by Susan Cooper
In his later years he would slip into the office and visit us one by one, catching up and making his apologetic but insistent requests. “Can you really make CDs from these old tapes? That’s really incredible. Whenever you have time,” he’d say, handing me a plastic bag full of old cassettes. “Just anytime. No hurry.” And before long he’d have slipped out again. . . .
Above all, if there’s one word for what Jack always did, it is empowerment. He treated each of us as a collaborator. And he was so effective with audiences because he had this conviction that everyone not only could sing but wanted to sing, and even needed to sing, even if they didn’t know it. So of course they did.
Then there was CLNE, which is as good a symbol as any for his lifetime involvement with all kinds of education. Almost every year from 1986 until the year he died, Jack and I spent a week each summer at a peripatetic one-week conference known as Children’s Literature New England. For two decades this remarkable institution was, in the small world of children’s books, a high point of the year: a demanding sequence of lectures and workshops with celebrated speakers; a recharging of professional batteries; an affectionate family gathering. It would culminate in the unlikely sight of some two hundred teachers and librarians, writers and artists, outdoors on some university campus holding hands in a gigantic circle and singing “Wild Mountain Thyme,” alongside the soaring baritone of John Langstaff.
Jack had been part of it from the beginning. In 1975 a remarkable teacher named Barbara Harrison, believing passionately that children’s books should be treated not as teaching tools but as literature, won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to found and direct the Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at Simmons College, in Boston. She was driven by the same inspired obstinacy with which Jack was simultaneously setting up the Christmas Revels. Indeed, Jack was one of the participants in a 1975 summer institute that Barbara organized, at Simmons’s request, to “prove the marketability of a children’s literature program.” The participants in his seminar were there to “explore ways of involving children in folk literature and music.” The novelist Gregory Maguire, who attended it, was at twenty-two the Center’s first and most notable graduate student — and briefly, in a nice familial connection, a member of the Revels chorus. (Eventually he became deputy director of the Center, and later wrote a book called Wicked, which was turned, as you may have noticed, into a musical.)
The Center flourished from 1977 onward, with a rich array of graduate courses, a broad outreach program, and a regular one-week summer institute that became famous for its literary focus. From the beginning, Jack was part of it, generally giving a talk about the ballads. Then in 1986, the sky fell in: Simmons decided that the Center, hitherto autonomous, should become part of the Department of Education. It was a small decision with stupendous implications, since it would negate the Center’s whole original raison d’être as a focus on children’s books as literature rather than primarily a tool for teaching.
Barbara, Greg, and their founding faculty members protested bitterly, and eventually resigned. And out of this academic explosion CLNE was born: an independent, floating conference that dropped anchor for a week every August on a university campus, somewhere in the eastern United States, England, or Ireland. It was a demanding, uncompromising celebration of excellence in children’s books as literature, approached every year from a different angle, as some sample themes show: Swords and Ploughshares; Worlds Apart; Rogues and Rebels; The Heroic Ideal . . .
There we all happily were, every first week in August, talking about books: writers, illustrators, librarians, teachers, and the students who would receive four continuing education units as academic credit for their hardworking week. Every morning’s core lecture was based on a reading list, and every evening lecture drew on the whole corpus of children’s literature. Both Jack and I generally did talks, but besides that he was essential to the basic fabric and mood of the week. He made them all sing. At the start of the week and again every morning, he would bound up to the stage, usually in white shirt and pants, a Morris man without the bells, and lead them in folk song or canon, familiar or strange. It put music into their minds, the rhythm and harmony they would be finding in prose and verse for the rest of their time there — and it illuminated every day.
He trained them to sing grace before dinner, too, using the same easy skill with which he trained Revels audiences to sing carols. I’ve never forgotten the first night’s dinner at a CLNE institute at Newnham College, Cambridge — the English Cambridge, the original one — when Jack stood up and raised one arm, and the entire dining hall erupted into four-part harmony with Praise . . . God . . . For . . . Meat. The college servants who were running around serving us all stopped in their tracks, astounded, and one of them dropped a plate.
