The Amazon song

 THE AMAZON SONG

(tune 'Besançon' https://bit.ly/3G2JjhT )

Amazon, pay your workers right, 

have things safe on every site,

have the unions organising,

jobs as jobs, with no disguising.

People, today's Buy Nothing Day --

come and let's make Amazon pay.

Amazon, pay your tax in full,

where you work, and pull no wool.

End your games of profit-shifting

and tax havens' legal grifting.

People, today's Buy Nothing Day --

come and let's make Amazon pay.

Amazon, cool the world that burns,

take less from it as it turns,

open Just Transition trial,

fund no climate change denial.

People, today's Buy Nothing Day --

come and let's make Amazon pay.

Aidan Baker

CC BY 2.0

Written in support of the Make Amazon Pay campaign https://makeamazonpay.com/

For Buy Nothing Day, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_Nothing_Day . If singing on some other day of the year, end each stanza with

People, each day's a boycott day --

that's how we make Amazon pay.

This was sung by a small group of us at two demos for Buy Nothing Day, 24 November 2023. The demos were small but successful -- one with placards and singing in front of Amazon's Cambridge office, one on the city's pedestrianised Burleigh Street with other groups marking Buy Nothing Day.

While we were getting our act together for the Amazon one, we were approached by the site custodian, who asked what our intentions were. We told him we'd be staying outside and singing. "Any chance of a good Christmas carol?" he asked. In fact the tune for the above words is from an old French carol, but I don't know if he was there to hear it.

Burleigh Street involved an extraordinary slow procession through the Grafton Centre, led by members of the Red Rebel Brigade (who dress in that colour for such occasions). Their protests are silent and very dignified. I think they'd have made some impact on me if I'd been a mere spectator, and I hope shoppers felt the same.

We didn't attempt to sing during their part of the proceedings, but we gave the Amazon song a couple of times before and after, while we were out in the sun.

The energy debt song

 THE ENERGY DEBT SONG

(tune 'St Anne' https://bit.ly/3V2mgJm )

O government, the cost of gas
and electricity
soars in your power.  We pray you slash
the bills for energy.

Your people's debts for heat and light
grow darker through your reign.
We pray you write them off today
and see us thrive again.

Pray insulate the nation's homes
and cheapen keeping warm.
Pray own the firms whose profits cast
these shadows to our harm.

(arising from campaign demands by Debt Justice at http://bit.ly/3OhIBRa )

This was sung by self and other activists at a street stall in Cambridge in November 2022.  It versifies a petition arising from the cost-of-living crisis.  The tune is William Croft's splendid melody often used for 'O God, our help in ages past'. I like to hope it lends the present words a little of its dignity.

The loss and damage song

THE LOSS AND DAMAGE SONG

(tune ‘Personent hodie’)

Climate change and its wounds —
what the world needs is funds,
funds of billions of pounds,
more than just a bandage,
more than I can manage.
Come COP27,
work to make things even,
put those pounds on the grounds,
mending loss and damage.

Let’s make sure our UK
is among those that pay.
We have dirtied our day
with our years’ pollution.
Here’s a resolution —
match the ash, ash, ash
pounds with cash, cash, cash.
It’s a wash, and a bash
at a best solution.

Should this nation pay more
when its people are poor?
Let the burden be for
dirty corporations.
Wipe them with taxations!
Tax ’em hard, hard, hard,
double-starred, starred, starred —
make their guilt and their gains
climate reparations.

We of Global Justice Cambridge sang the above song as our contribution to a day of action in support of such a fund as the song describes.  See our blog post for a view of the day's activity.

A Manchester chaplain

 THE REV. JOSHUA BROOKES 1754-1821

(to the tune 'Manchester' by Thomas Ravenscroft https://bit.ly/3AN0foh )

The writer stressed how like they were --
the antiquated pile
with weathered points and mouldering stones,
the chaplain in the aisle.

Obituary fondness for
the chaplain's gaffes and rage.
It seems the chaplain read the tale;
he marked the printed page.

