We look at a selection of ballads: an eerie Scottish ballad about coming back from the dead, ballads celebrating the American myths of the Tough Loner, such as Davy Crockett (pictured) and A Boy Named Sue, and then two powerful Dylan ballads. You are invited to attend.
On a Hallowe’en theme: a little Monster Mash, two eerie Kinks songs, and two Scottish Ballads, about fairies abducting mortal men – good stories both, and very fine musical accompaniment too. You are invited to attend.
Can we ever perceive, let alone tell, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Let’s explore this theme, with the help of Robert Louis Stevenson (pictured here, painted by Sargent), and music from Frankie Laine and Jimmy Boyd, Fraggle Rock, Walt Kelly, the Beatles, Dylan, and Marc Copland, and a clip from, of all people, The Three Stooges. You are invited to attend.
“Unjust laws exist,” says Henry David Thoreau. And what are we going to do about it? We attend to Thoreau’s famous essay “Civil Disobedience”, and the story of Thoreau’s imprisonment that lies behind the essay, and its connection with Martin Luther King and other advocates of “peaceful revolution”, interspersed with music from Taj Mahal, The Band, Aretha Franklin, and Bernice Johnson Reagon. You are invited to attend.
In this pivotal time, shifting from summer to autumn, let’s come together under lamplight to explore this special time of the year. There’s a triptych of three Kinks songs for us, and an upbeat Dylan celebration, plus, back after a long interval, the Harvest meditation from RLA’s CD Journey through the Seasons, with poetry by Emily Dickinson, John Keats, and Wendell Berry. And more besides. You are invited to attend.
We ring the changes on the theme of Changes, attending to David Bowie’s “Changes” and Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin'”, with the Kinks and Sam Cooke also making appearances, and Ram Dass on “The Nature of Aging”, and a slight and slighting notice in passing on that impotent attempt to turn back change by making America great “again”. You are invited to attend.
Hermes in the sky
We spend time with the trickster Hermes, bringing along Alec Guinness reading from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, some genuine music from Ancient Greece, Joseph Campbell talking about Sacred Space, Leonard Cohen taking us “A Thousand Kisses Deep”, Robert Bly’s tricksy poetry, Mike Scott and the Waterboys singing “Open”, the password to the Hermes Field, and a little digression with a story about the origins of Evening under Lamplight, which surely came to me as a Hermes message. You are invited to attend.
Jurgen, pleased with himself
Mother Sereda, bleaching out the colour, and beauty, and strangeness of all things
Wednesday: the middle of the week, suggesting all kinds of middleness, and messiness, and incompleteness, and also featuring the story of Jurgen (pictured) who through the gift of Mother Sereda, Guardian of Wednesday (pictured), who bleaches all things drab, regained his youth for one Wednesday, twenty years earlier, and the delights and disappointments he experienced there. (Stuck in the middle with you, where Mama told me not to come.) You are invited to attend.
We come now with Dante and Virgil to the very centre of Hell, and, after encountering a cannibal and a zombie, we confront the Rex Inferni, the King of Hell, in all his gruesome idiocy. And then we pivot and climb out of there. Thus we end Series 4 of Evening under Lamplight, inviting you to attend, and thanking you for coming along this journey with us.
Dante takes us to the transitional place between simple Fraud and the more complex Fraud of treachery and betrayal. There are frightening giants here, and somehow Dante and Virgil have to negotiate their way. And we too negotiate our way, together, attending to Dante’s Inferno and much else. You are invited to attend.
