The choir repertoire

We have an extensive repertoire.  This section explains the background to some of the songs we sing. 

The Blue Tail Fly

Who is Jimmy and why does he crack corn?

By one account, this was originally a blackface minstrel song, first performed in the 1840s.   The narrative is, on the surface, a black slave’s lament over his master’s death.  It can also be read more subversively, as a slave rejoicing over the master’s death.

There are numerous interpretations of the phrase Jimmy crack corn.  The most favoured is that it refers to cracking open a bottle of cheap whiskey.  Another is that Jimmy is slang for a crow and the phrase refers to crows being allowed to feed in the cornfields, rather than being chased away by the slaves.  The blue-tail fly in question is probably a species of horse-fly found in the US South which feeds on the blood of horses and cattle.

On the surface, there could be is problem about singing a blackface minstrel song, since the entire genre has been discredited as racist.  However this one has been sung by such right-on figures as Pete Seeger and the blues singer Big Bill Broonzy.   Some believe that the song is a genuine African American piece rather than a minstrel pastiche.  Seeger and others are also inclined to the subversive interpretations of the song.

Seeger: favours radical interpretation

The Peacemakers

The Peacemakers  is a setting of a poem by Waldo Williams (1904-1971), a Welsh writer who was also author of Recollection/Cofio, one of the pieces we sang at the Truro choir competition in 2009.

Williams was a renowned Welsh-language poet, born in Pembrokeshire in south-west Wales.  He was a teacher, like his father, and developed radical political and cultural views.  His poem Cofio, written in the 1930s, is both a celebration and a lament for the Welsh culture and language, which he saw as under threat.  Williams was also religious, first a Welsh Baptist and then a Quaker.  He became a pacifist and was a conscientious objector in World War Two.  During the Korean War he was imprisoned for withholding taxes on the grounds that they would be used to finance the war.

Waldo Williams

Williams wrote Y tangnefeddwyr, translated as The Peacemakers, in 1941, after witnessing the bombing of Swansea which was targeted by the German Luftwaffe on three successive nights in February that year.  Like Cofio, its immediate meaning – particularly in the English translation – is not always clear.   Our second tenor, Ernest Williams (no relation) admires Waldo Williams and his work.   He has provided comments which illuminate The Peacemakers through an understanding of Williams’ biography and beliefs.  Ernest also points out that in several places, the English translation of the poem understates or subtly misrepresents Williams’ intentions.   The translation we sing was made by Eric Jones, who also set our arrangement

Ernest Williams (no relation)

As Ernest tell us, Williams opens by describing seeing Swansea ablaze.  (“Abertawe”, the Welsh name for Swansea, is rendered in our version as “the city”.)  Williams invokes memories of his parents, who had died before the war, and who are the peacemakers of the title.   The Jones translation runs:  “Blest are they in glad release, God’s own children….”  As translated by Ernest, the original version makes more sense:  “Blessed are they because they are beyond the pain of warfare, they who were children of God…”

In the next two verses, comments Ernest, Williams describes his parents and their influence on each other. “Slander was not for them, they looked for good in everyone. In caring for the poor, his mother showed his father that the Christian way was to seek the truth and to love their neighbour.”

Williams then evokes a mix of Christian and pacifist beliefs to condemn the view that nations are divided into good and evil:  this, he says, is an illusion (translated by Eric Jones as “a lie”.)   Ernest believes that the curious phrase “what of their estate this night?”  means “what would they be feeling this night?”

Williams praises his parents further by saying that they believed in truth and foregiveness.   He concludes with the pacifist assertion that the world will be blessed when war is no more and men can live as brothers.

Ernest suggests that in writing his poem, Williams may have been influenced by the great Welsh hymn Rhagluniaeth fawr y Nef.   Ernest says that this piece “poses the difficulty we have in understanding destruction alongside building, warfare with peace, seemingly good nations with bad, beauty with ugliness – can we have one without the other?”

In that case, Williams appears to answer the question by asserting that war is unequivocally bad and that pacifism is the only true creed.   In my view, his poem also extends themes explored in Cofio, which can be read as profoundly nostalgic, laden with regrets for transience and the passage of time.   The peacemakers, beside its ideology, is an insistent lament for Waldo Williams’ parents and the values they represented.

Ernest ends his commentary with a personal note.   The author of Rhagluniaeth fawr y Nef, David Charles (1762-1834), wrote his hymn after seeing the Carmarthen rope factory on fire.   “I was told by my uncle that my mother’s great grandfather worked in the factory,” Ernest says.   “After the fire he and his young son walked the 80 miles to Pwllheli in north Wales in order to find work in the ship-building yard there.”