A Wayside Prayer

Lyricist. Elsie Janis

Publisher. Boosey & Co.

Date. 1927

Key/Range. A♭ Major (e♭' -- e♭")

COMMENTARY

Tours’ penultimate published song (his last song, “West of the Sun,” was published twenty years later) is also his most mature musical statement. Not surprisingly, it was the spiritual candor and profundity of the lyric by Elsie Janis, so rare in his body of work, that enabled him to create a song of great expressive depth. The direct appeal to God in the song outside of any formal religious context has a disarming sincerity about it that is likely a reflection of the creators’ own non-denominational sacred world view. In fact, the confessional posture of the protagonist is an explicit plea for God to hear the prayer of someone who does not attend church regularly, but who abides by the same ethical values as those who do. Tours sets the verse in three large sections that match the form of the poem. He uses the harmony to illustrate the text at key moments: when the singer is asking for forgiveness, the parallel minor of the tonic darkens the mood; and, when asking for help, having strayed from the path, the protagonist sings a melody that, after modulating to the dominant (E♭), wanders through almost every note of the chromatic scale except f and g (the second and third degrees of the diatonic scale). Beneath this seemingly aimless melodic phrase, the harmony wanders as well through several tonally unrelated dominant-nine chords (F, E, D♭, E♭, D, B) before arriving home through the dominant sonority (E♭) of the original key of Ab. This circuitous homecoming and recapitulation of the A-theme represents the feeling of security that can come though prayer at times of trial, bewilderment, and doubt.