Category: books

New book and album

For quite a while I’ve been threatening the world with a book based on my Tears of Morning album, on which nearly all the content has a Shropshire connection, including some settings of verse by Housman. The first version went onto the back-burner when I excised one of the appendices and gave it its own book (The Vanes Of Shrewsbury), which essentially provides historical and personal commentary on Shrewsbury as illustrated by my late uncle, Eddie Parker. I then veered into other projects, including a book on Nashville tuning for guitar and a new edition of my verse collection from the 1980s Suite in Four Flats (and a Maisonette).

Now, however, the Tears of Morning book (now renamed So Sound You Sleep) is available, like the other three, as a paperback and as an eBook for Kindle.

How Sound You Sleep tells the stories behind the songs on the album Tears Of Morning, which comprises songs and settings of poetry with a (sometimes tenuous) connection to Shropshire and the Welsh Marches. Several of the poetry settings are from Housman’s ‘A Shropshire Lad’.

The book contains copious commentary and information on the historical, traditional, musical and/or biographical background to the songs and poems on the original album, especially the settings of verse by Housman. However, it also includes a lot of additional material relating to other songs and settings, in many cases with a Shropshire connection that is even more tenuous. Not all the additional Housman settings, for example, are from A Shropshire Lad.

An updated version of the original album – called So Sound You Sleep – More Tears of Morning – features many more tracks in order to reflect the content of the book. There are links to each of the tracks in the book: while I’d be very happy if you bought the album, you don’t have to buy it to listen to the individual tracks. 🙂

(All of my books – well, those that are still available, including some ancient security books – can be found here, and all my current albums are on Bandcamp.)

Thanks to Kate Morley for the cover art and to Denise Lewis of the Memories of Shropshire Facebook group for permission to use a photograph of her great-grandmother, Ellen Hughes, who told a story to the writer Ida Gandy that was the starting point for one of my songs.

David Harley

FolkLife magazine

Just to say that I’m no longer the (acting) Kernow correspondent for the FolkLife magazine. The column I took over briefly to allow Nigel Morson to get some of his life back has now been taken over by Lamorna Spry (thanks, Lamorna!), who already contributes some material to FolkLife. I haven’t, of course, cut my ties with the magazine, for which I do a little editing, and I’ll be happy to pass on any interesting snippets that come my way.

Lamorna has quite a reputation in Cornish historical and cultural circles, and you might well enjoy the Cornish Story site to which she is a contributor.

[In the meantime, I’ve resumed work on my ‘Tears of Morning’ book project. (Which has much more to do with Shropshire than it does with Cornwall, but I’ll hopefully catch up with my adopted home county eventually…)]

David Harley

Epitaph for an Army of Mercenaries revisited

I’ve taken a couple of passes at this setting of a Housman poem (from Last Poems). After I posted a version on one of my blogs, I came across an alternative version I’d forgotten. I didn’t like the vocal much (I never do, but I particularly didn’t like this one), but I did like the synth and guitars, so I did a little splicing and remixing (or is that slicing and dicing?). Coming back to it for a book and album project, I did some more radical slicing and dicing, and I like it much better now.

To be honest, I’m not altogether sure I feel positively about the poem, still less the ‘war to end all wars’, but the poem does have a certain power, without the naked imperialism of Kipling at his worst.

This 1917 poem refers to the British Expeditionary Force, which German propagandists referred to as ‘mercenaries’ because at the outbreak of war, Britain’s army consisted of professional soldiers rather than conscripts or the later volunteers of ‘Kitchener’s Army‘. The BEF was practically wiped out by 1916.

A poem by Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries’ takes a very different view, regarding the BEF as “professional murderers”. I’m not sure how I feel about that one, either. Armies may commit atrocities, but its governments that set the context.

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages, and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

David Harley

David Russell and Survivors’ Poetry

[Unfortunately, the image that was here seems to have got corrupted. As the event was some time ago, I haven’t replaced it. I will post other Survivors’ events as and when I hear about them, and hope whatever the problem was doesn’t recur.]

A very long time ago, I emerged blinking from a failed marriage and reconnected with the London folk scene, where I got to know (among many others) the astonishing poet and guitarist David Russell. Almost as long ago I did quite a few benefit gigs for the Survivors’ Poetry group,  allied with the Campaign Against Psychiatric Oppression, and contributed a couple of poems to two anthologies published by Survivors’ Press.

