All in Green

Let's look at Joan Baez's version of "All in Green Went my Love Riding." It's a poem by E.E. Cummings, and this version can be found on he album Baptism which also includes some spoken word versions of James Joyce and Lorca, among other things.

The first idea would that this takes a bit of "literary culture" into the realm of "popular culture." That's not a wrong way of looking at it at all, but let's think about it a little longer.

A second idea: there is a "literary turn" in folk music itself. Bob Dylan's fans think of him as a poet, and Leonard Cohen is also a self-defined poet who turns to music rather than staying in the purely literary world.

Concept albums like Baptism are kind of middle-brow in tone, aren't they? They aren't designed to have top-40 hits.

And then there's Cummings.  He is the modernist poet for ordinary readers or for adolescents.  This particular poem is well-known, maybe better known that its popularizing performance itself. From this perspective both the poem and the song seem kind of middle brow to me, and in similar ways even. The poem is brilliant for what it is, though the music, for my taste, is not. For one thing, the rhythm of the poem is ignored in the setting. I hear  the rhythm of the poem in my head as

ALL in GREEN WENT my love RIding / INto the SILver DAWN / ON a great HORSE of GOLD

Of course "folk music" itself is kind of middle-brow in this sense. It is not actual folklore music, but an adaptation of it for particular audiences at a particular juncture in time. What makes it middle-brow is its secondariness with respect to the original, and its populist rejection of the increasing harmonic complexity of modern jazz, a music for cognoscenti like flamenco is.

(The poem has a thumping meter but a sophisticated and imaginative use of the meter, similar to what Stevens does in "Sea Surface Full of Clouds," where you rewrite the same text repeatedly but substitute words in each instance. There ought to be a word for that form.)