Melody's Blog

Any follower of my blog knows I come and go. Well, since my last post in July 2018, I have been in hospital 12 or 13 times, usually for 5-6 days at a time. Just one thing after another. I don’t believe you can withstand cancer for nearly 40 years without a bunch of other stuff going wrong and indeed, it is the effects of the cancer causing most of my problems. Now, we are stuck in shelter-in-place in most parts of the world due to COVID-19. I’m hoping to use this enforced period of self-isolation to write some more and edit more of my dad’s stories. I have also had a couple more books that were accepted in the Paul Bechtold Library Publications project before I had to resign to long-term disability, and everything else has had to wait on me getting those finished. I’m sure I wrote about the books we were publishing elsewhere, but the last two books in the project are awesome and I want to comment on them. The penultimate book is titled  Hattie’s Book: A Woman’s Story in the Ci...

About a year ago I started to have some interest in "night visiting songs." This was inspired by my growing admiration for the work of Jim Moray, an English folk-singer, and of course, my love for the saddest songs possible and songs of this genre are pretty uniformly very sad. Moray has recorded a couple of night visiting songs he wrote, "Nightvisiting" and "Nightvisitor," plus he covered Bella Hardy's beautiful "Three Black Feathers," along with a couple of other trad songs which I may or may not talk about in this post. (For links to performances of these songs, see the list at the bottom.) Well then, a few weeks ago when Miriam and I were hosting a singing at my house , I sang the lovely really sad folk song, "She Moved Through the Fair." It had never occurred to me this was a night visiting song, but it hit Miriam and about the same second as I was singing that it was. I used to sing this song to the kids when they were ...

Today I'm going to write about one group of songs that all have the same performance group singing them and was I ever surprised a few years or so ago when I found this music. I just happened to see a notice that 2015-16 would be Anonymous 4 's last year of performing together. They started singing in 1986 and have only had one change in personnel, an amazing feat. Then I discovered that, as last projects, they had made a trilogy of Americana. Surprise, because over the years, A4 has forged ahead as a quartet of women singing mostly medieval music, with some newly commissioned works thrown in. They have won award after award for their impeccable style and attention to details of historical research. And it is no surprise that the Americana trilogy has been equally researched and equally praised by classical and folk music aficionados. The trilogy consists of American Angels: Songs of Hope, Redemption and Glory ; Gloryland , with folk artists Darol Anger and Mike Marsh...

Another group of songs to reflect a wide range of genres. The first is: " How Beautiful Heaven Must Be " or We Read of a Place That's Called Heaven. The version I love is by George Jones. George Jones, "The  Possum," for you non-country lovers (of which group I used to belong) is possibly (if such a thing can be decided) the greatest country singer of all time. Oh, how I hated him as a child and teen. Now I know better! Two of his greatest hits are, and you should definitely listen to both — your education is not complete unless you know these — " He Stopped Loving Her Today " and " She Thinks I Still Care ." News flash!! Miriam and I hosted a singing at my house Saturday afternoon — I'm really finally just up and about after it as it took all my energy from me, but it was the most fun I've had in ages. Absolutely satisfying in so many ways. We plan to keep doing this. I'll write more about our plan (not that we have one)...

It's really odd how several books I've read fell into line with another book that had the same theme or something else holding them together. That has happened to me before (see my blog post on reading about donkeys from several years ago to which I could add one of the books I'm writing about here!) with serendipity making each book even more appealing. The first of the two pairings I'll write about here are Penelope Chetwode's Two Middle-Aged Women in Andalusia and Vladimir Losskey's Seven Days on the Roads of France . Well, in some ways these are miles and miles apart but both books are by committed Christians traveling on backroads; Chetwode traveled ON the other middle-aged woman, the donkey whom Chetwode calls the Marquesa, and Lossky traveled on foot, or hitch-hiked. In alphabetical order, Penelope Valentine Hester Chetwode, Lady Betjeman, was the wife of British poet John Betjeman, and she had become a devout Catholic, perhaps through her ass...