April 2024

With her sordid life and angelic voice, Sill is a fantastic subject, and as suits a figure who, with the evidence of her lyrics and her life, regularly conversed with angels and demons both, her muse was to some degree developed in juvenile court. She played church organ while she was in reform school, and that developed her taste for Bach which informed her songwriting and orchestral imagination. Among the interviews with peers like David Crosby and Jackson Browne, critic Tim Page plays something like the role Jonathan Richman played in Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground. He joyfully demonstrates the musicality behind his favorite track, “The Lamb Ran Away with the Crown,” and Page is mystified over why it wasn’t a huge hit. Even if you’re new to her music, you will be too.

Yet as Crosby notes, Sill had a reputation for being “fierce”; she knew what she wanted in the studio and, in fact, conducted her own orchestrations. Linda Ronstadt explains that the only other musician during that era with similar musical chops was Brian Wilson. In a marriage of the scared and the profane, Sill informed her folk music with classical structure and beer-barrel boogie, with lyrics that were searching and religious. This outlaw was repentant; she reveled in her transgressions but was just as fervent about the possibility of redemption. She battled demons as deeply as she embraced them and considered it more courageous to fight them. She could play like the devil, and as Natalie Mering, aka Weyes Blood, candidly points out, Sill was not conventionally attractive, but her music seemed to come out of some gorgeous fount.

If you’ve ever heard Marian Anderson sing “Deep River,” you’ve heard an immortal concert spiritual by Harry Burleigh. His name won’t appear on the youtube captions – and yet Burleigh’s “Deep River” isn’t a mere arrangement.

I unpack the genesis of “Deep River” – its surprising origins as an obscure “church militant” spiritual, its indebtedness to Antonin Dvorak, its subsidiary theme composed by Burleigh himself – on the most recent “More than Music” feature on NPR: “’Deep River’: The Art of Harry Burleigh.” The performances (other than Marian Anderson’s) were recorded in concert by the exceptional African-American baritone Sidney Outlaw. It was my pleasure to be the pianist.

The show argues that Burleigh was a major creative force – more than the pivotal transcriber of spirituals as concert songs. In particular, we present his final art song – “Lovely, Dark, and Lonely One”(1935) – as his valedictory: not merely one of the supreme concert songs by an American, but an encapsulation of Burleigh’s life philosophy. It takes an eloquently impatient Langston Hughes poem, and turns it into an expression of hope and faith. “Burleigh consistently refused to participate in movements he considered separatist or chauvinistic,” writes Jean Snyder in her Burleigh biography. He believed that artists, not politicians, would most effect progressive change. “They are the true physicians who heal the ills of mankind,” he wrote. “They are the trailblazers. They find new worlds.” Our performance of this song, at Princeton University last year, is a little slower than other versions; its interior life (the climax is a pregnant silence) felt deep and true.

Burleigh’s own life story is a parable of faith: his patience was rewarded.