The Blind Boys of Alabama did record "Amazing Grace" using the "House of the Rising Sun" melody.
Ooo! Do you know the name of the recording?
*pokes around web* Gosh, I seem to know slightly more of Foster's oeuvre than I'd realized; his songs really have worked themselves into the collective musical subconsciousness. ("Camptown Races" was one of his? Coincidentally, the last time I mentioned the Elbereth/goatherd combination to someone, they attempted revenge by re-resetting the lyrics to that: replace yodelling with "doo-dah, doo-dah"; rinse and repeat.)
With the Tennyson pastiche, the inherited combination of regular meter but slightly irregular rhyme scheme is relatively resistant to... um... (feh, drawing a blank for the right single word, if there is one) setting it to pre-existing music. However, the Poe pastiche does seem close enough to standard ballad meter to squodge into anything with that sort of pattern, incl. "Beautiful Dreamer" (which doesn't seem *quite* right to me for some reason) and "Oh Susanna" (eek). The near-parallel of the song title for "Laura Lee" is tempting, but I don't actually know the tune for that one and at the moment can't find a clear online sample (polyphonic barbershop-style renditions do *not* give a straightforward impression of the main melodic line, grr); the lyrics don't look like the right meter either, unless copious melismata are invoked.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2007-03-16 06:42 pm (UTC)Ooo! Do you know the name of the recording?
*pokes around web* Gosh, I seem to know slightly more of Foster's oeuvre than I'd realized; his songs really have worked themselves into the collective musical subconsciousness. ("Camptown Races" was one of his? Coincidentally, the last time I mentioned the Elbereth/goatherd combination to someone, they attempted revenge by re-resetting the lyrics to that: replace yodelling with "doo-dah, doo-dah"; rinse and repeat.)
With the Tennyson pastiche, the inherited combination of regular meter but slightly irregular rhyme scheme is relatively resistant to... um... (feh, drawing a blank for the right single word, if there is one) setting it to pre-existing music. However, the Poe pastiche does seem close enough to standard ballad meter to squodge into anything with that sort of pattern, incl. "Beautiful Dreamer" (which doesn't seem *quite* right to me for some reason) and "Oh Susanna" (eek). The near-parallel of the song title for "Laura Lee" is tempting, but I don't actually know the tune for that one and at the moment can't find a clear online sample (polyphonic barbershop-style renditions do *not* give a straightforward impression of the main melodic line, grr); the lyrics don't look like the right meter either, unless copious melismata are invoked.