It really is a very great honour and thrill to be asked to arrange someone else’s music for a group to perform, and an even greater honour when the person doing the asking is the composer themselves. Gary Steward is a wonderful songwriter, living in Alnwick in Northumberland, and in around 2015, he asked me to make an arrangement of his song Northumberland for Lionheart Harmony to sing.

Northumberland

He sent me this recording of his band Piddler’s Pot singing the song, and off I set…

I love this song: it’s a beautiful melody and sentiment, the harmonies are striking but not too way-out (!), and the Piddler’s Pot arrangement really does have lots of choral moments already. What Lionheart Harmony don’t have are guitars, so all harmony and the driving force of the rhythmic undercurrent provided by the guitars, is where the transcribing stops and the arranging begins. I also took the first couple of lines of Gary’s lyrics quite literally for the beginning and ending of my arrangement, with whistling and shsh-ing to represent the wind and sea.

Lionheart Harmony has performed the arrangement on many occasions, but this appears to be the only recording I have!

Following on from the success of this TTBB version, I made an arrangement for SATB and it has become a firm favourite of The Bridge Singers. Here they are performing the song in Brinkburn Priory in 2019. The photos are by Gary himself in this video we made as part of our attempt to keep the choir’s spirits up during the 2020/2021 lockdowns.

Till Autumn Comes

The next song of his Gary suggested I arrange, was Till Autumn Comes. I was organising a concert of fruit-themed music in the winter of 2017, and as this one contains berries, he thought it would be appropriate! Gary and I work in different ways when writing songs, as he cleverly works everything out by ear, and I cannot do that so well and like to write things down. He presented me with this video he’d made of the song, and I started to notate it and formulate some ideas.

As with Northumberland, the driving rhythms, and a persistent repeating E (which Gary informed me at the time, he’d not been aware of) in the guitar had to be substituted for something vocal. You can see a fragment of the solution here:

The choir enjoyed the song, and we returned to it in 2019 as we put together a programme of Autumn-themed music for our trip to Cumbria in October of that year. We performed it in Keswick and at Lanercost Priory and also in our pre-tour concert in Felton. The recording below is from the Keswick performance. Although all the performances were accurate and full of energy, none one of the recordings are great. On this one, the input was too high on the recorder and there is slight distortion, but at least it wasn’t in amongst the audience and therefore filled with clicks and scrapes as the others were! We’ll sing it again one day and make a better recording, I promise!

Both this one and Northumberland are tracks on Gary’s album “A Swan In The Evening”. He often performs it accompanying himself on the guitar or with David Ainsworth as part of The Shiremen.

Darling Daddy

In 2018, The Bridge Singers were asked to present a concert to mark the centenary of the end of WW1. Gary composed this very poignant song, and also wrote these thoughts for the programme of that concert: “It’s loosely based on the story of Private Joseph Forster who worked as a plumber for the Duke of Northumberland at the outbreak of WWI. He enlisted in the Northumberland Fusiliers, leaving behind his wife and three young daughters, and was sent to France where he engaged in fierce fighting.  Private Forster wrote home of his experiences, and it was evident that he was missing his family very much.  One postcard ended with the words, ‘Let me get home safe to love you all once more.’ His daughters replied with simple messages; how they were doing at school and about their new kitten.  They often began each postcard ‘Darling Daddy,’ which is where the title of the song came from. Private Forster was captured and sent to a POW camp in Germany. He died there in September 1918.”

When Gary first wrote the song, he came to sing it to me with his guitar. I recorded him and we worked out the harmonies he was playing on his guitar, and as with the others, I set about transcribing the recording, then arranging it for SATB choir.

As with all of Gary’s songs, there are harmonic quirks thrown in here and there, especially in the middle 8 section, and there are lively rhythms in the accompaniment which give the song its impetus. I’ve tried to replicate this with syncopated patterns in the altos. Listening back to this original recording Gary and I made, I realise that we now (in 2024) sing it at a less plaintive tempo than we used to.

In 2024 we have been singing a programme of North-East music, and we’ve included Northumberland, which is a choir favourite, and Darling Daddy in our repertoire. This recording is from our concert in St. Lawrence’s Church, Warkworth in May 2024.

Footsteps

Footsteps was written during the first lockdown in 2020. At the beginning of that year we were planning a concert of Queen-themed music, so Gary described the swan in the song as “Queen of her domain”. This concert eventually went ahead in 2022 and Footsteps was duly included. In the meantime, as we were emerging from our enforced silence, the choir did present a “Concert of Silences”. Gary and I engineered a silence in this song, so it could be included – it fitted fairly well in fact, after “…pausing at the same view”!!!

Writing this, I realise that Gary did quite a bit of “changing lyrics to suit the theme” as Northumberland suddenly sprouted a raised glass so that we could perform it in our Magical Glass concert!

In the programme note, Gary wrote, “We discovered many different walks, each one well trodden over the years, so we were walking in the shadows of ghosts, enjoying the same views, with every path leading home” This has proven to be another favourite of the choir and we sang it on every possible occasion in 2022!

Unlike Till Autumn Comes, we had four perfectly fine recordings of Footsteps to choose from! Gary chose this one from June 2022 in the resonant acoustics of Brinkburn Priory. There appears to be very little background noise, so I suspect it was us singing there for the joy of it with no audience present…maybe at a wedding fair, a few of which we attended at the time – brides and grooms passed through, and we showed off the acoustics and ourselves to the best of our abilities. The images have also been sent to me by Gary – photos of the walks he and Yvonne used to take around Alnwick at the time of the writing of this song.

Loud Blaw The Frosty Breezes

Just a note here on this one, which happened the other way round. I composed it for Gary and he gave the first performances of it. I’ve written all about this in another blog, so if you want to read about it, here’s the link:

Song Stories: Loud Blaw The Frosty Breezes

If you’d like to sing Gary Steward’s songs yourself, or purchase a copy of his CD, contact me and I’ll put you in touch with him!

Contact Cheryl