The Thoughtful Songs of James Simmons

Abstract

When James Simmons came to Oxford in June 1987 to give a reading of some of his poems and to sing some of his songs at the Oxford Irish Festival, he referred, in the course of some introductory remarks, to his need to write songs as deriving from his wish when he was young ‘to become a popular singer in the style of Frank Sinatra’. This remark drew laughter from the audience. ‘What’s funny about that?’ he asked, good-humouredly enough. But behind the good humour was, I thought, a hint of the irritation he feels at what he calls in his poem ‘Didn’t he Ramble?’ the ‘po-face / Of court and bourgeois modes’. And perhaps behind the irritation there was a touch of despondency. He told me that, although he has been singing more recently, there was a period of about ten years when he didn’t write many songs because ‘no one was singing them but me’. I can understand other singers not attempting to emulate him, because his singing has the authority of a singer with a poet’s sensitivity not only to the importance of every word in its context, but to its emphasis and timing in the musical phrase. As a performer he has the same sort of natural, unteachable sense of the union of word and music as, say, Burl Ives in the realm of folk music, and Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in that of the classical Lied.