Jeffreys, John - A Third & Final Book of Songs

John Jeffreys (1927-2010), Extract from Obituary in The Guardian:

John Jeffreys....was a multi-talented song composer whose sensitive, gentle settings of English poetry have recently found favour with distinguished singers including Ian Partridge, James Gilchrist and Jonathan Veira. The musical climate in the 1970s was not sympathetic to a composer of such traditional bent, and, disheartened, Jeffreys destroyed much of his work. However, in 1983 he chanced upon four reels of tape recordings made in 1966, and reconstructed most of the songs on them.

The publisher Kenneth Roberton championed his cause and published three substantial volumes, with piano accompaniment, in facsimiles of the composer's beautifully and precisely calligraphed manuscripts, with cover illustrations by the composer. In the songs, there is a perfect fusion between the text and the refined, subtle accompaniment. Virtuosity is eschewed in favour of expression and diction. Although many of the early songs were originally composed with string quartet, they were mainly recomposed with piano. There are others with bassoon and recorder as the accompanying instrument.

Contents (Poet in Brackets):

• Awake thee my Bessy (J. J. Callanan)
• The birds (Hilaire Belloc)
• Brown is my love (Anon)
• Corpus Christi (Anon)
• The farewell (Robert Burns)
• Fill me O stars (Joseph Campbell)
• Gather ye rosebuds (Robert Herrick)
• Ha'nacker Mill (Hilaire Belloc)
• I am the gilly of Christ (Joseph Campbell)
• In a boat (Hillaire Belloc)
• In Marley Wood (Hugh S. Roberton)
• The lone bird (Emily Bronte)
• Love me not for comely grace (Anon)
• Lullaby (Thomas Dekker)
• Merry eye (Wilfrid Wilson Gibson)
• My lady (Anon)
• My master hath a garden (Anon)
• Northumberland (Wilfrid Wilson Gibson)
• The reaper (Barry Duane Hill)
• Sally (Barry Duane Hill)
• Six badgers (Robert Graves)
• Sweeney the Mad (Anon)
• That ever I saw (Anon)
• To make my mistress kind (Patrick Hannay)
• A true woman's eye (Anon)
• What thing is love? (Anon)
• When I came last to Ludlow (A. E. Housman)
• When I was one and twenty (A. E. Housman)
• When as I wake (Patrick Hannay)
• With rue my heart is laden (A. E. Housman)
• Yet will I love her (Anon)