My father-in-law is the source of many of the tunes playing on my iPod. This holiday season, he delighted me with another find: a live recording of The Darwin Song Project which includes one of my favourite artists, Karine Polwart.
Among the celebrations taking place around the world in honour of Darwin Year 2009, the Shrewsbury Folk Festival organized the Darwin Song Project, a songwriting retreat in rural Shropshire. The Darwin Song Project invited 8 artists from the UK and US to come together for a week to write songs which have a resonance and relevance to the life of Darwin. The artists include Chris Wood, Karine Polwart, Jez Lowe, Mark Erelli, Emily Smith, Rachael McShane, Krista Detor and Stu Hanna.
They were tasked with creating new songs that had a ‘resonance and relevance to Darwin’. Following the retreat, they performed their 17 new songs for a live audience at the new Theatre Severn in Shrewsbury. The project was the feature of a BBC Radio 4 documentary and a feature on Mike Harding’s BBC Radio 2 show.
All of the Darwin Song Project performances are also on YouTube. Two that really speak to me are the powerful full-ensemble acapella piece, You May Stand Mute as well as the lyrical Clock of the World song. I've included those videos below.
The music is really wonderful - all of these artists are extremely talented - but I was singularly impressed with the quality of the lyrics. They are all listed in the accompanying booklet along with a story or reference to Darwin's life to explain the impetus behind the song. One of the things I appreciate most of all about the collection is that the artists wrestle both with Darwin's theories of evolution as well as his (and his wife's) faith - and with the faith of the people at the time. Evolution is certainly something I take for granted, but imagine being alive at the time when Darwin's theories were first published.
This issue is addressed in a number of the songs. My favourite is The Merchant's Question:
Dear Sir, dear Sir could you tell me//How the grains from the ground can grow//To the breath of a man, to the muscle of a hand//And all that a mind can know.
Dear Sir, fine Sir could you tell me//Is it true what's written in your books?//That a soul will yield to the furrows of the field//Like a tree with the branches struck.
Dear Sir, please Sir, could you tell me//Are the words of the lord all wrong?//Are our eyes just the eyes of the birds in the sky//And our bodies to a beast's belong?
Dear Sir, dear Sir, could you tell me//Will I still go to heaven when I die?// Cause I've worked too hard to be caught off guard//And just rot in the ground when I die.
You can listen to snippets of all the songs over on eMusic (or, of course, over on the Project's own site).
Side note: I tried a couple of options to try to embed the playlist with snippets here - but simply could not figure it out. Is there any music service that you know about that lets you embed album snippet playlists?