Introduction
This was never intended to happen. It started as a one-off, an in-joke that got out of hand and took on a life of its own. Here we are, decades later, with a full set of 60 story songs that took almost as long to compose as it took Sir Arthur to write the original stories. And it included a Great Hiatus.
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The mists of time have obscured the origins of this project. I had joined the Bootmakers of Toronto in 1978 and over a couple of years vaguely considered the possibility of coming up with a song about some aspect of the Sherlock Holmes world. At a meeting in the autumn of 1980, I suggested gathering together some members of a musical bent to form something which might be called the Speckled Band. That must have got me thinking about the possibility of writing a song (note: it would only be one song) which would retell a story in such great detail that Bootmakers who had not swotted up on the story would have a chance in the quiz (note: despite this, I’m still rubbish at quizzes). The story for the next meeting was The Solitary Cyclist and, sure enough, a folk song of seven verses emerged onto the page. The incoming Meyers (president of the Bootmakers) acquiesced and thus it came to be that at the Bootmaker annual dinner on 31 January 1981 at the Old Mill restaurant in Toronto, trusty guitar in hand, I premiered that song, along with two from Harvey Officer’s A Baker Street Songbook. The meeting was even written up in the society column of the Toronto Globe and Mail. The Solitary Cyclist song was published in Canadian Holmes in the summer of 1981. The role of Lassus was created for me on the executive of the Bootmakers.
And so, it continued. The Bootmakers were about two-thirds of their way through the Canon in the Baring-Gould sequence. At almost every meeting I would present a new “story song” along with one or two songs written by others. In 1986 the sequence started over again, this time in order of publication. Most of the songs were written in the 10 days before the meeting, often even less than that. I would start by rereading the story, usually in the two-volume Coles edition pirated from the Doubleday plates, making notes of the names I would have to work into the song. I would then sit down with a wadge of blank paper and try to find a place to start, a rhyming couplet which would set off a cascade of creativity. Usually more than half the song would emerge in that first session, with another a day or two later allowing for completion. Sometimes the melody came with the words, but often it was written afterwards.
After about 15 years of this, I began to lose momentum. By that point I had introduced 46 story songs at Bootmaker meetings. A 47th had been written but a snowstorm prevented me from attending the meeting. However, another project came along. George Vanderburgh of the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box suggested a collection of songs, which became Singalong with Sherlock Holmes (1995). It contained about 20 original songs and 80 collected songs from a variety of international sources. I deliberately did not include any story songs as I intended to collect them eventually into the volume you are now holding; little did I know that this would take a further 25 years.
Then in 1999 I had the opportunity to take a job in Britain and the project went on hold, the Great Hiatus. By that point I fully intended to complete the entire run of 60 story songs before I died. The remaining Baker Street dozen songs were constantly nagging me. In 2007 I began to wonder if I would ever be able to write again, so I looked at the list and the first missing song was A Case of Identity. Taking the same approach as previously, within a few hours the song was no longer missing.
Eight years later I took early retirement and no longer had an excuse for procrastination. The planets aligned in January 2016 when Deborah went away for a week to visit her family in true Mary Morstan fashion. A few weeks earlier there had been a radio interview with Joan Baez in which she talked about the brief period in the early 1960s when she lived in Greenwich Village with Bob Dylan during his most creative period. How did he fuel that creativity? Was it drugs? Well, it turned out to be somewhat more prosaic. He would drink coffee all morning, then red wine all afternoon and evening. So, I thought, that’s doable, though the wine should be a bit special. I bought a bottle of entry-level Chateauneuf du Pape. On the Tuesday morning I had an extra cup or two of coffee (I’m an “Everything in moderation” type of guy). At about 1 PM I uncorked the bottle, decanted the beeswing, and poured myself a glass. I sat down with a wadge of blank paper and in a couple of hours, The Crooked Man was complete. But it was only mid-afternoon and there was still plenty of wine left. Is there another song in that bottle, I wondered? The next missing song was The Five Orange Pips. I quickly reread it, refilled my glass, and sat down with another wadge of blank paper. A couple more hours and the job was done.