The chaplain died within the year.
The church lived on to do
its work among the things that set
its city with the new.

This poem was my entry in Manchester Cathedral's 600th Anniversary Poetry Competition.  Before Manchester Cathedral was a cathedral, with a dean, it was a collegiate church with a chaplain, and the Rev. Joshua Brookes was of that line.  He was something of a character, the subject of what you might call a 'pre-obituary': a profile article entitled 'Brief sketch of the Rev. Josiah Streamlet' in Blackwood's magazine 8(48), 633-637, March 1821.  That's the starting point of this poem.

And it has now been sung in public!  By me, at an event to raise funds for rebuilding work at St Martin's church in Cambridge.  They let me sing several of my hymn tune retextings, and these benefited much from accompaniment by Mike Cole.

The tune 'Manchester', by the way, is also known as 'Ely'.  In time I will find out which came earlier.  But I felt its qualities well suited Joshua Brookes.  Synaesthetically, it made me see bushy eyebrows.

New words to old tunes

Here are two campaign songs I wrote during 2021 and sang at demonstrations.

The first was in connection with Global Justice Now's campaign for the dropping of patents on vaccinations against Covid19.  The demonstration was outside AstraZeneca's Cambridge premises, during their AGM in May.  The tune is Vaughan Williams' 'King's Lynn', which became for me the signature tune to Lockdown 1 in March 2020.  I wrote an article about the tune's story for the online news outlet East Anglia bylines, and am following that up with explorations of other hymn tunes.

THE ASTRAZENECA SONG




(to the tune King's Lynn)




We call on AstraZeneca

to make their patent free.

It's funded by the taxes

of folk like you and me.

The firm met the occasion

to get the vaccine done.

Now let it be their doing

but not a thing they own.




We call on AstraZeneca

to make their price pledge fair.

We hear what's outsourced to Pune

gets higher prices there.

We hear of countries with three times

their needed vaccines stored,

and others where vaccine's a thing

nobody can afford.




We call on AstraZeneca --

they're short of engineers --

to have more sharing of knowledge

in world health with their peers.

Think COVAX and its makers,

think Salk who long ago

gifted his treatment to the world

and conquered polio.




We call on AstraZeneca

to take Joe Biden's lead

and waive their rights in the vaccine

according to the need.

We see the Covid-19

Technology Access Pool.

We ask big pharma, ask this firm

to let the pool be full.




We call on AstraZeneca

and others in the field

to see more in their drugs than

the profits that they yield,

to listen to the protests

today outside their door.

Poor sort of wealth it is consists

in keeping others poor.



For Cambridge's demonstration on the Global Day of Action for Climate Justice, in November, I wrote a song to a tune by the seventeenth-century composer Henry Lawes.  It's a fine, strong, angular tune. The link at the tune's name, below, will take you to its entry in hymnary.org , and you'll find a recording there.  I took it somewhat faster than that at the demo (50’28” in the film).

The song lists the outcomes we hoped for from the COP26 in Glasgow, which was running at the time.

Anyone who can tell me how the tune came by its name will be listened to with great interest.  Farley Castle near Reading was built about two centuries after Henry Lawes' time.  The name might refer to Farleigh Hungerford Castle in Somerset, which saw action and changed hands during the Civil War.  Was Lawes ever there?  Or was the tune named retrospectively by a hymnbook editor?  Or is there some other story?


COP26, HERE'S WHAT WE WANT TO SEE




to the tune 'Farley Castle' by Henry Lawes 




COP26, here's what we want to see.

Unblock the route to cleaner energy!

Corporate courts must never own the rules!

Cut them away, those harmful bosses' tools!




COP26, wherever oil is found,

coal, fossil gas, let them stay underground.

Earthquakes and fires have been the warning signs --

fund the transition, all who funded mines!




COP26, we want more jubilee!

Debt locks the global south's dependency,

debt saps green work, saps every healthy spend,

some debts are bad and doubtful. Have them end!




