David Harley Words & Music & Pictures &…

With one exception, all the settings here right now are of verses from ‘A Shropshire Lad’, by A.E. Housman. Housman can’t really be described as a Shropshire lad himself: he was born near Bromsgrove in 1859, and died in Cambridge in 1936, and it’s often said that he hadn’t actually visited the Shropshire countryside of which he presented his own vision until after he had published the collection. (Most of the poems were written while living in Highgate, London.) However, his ashes are buried near St. Lawrence’s church, Ludlow, five minutes walk from where I live at the time of writing. Although I lived for the first 19 years of my life in Shrewsbury, none of these settings was composed in Shropshire either. I was living in Berkshire at that time, though the setting to Bredon Hill was composed while I was visiting my parents in Manchester, I think.

These MP3s are unaccompanied (with one exception), and all are first-take demo versions, not studio quality. I’ll maybe come back to them properly when the size of my back-catalogue looks a little less daunting. Some day, I might even set some more of Housman’s verse. While much of his work has a somewhat depressive nature that’s often been parodied (there are a couple of good examples quoted here), many of his verse cry out to be sung.

I wouldn’t want to discourage you from reading or even buying the whole cycle, but the whole of ‘A Shropshire Lad’ is viewable from bartleby.com. There are countless hard-copy volumes of Housman’s verse, of course, but my favourite is the 2009 edition published by Merlin Unwin with local photographs by Gareth B. Thomas (and a handful from the Shropshire Regimental Museum), an introduction by Prof. Christopher Ricks, and a brief biography of Housman by Dr. David Lloyd, a well-known name here in Ludlow.

• A Shropshire Lad XXI (Bredon Hill – MP3 of unaccompanied demo version): (Housman-Harley) Bredon Hill is actually in Worcestershire. You can find this one on the Housman Society’s page. And a demo version with guitar. And a more ambitious demo version with guitar and tubular bells(!): 
  
• A Shropshire Lad XLVII (The Carpenter’s Son): (Housman-Harley) The poem is published on the bartleby.com page here. And a very rough demo with some added guitar:  And a noisier but slightly better synched demo: 
• A Shropshire Lad XVIII (Oh when I was in love with you): (Housman-Harley) Strangely enough, I only just noticed that the same tune fits just as well for A Shropshire Lad XIII (When I was one-and-twenty). I’ll have to think about this… XVIII is also available from the Housman Society, as is XIII. And a rough demo for the version of XVIII with guitar. A better demo of XVIII:  And a demo of XIII: 
• A Shropshire Lad VIII (Farewell to Severn Shore – MP3 demo version) (Housman-Harley) Bartleby has the poem here. Better demo: 

Other Housman settings have been composed by real composers like:

• George Butterworth
• Ivor Gurney
• John Ireland
• Ernest John Moeran
• Arthur Somervell
• Ralph Vaughan Williams

Oddly enough, I’m not aware of any other folkies who’ve set any of these, but it’s unlikely that I’m the only one. 

I’ve also set this one.

• The Pilgrim (Yeats-Harley) The words to the original poem by W.B. Yeats are here. (Among other places!) Demo version with guitar (needs more work, but I think it’ll eventually work better than the pure unaccompanied version: pilgrim2

I also set a couple of Causley poems to music, but there may be copyright/IP issues with that. The late Alex Atterson did some excellent settings of Causley, which I believe were/are available on CD. You could try Musicstack, if you’re interested in those.