The pace of two songs in one afternoon was never repeated, but progress continued over the next two years even without the stimulus of vintage wine. One of these songs was Shoscombe Old Place. I had started two write it in March 1984 but ran out of time before the meeting; when I came back to it in February 2017 I still had my original notes and initial verses, despite living at 15 addresses in the intervening 33 years. In November 2017 I finished the 60th song, fittingly (and deliberately) His Last Bow.
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It was a tacit decision that the songs would be written with original music. This likely occurred for four reasons.
Firstly, it is what I was doing at the time. In the mid- to late-1970s I had been writing satirical songs for revues at university and settings of Biblical texts (how’s that for breadth?), all with original music.
Secondly, it continues the tradition of Harvey Officer. I had received a photocopy of Officer’s A Baker Street Song Book (New York: The Pamphlet House, 1943) from Cameron Hollyer on one of my first visits to the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection at the Toronto Reference Library. Granted, Officer’s most widely known song is “The Road to Baker Street” written to the tune of “On the Road to Mandalay.”
Thirdly, it continues the tradition of one of my heroes, Tom Lehrer, whose satirical songs were a holy grail which I pursued. Granted, one of Lehrer’s most popular songs is “The Elements”, sung to the tune of “I am the very model of a modern major general” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance.
Fourthly, and most importantly, it gave me total flexibility in terms of form, metre, and rhyme scheme. And, indeed, I did start work on each song with a blank page and no preconceptions. For the most part. On a few occasions a snippet had occurred to me in advance of the initial formal writing session.
Despite these advantages of original music, there is one massive downside: it makes the song inaccessible beyond the initial audience. At least, until this book came along.
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The music encompasses a variety of styles. While many songs could be classed as generic trad folk or folk rock, there are a number of pastiches of familiar styles: Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs (the Modern Major General makes several fleeting appearances), Victorian music hall, and one even verging on punk rock. Several are specific to the topic of the story: sea shanty (Black Peter), rhumba (The Dancing Men, the Sussex Vampire), bouzouki (The Greek Interpreter), country and western (The Three Garridebs), military band (The Naval Treaty), rugby song (The Missing Three-Quarter), and drinking song (The Six Napoleons).
There are also brief quotations of familiar music: “The Bridal Chorus” and “The Wedding March” in The Noble Bachelor, “Alberta Bound” in the Gloria Scott, “Waltzing Matilda” in the Abbey Grange, “The Hornpipe” in the Bruce-Partington Plans, “Matilda” in the Sussex Vampire, and an extended use of “Home on the Range” in A Study in Scarlet. The Musgrave Ritual makes use of Harvey Officer’s setting of the chant.
The songs were written to be performed once, by a singer with a guitar. When it came to writing down the notation for posterity, many problems emerged. Verses differed, with eighth notes fitting two syllables to a quarter note in some cases, the presence or absence of pickup notes, etc. In the process of notation of the songs over the last few years, many of these anomalies have been ironed out. Notably, the final dozen songs, written in a leisurely manner post retirement rather than to the deadline of a meeting, tend to be much more regular in their metre. Notation was generated using a package called Sibelius.
Finally, I must acknowledge the influence of Gordon Lightfoot, whose music I have been enjoying for more than 50 years. There is a general influence of his folk ballads, while at least three of the songs are in a definite Lightfoot musical style. And the instrumentation of the YouTube recordings – acoustic guitars and electric bass – reflect early Lightfoot performances. (My YouTube channel is Sherlock Songs.)
To those of you who heard performances at Bootmaker or Spence Munro (Halifax, Nova Scotia) meetings (or ASH, Bimetallic Question or Sherlock Holmes Society of London events), I hope this book reinforces fond memories. And to those for whom this is new, I hope you enjoy it!
Jim Ballinger, MBt
Halifax, Nova Scotia
October, 2021
