Mother o’ Mine

Lyricist. Rudyard Kipling

Publisher. Chappell & Co.

Date. 1903

Key/Range. C Major (d' -- e")

COMMENTARY

The poem by Rudyard Kipling originally appeared as a preface in an early reprint of his first novel The Light that Failed. The setting is through-composed with only two instances of musical repetition of the title phrase (“Mother o’ Mine”) at 17-18 and 28-31. Tours composed each of the seven iterations of the phrase differently so that the listener does not tire of hearing it over the course of the song. In the middle stanza, he changes meter twice to preserve the natural scansion of the phrase. The music builds throughout the third section and climaxes powerfully at the very end. The setting begins on the tonic, but moves away quickly and does not return until measure 6. Each stanza that depicts the various tribulations that the protagonist imagines begins on an unstable sonority and does not resolve fully until after the words “Mother o’ Mine” are sung. Furthering this sense of instability, the third stanza opens with a succession of unrelated half-diminished chords that only resolve to the tonic eleven bars later at measure 30 for the final time. Though Tours’ songs generally have vocal lines that are almost uniformly syllabic, “Mother o’ Mine” has no less than eight melismatic two-note downward intervals that emphasize the pathetic tone of the poetry. These traditional sighing figures all emphasize key words in the text (“I,” “love,” “still,” “sea,” “tears,” “me,” “prayers,” “whole”) and call for an emotional tone in the voice to enhance their impact on the listener. Tours’ best-known song was commercially recorded by at least sixteen singers between 1907 and 1951. Two other published versions—one by Arthur Classen and another by Leo Ornstein—were published within fifteen years of the Tours setting, but were nonetheless eclipsed by the enduring popularity of the original. A convincing case could be made for this song being considered the high point of the Victorian/Edwardian ballad tradition.