the harmonies, and I know these voices, they're the people I've been singing with all my life now, at my 32nd NEFFA. So this is for all of you: the voices in my head, in my ear, and in my bones. Wherever there's harmony singing, that's my Kingdom Come.

 

Text ©1902 John Masefield. Tune ©2006 Lynn Noel. Photo by Lynn Noel, ©2000 Maptech.