|
Here
is the story of "Legends, Dreams, and Myths"
I think it was the year 2000 when I had accumulated enough
original material to make an album.
I awoke one morning, while the diurnal ascendant of my birth's
chart was in 7 Scorpio, and God told to me, make the
"deposit" right now.
A "deposit" is the sample of one's work that is sent
to the copyright office for the office's records.
So I arose from my bed of slumber, and immediately tuned my (Jimmy
Arnold's old) guitar and fetched my list of songs,
and started singing into the cheap portable cassette player that
somebody had left on the street near to my thentime abode,
"Sunnybright."
Since the "deposit" tape was being done on cheap
equipment,
I was thinking that I would have to record these songs all over
again, after exercising my voice for a couple of weeks, before
making them available for sale.
However, I gave a double of the tape to a musical associate, Jon
Felton; actually some of the songs were duplicated,
while I re-did others for his tape.
Then in 2002, about January, or maybe December, 2001, I was
about to record the songs on my expensive but antiquated TEAC
two track recorder,
when Dave Mitchell, one of the two owners of Kramer's Deli in
Frostburg MD, said to me that he liked so much the sound of my
Lo-Fi cd, "Happiness
Teacher,"
that he thought I should do more lo-fi cd's, instead of using
the nice equipment.
Days later, as I was wondering whether there were any merit to
his suggestion, I received an email from Jon Felton, (or maybe
he visited me) saying that he greatly enjoyed to listen again
and again to the tape that I had given to him,
the lo-fi tape made on the cheap cassette player.
At that point I realized that my God was trying to help me to
find the way to career success in marketing cd's. People LIKE my
lo-fi acoustic music. Fine. I like it too, and play it over and
over again at home.
So I went to the maker of my first cd, "Happiness
Teacher," whose name is Marc, and we arranged to "capture" the music
from my tapes to make two more lo-fi cd's,
LEGENDS,
DREAMS, and MYTHS,
and
HYMNS
AND HISTORIES OF JESUS CHRIST.
Stories Behind Some of the Songs
14) APOLOGY FOR ROBIN HOOD: I wrote the words and the tune of
this one because, in the early 80's, I conceived of dedicating a
whole album to Robin Hood, and I wanted to give a brief
background. So I paraphrased the first page of the "Robin
Hood" section from one of my mother's childhood book
collections, called, "My Bookhouse."
Robin Hood was as a god to me, since, in the early 50,s at a
time when I was needing role models, a show appeared on
television, entitled, "Bill Wells Tells." I think it
was a local Washington DC show. Bill Wells was an
artist/storyteller, who would simultaneously tell a story, while
drawing an illustration of the story as he talked.
Later, in the early 80's, as I was searching for existing songs
for exemplifying the traditional warrior spirit of our people, I
discovered, in another of my mother's series of books, two old
Robin-Hood ballads, without any music. They were "Robin
Hood and the Stranger," and "Robin Hood and the
Widow's Three Sons."
I composed tunes for both of these, and learned to play them on
guitar, with a droning bass played with my right thumb, as you
can hear on the cd. For "Robin Hood and the Widow's Three
Sons," I tune the "E" string down to
"D".
15) HE LEADETH ME: While Uranus was transiting my ascendant, in
the late 80's, I was living in Annandale, VA, with my close
associate, Adele Wilson. I used, in that time, to visit numerous
"Spiritualist" churches in Washington DC and Virginia.
One of them was called The Church of the Two Worlds, in
Georgetown, Washington DC.
There was a quite Traditional Southern flavor to the songs and
services there, whereas I had been upraised in the New England
tradition of the Congregational Church. So there I became
acquainted with specifically two hymns that took a liking to me,
this one and "Sweet Hour of Prayer."
In the spiritualist hymnal, somebody had changed the words of
this one to "He Healeth Me." Or maybe it was one
Sunday the management circulated a separate piece of paper with
that change on it, not in the book.
16) HYMN TO APHRODITE - I did this one in the early 80's also,
being interested in many gods and goddesses at that time. This
is Percy Shelley's translation of Homer's hymn. It is in the
phryggian mode, and one of my earliest efforts to compose in
that mode. The song was so long that I had to make four
different melodies, to keep it from being too boring.
It was from THE REPUBLIC that I took the notion that the Dorian
and Phryggian modes are the only two to be used in music that is
to help to cause successful living. The modern musical theory's
textbooks of that time, the 80's, claimed that there was no
correlation between the modern naming of the modes and the
ancient naming. However, Socrates described the type of
psychological feeling engendered by the Dorian and Phryggian
modes and the major scale, and I found that his descriptions do
correlate, and do verify the modern naming of at least those two
modes, so there has been some force at work unknown to the
writers of modern textbooks.
17) DIANA AND HER DARLING CREW - Not sure where I got this one,
but I think it was in a book about The Old Religion, in the
Frostburg State University's library. The music was included,
and I just switched it into the Dorian mode. It is a verily old
song, several hundreds of years.
18) GLORIOUS APOLLO - This song was written during "The
Renaissance," and I found it in the library in Fairfax
City, Virginia, in the late 80's, when I was abiding in
Annandale, Virginia, or possibly in Alexandria, Virginia. I
moved about "considerable" during the late 80's, but
all within the scope of Northern Virginia, DC, Poolesville MD,
and Washington VA. I changed the scale to Dorian on this one
also. The cassette I was using to record the "deposit"
for the copyright office ran out of space before this song was
over, but there was enough of the melody still on the tape to
satisfy me. |
