Jest a Wearyin’ fer You

Lyricist. F. L. Stanton

Publisher. Joseph Williams, Limited

Date. 1911

Key/Range. A Minor (d' -- f#")

COMMENTARY

The poem by Frank Lebby Stanton, originally published in Songs of the Soil in 1894, was titled “Wearyin’ fer You” and consisted of seven stanzas of which Tours set the first, third, sixth, and seventh. The only specific reference to gender in the poem lies in the fourth stanza: “Comes the wind with sounds that jes’/Like the rustlin’ o’ your dress.” Stanton’s poem clearly depicts a domesticated home where, in 1894, it would be nearly impossible to imagine a woman taking a long trip for work, and thus we can only imagine that the woman has left for other reasons that give her absence heartbreaking implications. In her 1901 setting of the poem, Carrie Jacobs-Bond did not use this stanza, being a performer of her own songs whose point of reference in this case was her husband, to whom the song is dedicated. Likewise, rather than identify with Stanton’s male protagonist, Tours seems to follow Jacobs-Bonds’ model, as if knowing that her popular setting had fixed the idea of a female singer in the public’s mind. Though he used different stanzas than Jacobs-Bonds in his setting, he likely also avoided the fourth because it was common in the 1910s for women to be alone at home for long periods while their husbands traveled for work, making for a more plausible and less pathetic scenario. Nonetheless, since there is no clear reference to gender in this version, it can comfortably be sung now by a man or a woman, depending upon the intention of the performer. The bass-chord rhythm in the accompaniment is reminiscent of the plodding footsteps in some of the songs from Schubert’s Winterreise and could be thought of as the sound of the protagonist pacing through the empty house. The harmony, with distantly related chromatic chords in every measure, is expressive of emotional weariness through its abundance of dissonant sonorities. Few of Tours’ song settings have accompaniments that are as free of melody as this one. The prevailing dotted-eighth/sixteenth rhythm in the melody is expressive of the heavy burden of loneliness, and yet Tours gives the listener a welcome relief from the pervasive unequal subdivision (and from the minor mode) in the second part of the A section. Tours’ setting of the poem, though it never got the traction that it deserved, having been overshadowed by the success of the version by Carrie Jacobs-Bond, is more effective and nuanced in its treatment of the text than its more famous predecessor, having made the vocal line and harmony an equal partner in the expressiveness of the song.