On June 16, people around the world will drunkenly wander into Irish pubs dressed in early 20th century period clothing and drinking Guinness. The occasion is Bloomsday, an annual celebration dedicated to Leopold Bloom, the “every man” hero in James Joyce’s 1922 experimental novel Ulysses. To provide a soundtrack for the weekend’s activities, we asked Derek Pyle to highlight some Joyce-inspired music for Folk Radio UK readers.
James Joyce’s writing is highly musical; Joyce himself was a musician, and his lyricism and experimental writing style are often described as a kind of music. Therefore, Joyce is commonly associated with at least two kinds of music. First are the popular and operatic songs of his day, including those sung by the likes of John McCormack, and often alluded to in his works. Second, Joyce is counted as an important inspiration on many 20th century classical and avant-garde composers, including John Cage, Samuel Barber, Luciano Berio, and others.
Yet Joyce’s influence on music is actually much wider, and deeper, than this. Joyce can be found in chart-topping dance hits, underground noise music, Korean hip-hop, and in numerous metal subgenres. Here are a few of the Joycean highlights in folk and acoustic music; for the full overview of Joyce in music, check out “The History of James Joyce Music — Adaptations, Interpretations and Inspirations”, compiled by Derek Pyle and Krzysztof Bartnicki and published by the Waywords and Meansigns project.
1. The earliest arrangements of Joyce’s works were settings of his poetry collections, Chamber Music (1907) and Pomes Penyeach (1927). Inspiring countless classical arrangements by composers such as Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer and Sir Arthur Bliss, Joyce’s poems continue to beckon contemporary musicians. Martyn Bates of Eyeless in Gaza recorded Chamber Music as a two-volume set, released by Sub Rosa in 1994 and 1996.
2. More recently, singer-songwriter Josephine Foster included an arrangement of Joyce’s poem “My Dove, My Beautiful One” on her record No More Lamps in the Morning, released in 2016 by Fire Records.
3. New arrangements of Joyce’s poems have also seen successful covers by subsequent musicians. Syd Barrett’s haunting acoustic arrangement of “Golden Hair” was included on his 1970 solo album The Madcap Laughs, and has since been performed and recorded by shoegaze band Slow Dive (1991/2005) and the Italian singersongwriter Alice (2003).
4. In 1969, the experimental Irish folk band Dr. Strangely Strange recorded another one of Joyce’s poems, “Strings in the Earth and Air”, and their version was subsequently covered by Scottish musician Robin Williamson on his 1972 album Myrrh.
5. Rather than adapt his works, some musicians address Joyce and legacy directly, through song narratives. “Finnegans Wake”, the 2006 song by New Jersey-based singer-songwriter Barry Bender, draws comparisons between the equally bewildering processes of loving someone and reading Finnegans Wake. Another delightful story is the 2014 lo-fi folk song “Song Celebrating My Genealogical Connection to James Joyce” by Alanna Takes a Solo.
6. Some Joycean references are more poetic in nature, even providing a underlying framework or concept to albums. A popular inspiration is James Joyce’s book Finnegans Wake, which begins and ends with an unfinished or circular sentence — the book re-starts after it ends, creating an infinite loop of death and resurrection amidst the eternal struggles of human life. Joanna Newsom’s 2015 album Divers likewise begins and ends on the same tonal note, and the album’s final song “Time, As a Symptom” includes lyrical references to the first/final sentence of Finnegans Wake. Another Joyce-inspired thread ties together The Seim Anew, a 2013 album from the Brazilian Celtic folk metal band Kernunna. The album and three of its tracks borrow their titles from Finnegans Wake.
7. Connecting to his lineage through a conduit of creative source, Joyce’s names also holds special significance to some artists. Prior to becoming a songwriter, the Boston Sunday Herald remarked of novelist Leonard Cohen: “James Joyce is not dead. He lives in Montréal under the name of Leonard Cohen.” This quote was subsequently used by Columbia Records to promote Cohen’s 1967 debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen. Irish singer-songwriter Luka Bloom also derived part of his stagename from the author — “Luka Bloom” is said to be a combination of Suzanne Vega’s song “Luka” plus “Leopold Bloom”, Joyce’s protagonist in Ulysses.
8. Joyce’s names were recombined again by the consummate re-writer of folk history, Bob Dylan. In his 2009 song “I Feel A Change Comin’ On”, Dylan lyrically juxtaposes Joyce and American outlaw country icon Billy Joe Shaver. Although featured on an album co-written with Grateful Dead lyricist and noted Joyce reader, Rober Hunter, the line seems to come from Dylan, who explained in an interview with Rolling Stone: “Tying Billy Joe with James Joyce. I think subliminally or astrologically those two names just wanted to be combined. Those two personalities.”
9 / 10. Joyce was fond of creating new multilingual words, and his work is known for dense allusions to the world’s major and minor events of history, culture, and even advertising. This synergistic approach has lent itself to some major Joycean music compilations, most notably from Fire Records; in 2008, they organized 38 musicians and groups to record Joyce’s poems Chamber Music. The record is a verifiable who’s who of indie, alternative, and punk, featuring the likes of Peter Buck, Lee Ranaldo, Bardo Pond, Ed Harcourt, Green Pajamas, Jessica Bailiff, and many more. The project Waywords and Meansigns, organized by yours truly, also builds on the idea of massive audiobook-compilations — working with 150 artists and musicians from around the world, we collaboratively set Finnegans Wake to music two and a half times.
11. Of course, the Irish folk song most closely associated with James Joyce is “Finnegan’s Wake”, a street ballad from the 1800s about the traditional Irish wake held for a gentleman named Tim Finnegan. A story of life, death, and the resurrective power of whiskey and family brawls, the song has been performed and recorded by numerous artists, including the Clancy Brothers (1959), the Dubliners (multiple live recordings), and the Dropkick Murphys (1998). The ballad served as partial inspiration for Joyce’s final and famously obscure 1939 novel, Finnegans Wake. Note that Joyce’s title has no apostrophe, and therefore suggests something more universal — there are many Finnegans, all of them waking, whatever that might mean…
Derek Pyle is the director of Waywords and Meansigns (http://www.waywordsandmeansigns.com), an international project collaboratively setting Finnegans Wake to music. He co-wrote “The History of James Joyce Music — Adaptations, Interpretations and Inspirations”, a collaboration with Krzysztof Bartnicki. Derek is also co-editor of the James Joyce Quarterly’s annual column “Joyce Smithy: A Curated Review of Joyce in Visual Art, Music, and Performance”.
Find out more here: http://www.waywordsandmeansigns.com/about/james-joyce-music/
Photo Credit: History of Joyce Music by Sara Jewell