In honor of Earth Day (April 22), we wanted to share a song that addresses issues of human impact on our planet.
Earth’s Burdens is a poem by Ernest Jones, a member of the Chartist movement in England (and the same poet who wrote the original words to Song of the Lower Classes). It was most likely written in 1849 when he was in prison for giving speeches in support of the Chartists that were deemed seditious by the British government, on radical topics such as human suffering and inequality. This poem diverges from his usual subject matter, speaking in the voice of the Earth and lamenting the degradation of the natural world. Jones’s words – mainly aimed at the expansion of cities and the decline of rural life – seems chillingly prescient in today’s world of increasing climate catastrophe.
On a lighter note, when we introduce this song in concert, we like to say that it’s the 1840s version of “paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Maybe Joni Mitchell was reading Chartist poetry when she wrote Big Yellow Taxi!
When we found Earth’s Burdens, it was just a poem with no tune, so we turned to our musical roots and went looking through the Sacred Harp, a collection of American shape note songs. An old favorite, Child of Grace (E.J. King), fit the words perfectly. When we realized that the poem and the tune were written within a few years of each other (though an ocean apart), it felt like additional confirmation that we’d found the right match.
As you know, it is a rare song that gets through Windborne’s process without being modified somehow, and this is no exception. The second verse is where you’ll hear the closest arrangement to the original shape note tune, and the biggest musical addition we made was a new bass part, which comes in halfway through the third verse.
We left the words mostly intact in this piece, with a few minor changes in the first verse to make the meaning clearer to modern listeners, as well as modifying the final verse. In the last verse, we altered Jones’s original text, “Black sin supports the throne” to “And greed supports the throne,” and we changed the line “And slaves are slavish more and more” to “Indifference echoes more and more.” In the 1800s, calling a person a slave was to accuse them of bowing too readily to authority. However, that connotation does not ring true in the modern era, especially given that in the 1840s, millions of people were being held in involuntary slavery, the effects of which we are still grappling with today.
EARTH’S BURDENS
“Why groaning so, thou solid Earth! Though sprightly summer cheers?
Oh, is thine old heart dead to mirth? Or art thou bowed by years?”
No, I’m not cold to summer’s prime, nor knows my heart decay;
Nor am I bowed by countless time, thou atom of a day!
I loved to hear, when tree and tide their gentle music made;
And, lightly, on my sunny side, to feel the plough and spade.
I loved to hold my liquid way through floods of living light;
To kiss the sun’s bright hand by day, and count the stars by night.
I loved to hear the children’s glee around the cottage door;
And peasant’s song right merrily the field come ringing o’er.
But man upon my back has lain such heavy loads of stone,
I cannot grow the golden grain: ‘Tis therefore that I groan.
And where the evening dew sank mild upon my quiet breast,
I feel the tear of the houseless child break burning on my rest.
And thick and fast as autumn-leaves my children drop away:
A gathering of unripened sheaves by premature decay.
Oh! where are all the hallowed sweets, the harmless joys I gave?
The pavements of your sordid street are stones o’er virtue’s grave!
Gaunt misery bars the cottage door and greed supports the throne;
Indifference echoes more and more: ‘Tis therefore that I groan.
