If it’s Friday and I don’t have a completed book to review, I turn to music. I’ve done a lot of Norwegian songs, but I’m running out of ones that are familiar to me (and I have surprisingly little to say about the ones that aren’t familiar to me). So I’m edging into traditional American songs. I don’t think the kids learn them anymore. Stephen Foster’s too racist, and anything written before the 1960s is pretty much assumed to be the same sort of thing.

I don’t think you can really find much fault with Aura Lea, though. A lovely, sentimental song full of longing and nostalgia, and the name “Aura Lea” sings particularly well. It offers a great opportunity for a singer to really open his throat on the long vowel and let go from the diaphragm. Elvis Presley sang the melody, with different lyrics, as “Love Me Tender” in 1956 (I’m old enough to remember when that one was new). “LMT” sings all right too, but I prefer the original.

The lyrics were written by W. W. Fosdick (1825-1862), an American lawyer who had some success as a poet in his day. The melody came from George Rodway Poulton (1828-1867), an English-born American. Neither of the two is remembered today for anything else, except that Poulton was tarred and feathered in 1864 for having an affair with a young student. Wikipedia, my source, does not say whether this trauma contributed to his early death three years later. Fosdick, you’ll note, was already dead by then, without assistance as far as I know.

But the song had, as they say in show business, “legs.” It was published in 1861, right about when the Civil War began. Soldiers on both sides took comfort from its unabashed sentiment, and sang it around their campfires. Minstrel shows featured it. The U.S. Military Academy came up with a song called “Army Blue” to the same tune, and made it a graduating class song.

Aura Lea is lyrical and sentimental and idealized. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong with those things, as well as they’re done well.

(I see that I’ve posted about this song before. Ah well. Have a good weekend.)