Backyard Songs (1990)

Soprano, flute, harp – 12 min.
Version 2 – 2 Backyard Songs, Soprano, Flute, and Piano – 9 minutes

Audio

Score (Free Download)

Version 2 (for Soprano, Flute, and Piano)

Program Note

Backyard Songs was commissioned by the Jubal Trio, a trio of voice, flute and harp. In its original form, there are three songs surrounded and connected by scat interludes. Two of the songs have been transcribed to substitute piano for harp and make a short suite. The poetry is by Chicago’s Afro-American Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Gwendolyn Brooks.

Backyard Songs (1990) emulates the carefree virtuosity heard in the jazz singing of Ella Fitzgerald and the raw emotional power communicated by Memphis blues singer Ruby Wilson. The voice-dominated “songs” — settings of poems by Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks — are introduced and linked by “scat” sections in which the voice is instrumentally integrated to create a real mixed-trio texture. Dramatically, the set moves from the whimsical naughtiness of “a song in the front yard,” through the threatening suppressed violence of the up-tempo “We Real Cool,” and concludes with the wrenching, cathartic blues-cortège “of DeWitt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery.”

a song in the front yard

I’ve stayed in the front yard all of my life.
I want a peek at the back
Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows.
A girl gets sick of a rose.

I want to go in the back yard now
And maybe down the alley,
To where the charity children play.
I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.
They have some wonderful fun.
My mother sneers, but I say it’s fine
How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine.
My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae
Will grow up to be a bad woman.
That George’ll be taken to jail soon or late
(On account of last winter he sold our back gate).
But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do.
And I’d like to be a bad woman, too,
And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace
And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

WE REAL COOL

The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery

He was born in Alabama.
He was bred in Illinois.
He was nothing but a
Plain black boy.

Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot.
Nothing but a plain black boy.

Drive him past the Pool Hall.
Drive him past the Show.
Blind within his casket,
But maybe he will know.

Down through Forty-seventh Street:
Underneath the L,
And Northwest Corner, Prairie,
That he loved so well.

Don’t forget the Dance Halls—
Warwick and Savoy,
Where he picked his women, where
He drank his liquid joy.

Born in Alabama.
Bred in Illinois.
He was nothing but a
Plain black boy.

Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot.
Nothing but a plain black boy.

“a song in the front yard,” “WE REAL COOL,” “of DeWitt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery,” © 1987 by Gwendolyn Brooks,
The David Company, Chicago, Illinois.