A Song Lyric by Margaret Bonds
Margaret Bonds traveled nearly constantly in her adult life. Even though she maintained a single address in New York from 1940 until her move to Los Angeles in 1967, she toured constantly as a pianist and public speaker, often performing her own compositions as soloist, duo-pianist, and collaborative pianist, in recital halls and night clubs. Even after she moved to Los Angeles, starting anew after separating from her husband and after the death of Langston Hughes, she was constantly on the move, with frequent trips to the Bay area and elsewhere – likewise as soloist, collaborative pianist, and composer and speaker, in recital halls and night clubs. That lifestyle did not lend itself to maintaining a well organized and stable library of music manuscripts, books, or really anything – and so she often left the documents of her life with others, or sometimes mailed them ahead to herself. Those circumstances are the primary reason why so many of those vitally important documents are so elusive today, and why the ones that have landed in stable repositories are often quirky in one way or another.
Here’s an example: the single largest and most consciously serious surviving composition of Bonds’s entire creative life is the Credo – a seven-movement setting of the iconic civil-rights creed of W.E.B. Du Bois for soloists, chorus, and piano and or orchestra. And tucked inside the binding of the orchestral/choral score for that massive work is: a song lyric, undeniably popular and lighthearted, as witty as the music of the Credo is earnest.
The lyric is in Bonds’s handwriting and no other songwriter is named. It’s probably by Margaret Bonds herself. If we want to assume that the lyric dates from around the time of the orchestral version of the Credo – and please understand, that is a very big if – then that would place it ca. 1967. The rhythmic hooks, syncopations, and general style make it easy to imagine Bonds accompanying herself to this song.
Here’s the lyric, which sparkles with the playful humor that’s found in Bond’s hundreds of letters. Enjoy!
Usual archival categorization would probably classify this lyric as “ephemera” – and certainly that fits, in the sense that the lyric is short and unimposing, capturing a specific moment in Margaret Bonds’s creative imagination – a moment that is now gone forever.
But is it so ephemeral, really? I don’t think so. Because this lyric is forever imbued with the imagination that produced it, and that imagination, born as it was of the extraordinary creative life of Margaret Bonds, is anything but ephemeral.
Just a thought in closing: I’d LOVE to see and hear someone compose music to this lyric!
