Carl Sandburg was the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry, and a third for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. He was also known for his 1927 anthology “The American Songbag,” espousing our native folk song and anticipating the folksong revivals the 1940s and the 1960s. On top of everything else, he was awarded a Grammy for his recording of Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait.” When Sandburg died in 1967, at the age of 89, Lyndon Johnson observed that “Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He WAS America.”
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll hear music inspired by this popular – and populist – figure, with two works especially appropriate for Memorial Day and, in between, a piece after a poem evocative of the American heartland.
Philadelphia composer Romeo Cascarino (1922-2002), who had served in the U.S. Army, composed a plaintive elegy, “Blades of Grass,” in 1945, just after World War II. He expressed a preference on several occasions that Sandburg’s poem “Grass” be read before performances. You’re probably familiar with it:
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
Leo Sowerby (1895-1968) was born in Grand Rapids, MI, and spent much of his career in the Midwest. Sometimes referred to as the “Dean of American church music,” he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1946 for his cantata, “The Canticle of the Sun.”
The published score of his symphonic poem after Sandburg, titled “Prairie,” from 1929, bears the following lines:
“Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields, the shore of night stars, the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley?
“Have you heard my threshing crews yelling in the chaff of a strawpile and the running wheat of the wagonboards, my cornhuskers, my harvest hands hauling crops, singing dreams of women, worlds, horizons?”
Last but certainly not least, Roy Harris, who shared Lincoln’s birthday (though born 89 years later), was born in a log cabin in Lincoln County, OK, only adding to his sense of destiny. Indeed he went on to become one of America’s greatest composers.
Harris’ Symphony No. 6 is subtitled “Gettysburg.” It’s one of a number of works the composer wrote with a “Lincoln” connection. Each movement of the symphony bears a superscription taken from the Gettysburg Address: the first, “Awakening (‘Fourscore and seven years ago…’);” the second, “Conflict (‘Now we are engaged in a great civil war…’);” the third, “Dedication (“We are met on a great battlefield of that war…’);” and the fourth and final movement, “Affirmation (‘…that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain…’).”
Prior to composing the work, Harris read – you guessed it – Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln.
I hope you’ll join me for “Lincoln Logger,” an hour of music inspired by Carl Sandburg, this Sunday night at 10 EDT, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
Although not on tonight’s show, here, as an added bonus, is Sandburg narrating Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait”:
