Around the time COVID lockdown lifted and we extenuated souls began venturing out to rediscover our masked community, I heard Old Songs perform from Callimachus at Normals Books & Records in Baltimore. I have since practically worn that CD out in my Toyota Tacoma sound system. That music is pure solace as I drive home from a day’s work at the hospital.
What is an old song? Is it Def Leppard’s Pyromania on an 8-track restored in a 1973 Ranchero? Is it Doc Watson’s “Deep River Blues” picked out on somebody’s daddy’s guitar at the Ridgeway Opry House? Or do we sojourn way back to the 3rd century BC to revive archaic poetic forms and passions?
Old Songs lines up in that latter camp. In its catalogue to Callimachus, the group writes:
The Old Songs project has played and recorded hundreds of song versions of Sappho, Hipponax, Anakreon, Alcaeus, Archilochus, Alcman, and others. Our premise is that since these poems were originally sung, they come to life not on the printed page but in the air on the musical phrase.
I don’t know about you, but it always rocks my world to hear contemporary poetry sung. Rupert Wondolowski of Mole Suit Choir sets his own and peers’ poems to music, and you will often catch Buck Downs and Lee Ann Brown breaking out in song during one of their readings. Punk-jazz band Joy on Fire (spotlighted here on NPR’s “All Songs Considered”) features the lyrics/poetry/vocals of Dan Gutstein. Also notable are Tom Bickley and the trio Comma, a fixture in D.C. in the late 1990s. Bickley and the trio performed John Cage’s Song Books on the CD (voices) and were memorable for improvising musical and vocal interpretations of poems that captured their imagination on the spot.
It is equally exciting to hear Alexandrian poet Callimachus resurrected by Old Songs’ Liz Downing, Mark Jickling and Chris Mason. Downing’s otherworldly vocals, Jickling’s mandolin and banjo, and Mason’s guitar and poetic muscle constitute a trio both thrilling and challenging to the post-modern ear. Who could, for example, resist “Soft Amber Ointment”?:
The only things I get to keep
the only things that last
are the sounds that land in my ears
These are the sort of lyrics that rouse you in the night and parade across your wakeful brain. They connect you to a place you did not know until Old Songs made that connection for you. They lure you into the ethereal world of Zeus’ daughter Artemis (“virgin, killer of Tityos, / golden armor and belt”) and the possibly seedy one of local philosopher Cronos (“even the crows, croaking on the roof / Philosophize”). They place you face-to-face with icons:
The muses swarmed around Hesiod
by the path of the speeding horse
Truly the birth of Chaos
Horse’s hoof – water
Whoever makes evil for others
Makes evil in his own heart
Moreover, Callimachus evokes humor and joy, as in this diplomatic instruction for poets of all eras, from “Wolf God Apollo”:
When I first sat down to write
Wolf God Apollo told me
“Fatten up your animals
but keep your verses lean”
StartleResponse.com champions Callimachus and pairs it with a ferry ride on the mighty Cape Fear River. We can only imagine what the great naval commander Leontichus, referenced in Old Songs’ “Shipwrecked Stranger,” may have visualized on the open sea. Old Songs invites us to dwell in his world for the sweet duration of, well, an old song.
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