Poetry

This is one of those literary oddities that sounds made up until you go and check it. But it’s true: on her 1968 album Baptism: A Journey Through Our Time, social activist and folk musician Joan Baez recorded not one but four poems by Henry Treece, with Old Welsh Song appearing twice, as both opening and closing piece. On this record, Treece was not some marginal inclusion tucked away in the middle of the track list: he is one of the most strongly represented poets on an album that also featured much more famous writers such as William Blake, John Donne, Walt Whitman, and James Joyce.

Although Treece is best known as an author of children’s historical novels, his first forays into print were as a poet and essayist. I’ll have more to say about that in future posts, but by the time Baez released Baptism, Treece had been dead for about two years, and his last poetry collection – The Exiles (Faber & Faber, 1952) – had appeared a decade and a half earlier. Indeed, following its publication, Treece more or less gave up poetry.

That immediately raises a first question: how on earth did Baez come across Henry Treece? There’s no evidence, at least none that I’ve been able to find, of any personal connection between them and the sleeve notes on the reverse of the album simply provide a potted biography. But Treece was by no means unknown in the United States by 1968. His poetry had been appearing there since the early 1940s, first in little magazines and small-press publications, then in book form. An American edition of his Collected Poems was published by Knopf in New York in 1946, and he also appeared in American anthologies, including Kenneth Rexroth’s The New British Poets in 1949. In other words, Treece’s work was available on American shelves, even if he was never exactly a household name.

The really interesting detail is that the poems Baez chose come from several different Treece books, not just one convenient anthology. One can be traced to Invitation and Warning from 1942, another to The Black Seasons from 1945, and another to The Haunted Garden from 1947. That suggests a genuine act of selection rather than a casual skim through a single volume. The most likely explanation, then, is not some lost meeting between Baez and Treece, but a literary route: books, libraries, publishers, editors, and the wider mid-century Anglo-American poetry network. Kenneth Rexroth may well have been part of that broader chain, since he helped introduce Treece to American readers and also has work on the same Baez album, but that remains informed speculation rather than documented fact. It’s intriguing to note, however, that Rexroth was active in the anarchist movement in the USA at the same time that Treece was flirting with anarchism in Britain. Perhaps there’s a political connection? Again, I’ll explore Treece’s politics in later posts.

The second question, of course is: how do they sound, what did Baez do with these poems? Let me start with what is arguably Treece’s best known poem, The Magic Wood, which frankly Baez and her collaborators make a bit of a hash of. This surreal, mystical piece about uncanny encounters in a strange woodland is best performed as a slow reveal – listen to this setting of Peter Capaldi’s reading, for instance. That version comes from a BBC Radio 4 programme presented by Neil Gaiman in which he describes the influence of this poem on his comic book series The Sandman. In contrast, Baez’s version is a gallop through faerie, as though she doesn’t really understand what’s going on and can’t wait to get to the end! In contrast, Who Murdered the Minutes is a much better fit to her voice and delivery. The two versions of Old Welsh Song that begin and end the record (and they are different if you listen closely) are likewise fine renditions of this short piece.

So yes: Joan Baez really did sing Henry Treece. And not by accident. Somewhere in the background lies a small but fascinating story of transatlantic literary circulation, of how a poet associated with a small, slightly obscure British literary movement, the New Apocalypse, found his way onto an ambitious late-1960s record by one of America’s best-known folk singers. Strange, unlikely, and entirely real.