{"id":7437,"date":"2012-05-01T05:08:19","date_gmt":"2012-05-01T09:08:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/jimmy\/folkden-wp\/?p=7437"},"modified":"2019-11-07T23:08:32","modified_gmt":"2019-11-08T03:08:32","slug":"down-in-the-valley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/jimmy\/folkden-wp\/?p=7437","title":{"rendered":"Down In The Valley"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/jimmy\/folkden\/php\/images\/Down_In_The_Valley.jpg\" width=\"500\/\"\/><\/p>\n<div class=\"audio\">\n<div class=\"alignright caption\"> <a href=\"?page_id=6069\">How do I download this Mp3?<\/a><\/div>\n<div class=\"audio_link\"> Mp3: <a href=\"http:\/\/ibiblio.org\/jimmy\/folkden\/php\/music\/Down_In_The_Valley.mp3\">Down In The Valley &#8211; Click To Play<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"about\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/bit.ly\/Jy7uBY\">This song had an influence on Kurt Weill<\/a><br \/>\nDown in the Valley: An Appreciation<br \/>\nby Mark N. Grant<\/p>\n<p>Kurt Weill couldn&#8217;t convince any of his usual collaborators to write a libretto, so Stonzek and well-known conductor Lehman Engel suggested Arnold Sundgaard (1909-2006), who had already had two plays produced on Broadway and had co-written the book for the Fritz Kreisler operetta Rhapsody produced on Broadway the preceding season. He had studied playwriting with Eugene O&#8217;Neill&#8217;s teacher George Pierce Baker at Yale Drama School. His 70-character play about syphilis, Spirochete, created a sensation in 1938 as a Federal Theatre Living Newspaper production. Sundgaard&#8217;s long and varied career included teaching and writing children&#8217;s books, and he wrote librettos for Douglas Moore and Alec Wilder.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;When I had lived in the mountains of Virginia in 1939-40,&#8221; Sundgaard recalled late in life, &#8220;among the songs I heard was &#8216;Down in the Valley.&#8217; I felt that song suggested the kind of story we could write.&#8221; The song&#8211;a traditional Ozark ballad about a condemned prisoner and the woman he loves, set to a deceptively serene tune&#8211;first appeared in print collections in the 1910s. It also appeared under the titles &#8220;Bird in a Cage,&#8221; &#8220;Birmingham Jail,&#8221; and &#8220;Down on the Levee.&#8221; The lyrics varied from version to version, but the following composite gives a good idea of the raw material from which Sundgaard constructed the plot.<\/p>\n<p>Down in the Valley bears a superficial resemblance to an opera for students that Weill wrote in Germany, Der Jasager (1930), but the musical styles of the two works differ considerably. In this American folk opera, a short, eminently performable 35-minute work, the composer sought sheer lyricism in melody, harmony, choral writing, and orchestration more unabashedly than perhaps anywhere else in his oeuvre. It is, simply put, one of Weill&#8217;s most beautiful scores.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"lyrics-header\">Lyrics:<\/div>\n<div class=\"lyrics\">\n[A] Down in the valley the valley so [D] low<br \/>\nHang your head over, hear the wind [A] blow<br \/>\nHear the wind blow love, hear the wind [D] blow<br \/>\nHang your head over, hear the wind [A] blow<\/p>\n<p>Roses love sunshine, violets love dew<br \/>\nAngels in heaven, know i love you<\/p>\n<p>Write me a letter, send it by mail<br \/>\nSend it in care of, the Birmingham Jail<br \/>\nBirmingham Jail love, Birmingham Jail<br \/>\nSend it in care of, the Birmingham Jail<\/p>\n<p>Build me a castle, forty feet high<br \/>\nSo I can see you, as you ride by<br \/>\nAs you ride by Love,  as you ride by<br \/>\nSo I can see you, as you ride by<\/p>\n<p>Down in the valley, the valley so low<br \/>\nHang your head over, hear the wind blow<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><script src=\"http:\/\/digg.com\/tools\/diggthis.js\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How do I download this Mp3? Mp3: Down In The Valley &#8211; Click To Play This song had an influence on Kurt Weill Down in the Valley: An Appreciation by Mark N. Grant Kurt Weill couldn&#8217;t convince any of his usual collaborators to write a libretto, so Stonzek and well-known conductor Lehman Engel suggested Arnold &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/jimmy\/folkden-wp\/?p=7437\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Down In The Valley&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-love"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/jimmy\/folkden-wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/jimmy\/folkden-wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/jimmy\/folkden-wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/jimmy\/folkden-wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/jimmy\/folkden-wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7437"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/jimmy\/folkden-wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8797,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/jimmy\/folkden-wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7437\/revisions\/8797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/jimmy\/folkden-wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/jimmy\/folkden-wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/jimmy\/folkden-wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}