More recently, having dipped several toes into the Cornish poetry scene, I wondered what had happened to the group and to the Survivors’ Press. As far as I can tell, the Press isn’t doing anything these days.  Sadly, quite a few of the people I knew from that time (Frank Bangay, Razz, Peter Campbell…) have died, but the group is still putting on regular poetry events. In fact, there’s one tomorrow night (29th December 2022) on Zoom, featuring Wendy Young, Jackie Juno, and the same “all-round experimentalist” Dave Russell. That sounds well worth checking out anyway, but I’m rather pleased to have reconnected with Dave, who has sent me a couple of YouTube links that you may find interesting:

David Harley

Suite in Four Flats (and a Maisonette)

Just realized that I haven’t flagged my third book on Amazon (apart from the old security books), though there is a link to the eBook on Lulu in an earlier post.

Anyway, this is a short collection of verse from the 1980s, with some edits and additional commentary.

I’m afraid there’s likely to be some more recent verse in due course…

 

David Harley

Review of the Nashville Tuning book

Many thanks to Mike Wistow for a lovely review of Introduction to Nashville Tuning for Guitar for Folking.com.

(Yes, I do sometimes write reviews for the same site, but there is no underhand collusion involved!)

If reading the review makes you think maybe you would like to contribute to my retirement fund, there are currently four versions available:

  • The paperback version at £4.50,  at Amazon  (includes links to sound clips)
  • An eBook version with embedded audio clips (there’s also a review by Mike for this one): £3.50 at Amazon
  • An eBook version with links to audio, but no embedded clips: also £3.50 at Amazon
  • If you’re not a fan of Amazon, there’s also an eBook version on lulu.com at £3.55. No sound clips in that one, but the links are there, of course.

David Harley

Introduction to Nashville Tuning book

There’s now an expanded version of an article that used to be on this blog available as an eBook or paperback on Amazon. (I might reinstate the article at some point but it will require some editing, and certainly won’t contain anything like all the material the book does.)

This is a short textbook on an alternative technique for stringing and tuning a guitar to get a very bright, treble-y sound that can be used to create some very unusual effects. It may at least interest some of the people who’ve asked me questions about Nashville stringing/tuning when I’ve used it in performance. It includes information on more-or-less related tunings, and the factors that need to be taken into account when considering setting up an electric or acoustic Nashville-strung guitar. It also includes links to a number of sample sound files illustrating the technique and ways in which it can be used to emulate other instruments.

It’s the first part of a book series called Strings Attached, though it’s more background than anything. The other books will be about albums, songs, and the history behind them.

The book is called Introduction to Nashville Tuning for Guitar, and it’s available as:

  • A reflowable eBook for Kindle, so you can do things like resize the font on a suitable device if it makes it easier to read. It includes links to audio clips.
  • A print replica book – that means you can’t change things like font size, but as well as links, there are embedded audio clips so it can be read even when there’s no Internet connection.
  • A fairly slim paperback version, since Amazon likes it if I do a paperback too… No embedded clips, I’m afraid. 😉 But the links are still there!

The previous book, The Vanes of Shrewsbury, featuring drawings of Shrewsbury buildings by my uncle, Eddie Parker, is also available on my Amazon page, as an eBook or as a paperback.  There are even links to some of the security books I’ve written or edited or contributed to.

David Harley

Book – The Vanes of Shrewsbury

For some months, now, I’ve been working on a book that takes my album ‘Tears Of Morning’ as its starting point. Tears Of Morning is a collection of songs and settings (plus a couple of instrumentals) that have a sometimes tenuous connection with Shropshire. The book will include most of the music and all the lyrics, but with a shedload of additional historical, literary and anecdotal material. It will also include some songs and verse that didn’t make it to the album.

That’s still in progress, and should be available fairly soon, in fact. However, I got (pleasantly) sidetracked.

Originally, I planned to include some drawings by my late uncle, Eddie Parker, who, although he spent his retirement years in Australia, still had a keen interest in Shropshire history and architecture. The drawings were to be published with appropriate commentary and, where possible, contemporary-ish photographs of the same buildings. However, it soon became obvious that I had way too much material to be shoehorned into an appendix, and it deserved a book of its own.

That book is the small but perfectly-formed (I wish!) The Vanes Of Shrewsbury (a title taken from A.E. Housman (A Shropshire Lad XXVIII ‘The Welsh Marches’).

High the vanes of Shrewsbury gleam
Islanded in Severn stream

 While the drawings all show buildings in Shrewsbury, the subject matter extends much further: for example, to the collapse of Old St. Chad’s in the 18th Century, the legend of the Dun Cow, how the Dana walkway is connected to the book Two Years Before The Mast as well as my time working with the security firm ESET, Sir John Falstaff and the Battle of Shrewsbury, and the evolution of the Fire Service. It also includes a preview of the book I’m working on now!

It’s available from Amazon in three versions in order of ascending cost:

Cover illustration of 'The Vanes Of Shrewsbury'
Cover illustration of ‘The Vanes Of Shrewsbury’