Sowash: "Pirate Treasure” for SATB chorus

I love Pirate movies.  Erroll Flynn’s “Captain Blood,” Burt Lancaster’s “The Crimson Pirate” and Disney’s “Treasure Island,” starring the incomparable Robert Newton whose broad accent and guttural baritone set the standard for “pirate talk.”  Arrrgh!

And I love Pirate novels.  Robert Louis Stevenson’s most famous title is the best.  RLS gave us virtually all of the pirate clichés:  the parrot on the shoulder, the Black Spot, the Treasure map.  And the great American illustrator/painter N.C. Wyeth showed us what pirates look like.

Rafael Sabatini’s pirate novels are almost as much fun.  Not only “Captain Blood” but also the two sequels and “The Sea Hawk.”

(I know that piracy is despicable.  I hear the news and the I saw that Tom Hanks movie.  Jeeminy!)

18th-century Caribbean pirates seem sufficiently distant from contemporary Cincinnati to render them non-threatening, even charming.  The pirate theme makes me smile, speaks to the Little Boy in me, nurtures the fantasy that, at heart, even at 65, I’m still something of a Sowash-buckler.

Be assured, I’ll never engage in piracy, nor write a pirate novel, nor star in a pirate movie, but I came as close as I’ll ever come when I set to music Abbie Farwell Brown’s delightful story-poem, “Pirate Treasure.”

I’ll include the poem at the bottom of this message.  It’s deftly done; in our language, writing a poem in rhymed couplets is fairly easy but devising a story-poem in a series of THREE rhymed lines is a virtuoso feat.

I admire this poem; it offers just enough detail to bring the scenes and characters to life.  And the final stanza is a delightful surprise.

Since every verse ends the same way, I decided to give this piece a Theme-and- Variations structure.  Usually, that structure is reserved for instrumental music. It’s a little unexpected in a choral piece.  Yet each verse seemed to ask for a uniquely expressive treatment, a variation, “text-painting” each segment of the story and ending with a grand return of the opening theme.

This last may be obvious but I’ll state it anyway:  the poems says that the pirate sets ashore his lady love with a “little treasure.”  Psst!  It’s NOT a chest of doubloons and pieces of eight, as I assumed on first reading the poem.  The “little treasure” is … a BABY!

So the title, “Pirate Treasure,” refers, not to ill-gained loot, but to the patrimony of the narrator.   (Not being the sharpest marble in the bag, I didn’t get that, first time through.)

I intended the piece to be sung a cappella but when my choir director friend Kevin Kelly wanted to feature the piece on a concert with his Athens Chamber Singers (of Athens, GA), he asked permission to write a piano accompaniment.  Why not?  He created a very effective piano accompaniment and now I prefer the piece in the accompanied version.

Just before singing the piece in concert, the Singers quickly donned earrings, pirate hats and red ‘dew rags.'  Two or three even sported black eye-patches (a challenge for singers trying to read music).  The audience loved it.

To hear "Pirate Treasure” lustily sung by the Cincinnati Camerata under the enthusiastic direction of my dear friend Chris Miller, who looks somewhat like a pirate himself, click here:
http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/pirate_treasure.mp3

To see a PDF of the score, click here:
http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/pirate_treasure.pdf

PIRATE TREASURE by Abbie Farwell Brown

A Lady loved a swaggering rover.
The seven salt seas he voyaged over.
Bragged of a hoard none could discover,
Hey! Jolly Roger, O.

She bloomed in a mansion dull and stately.
And as to Meeting she walked sedately.
From the tail of her eye she liked him greatly.
Hey! Jolly Roger, O.

Rings in his ears and a red sash wore he.
He sang her a song and told her a story;
“I'll make ye Queen of the Ocean!" swore he,
Hey! Jolly Roger, O.

She crept from bed by her sleeping sister;
By the old gray mill he met and kissed her.
Blue day dawned before they missed her,
Hey! Jolly Roger, O.

And while they prayed her out of Meeting,
Her wild little heart with bliss was beating,
As seaward went the lugger fleeting,
Hey! Jolly Roger, O.

Choose in haste and repent at leisure;
A buccaneer life is not all pleasure.
He set her ashore with a little treasure,
Hey! Jolly Roger, O.

Off he went where waves were dashing.
Knives were gleaming, cutlasses clashing;
And a ship on jagged rocks went crashing.
Hey! Jolly Roger, O.

Over his bones the tides are sweeping;
The only trace of the pirate sleeping
Is what he left in the lady's keeping,
Hey! Jolly Roger, O.

Two hundred years is his name unspoken.
The secret of his hoard unbroken.
But a black-browed race wears the rover's token,
Hey! Jolly Roger, O.

Sea-blue eyes that gleam and glisten.
Lips that sing — and you like to listen —
A swaggering song; it might be this one,
Hey! Jolly Roger, O.