COP26, unmake the harm we made,

hold the UK to useful climate aid,

rich countries' reparations and our share,

small to our GDP and only fair.




COP26, write new rules that will bind.

See those with power hurting humankind,

see how their years have left the planet scarred,

hard work to tie them, work to tie them hard!




CC BY-SA 2.0
Arising from campaign demands presented at https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/our-campaigns/climate/

Earlier fruits of my interest in places that have given their names to hymn tunes are my Google Maps list of those in the British Isles and my retextings of 'Trentham' and 'Little Cornard'.  Another person who shares this interest is Mark Browse, whose book O little town: hymn-tunes and the places that inspired them I strongly recommend.

Poems to hymn tunes: 'Trentham' and 'Little Cornard'

 

SAM HUGHES (1824-1898)

(To the tune 'Trentham'  .  Acknowledging 'A lament for Sam Hughes: the last great ophicleidist' by Trevor Herbert  )

Trentham where he was born,
Three Mile Cross where he died,
these framed the triumphs of his breath:
he played the ophicleide.

Fanfares, chromatic runs --
he played not only these,
but gentle phrases softly breathed
to bands' strong harmonies.

He could have stayed in Wales,
grown Welsh, you say, secure
in comfort and admirers' love,
a champion and more.

He could have learned the new
smart-prized euphonium,
cheaper and easier, and lived
rich with well-earned income.

Footnote to Trentham's tune.
Not Wales, nor progress, he.
Your prose undims his instrument.
He died in penury.

LITTLE CORNARD

(to the tune ‘Little Cornard’)

Sing of a breaking world!
Nations to strive and part,
points of the compass spin,
nothing is found at heart,
and what you mean by south and north
and west and east has lost its worth.

Sing of a breaking myth!
Dragon on dragon fight!
How did the tale arise,
shouts in a Suffolk night?
No dragon-real time’s known to be,
not even fifteenth century.

Sing of a breaking rule!
Derailment injuries,
horrible grandeur fail,
nothing of that in these:
van bearing matter for a drain
smashed with a level crossing train.

Sing of a breaking sea!
Deep, deep and deep their call,
waves that are high for waves,
boats and a hard landfall.
Our voices falter praying for
all those in peril on the shore.

I mentioned in my blog post on Boxing Day 2019 that I had a Google Maps list of British Isles places with hymn tunes named after them.  The Places of Poetry map, where I'd posted some of my work, was re-opened briefly for posting in October 2020, and I nipped in and put these two poems of mine on it. 

But henceforth my ignorance shows.  I'd like to know why Robert Jackson, a church organist in Oldham, chose to name a hymn tune after Trentham in Staffordshire, some fifty miles away.  Similarly about Martin Shaw and Little Cornard in Suffolk.  Come on, Aidan, you're a librarian.  There's a wealth of published material about these chaps, especially Martin Shaw.  Have a look.

The day thou gavest

THE DAY THOU GAVEST

(after conjectures that the hymn tune 'St Clement', long attributed to the Rev. Clement Scholefield, might be in part the work of Arthur Sullivan)

What part is Clement, what part Arthur,

none now can hope or need to tell.

The hymn the singers love is seamless;

if sewn, then sewn together well.

Whatever zones part eve from waking,

the shadow edge of light in air

moves elegiac in its raising

along the spine and through the hair.

And did the famous aid the cleric,

whose other music fell away?

The question stands, and needs no letters,

no fingerprints, no DNA.

And only wishing tells us Clement,

himself a part of all he'd met,

once only found, once only, music

more great than most, more nearly great.

This poem was written in 2013 for the Mirehouse/Words by the Water competition, whose theme that year was the Tennyson quotation "I am a part of all that I have met." I cannot remember what led me, at about that time, to the Wikipedia page for the hymn tune 'St Clement', so effectively tied to the words 'The day thou gavest'. But here was a story of authorship questioned after more than a century, and blurrings of individual contribution that had become impossible now to determine. I thought it fitted well with the quotation.

I've now entered the poem in a Poem Pigeon competition on the theme 'Awakenings'.