The driving perfectionism of CLNE kept argument and celebration humming through each of these weeks, even outside the punishing schedule of lectures: over coffee in Harvard Square or walks through the Backs, depending on which Cambridge we were in; in college gardens, in dormitory bathrooms, or (more loudly) over communal bottles of wine in dorm rooms at the end of the day. A passion for good books is infectious. And at intervals Jack and I would sit in quiet corners discussing the next Christmas program for Revels.
The penultimate CLNE was held in 2005 at Radcliffe University, four months before Jack died; he led that intent summer audience in the folk songs whose words hold the roots of so many children’s books, just as he had the first time thirty years earlier. I was staying with him in Cambridge, driving him to and fro. Though he chose not to think about it, his arteries were now in a truly perilous state, and Nancy had made sure I had the telephone numbers of his doctors in my pocket. As we were leaving the house the first morning, Jack paused in his garden and picked a red rose.
“What’s that for?” I said.
“You’ll see,” said Jack.
And so I did, because the rose was in a glass of water onstage when he began the institute with music, and he had everyone singing “Fair Rosa,” the Sleeping Beauty story, jaunty and poignant as all folk song. The rose stayed on that stage all through the week; each day it dropped a petal or two, but it glowed there till the end, when Jack’s voice sent the CLNE audience reluctantly off to the outside world, trying like Fair Rosa to take the magic with them.
Fair Rosa now will sleep no more
Sleep no more
Sleep no more
Fair Rosa now will sleep no more
A long time ago. . . .
As I said at the beginning, this book is not a biography of John Langstaff, nor a history of the Revels; it’s a portrait of a Maker, subjective and incomplete. Perhaps it’s a posthumous present to a friend. If Jack had written his book The Choirboy, there’s no knowing whether he would have taken it past the beginning of Revels, Inc.; his initial impulse was simply to show how the roots of the Revels went way back into his childhood. He didn’t want to document every aspect of his career, just as he didn’t want to spread every detail of his private life out for public view.
So I haven’t done those things either. This has just been a sketch, by someone who was once the tame Revels writer, of the man I knew and worked with. Dozens of people could produce one of their own, and they would all be different — and complementary. They would each certainly have a different focus: his singing, his recordings, his later outreach work with all the Revels cities; his teaching, and his work with Nancy on the importance of the arts in education; his place in the world of folk song and dance, and on and on.
Jack loved music, but above all he loved people; he was an enthusiast, a life enhancer, one of those people who light up the world. Though he avoided belonging to any specific church or even religion, and took care that Revels should do the same, he was a deeply spiritual man; at heart, he was still the choirboy who felt he was singing to God. I think he’d have liked the fact that the crew of the space shuttle Discovery were awakened one morning in 2007 by
— at the request of its commander’s husband — the voice of John Langstaff singing “The Lord of the Dance.” It’s the ultimate celebration, perhaps, to have your voice traveling out into space, out into the mystery, paying tribute, spreading joy.
His professional relationships nearly always became friendships, and lasted. He loved best his still center: Tro, as he always called Nancy; his children; his siblings; the cabin in Vermont, and a few other tranquil places where he could listen to the silence. But his mind and imagination whirled with energy, all his life. The last time I spent the night with him and Nancy in the Cambridge house, eleven days before he died, his face fell when he found I had to leave next morning. “I’ve got so much more for us to talk about,” he said. “All sorts of ideas . . .”
A few days later he flew to Switzerland to visit his daughter Deborah, her minister husband, Burkhard, and their two small daughters. The girls found him sitting in a chair one morning, looking, they said, surprised. He had had a major stroke. He lived long enough for Nancy to fly from Boston to join him, and to feel him squeeze her hand, and then he died peacefully with his family singing to him. When Burkhard presided at the memorial for John Meredith Langstaff months later, at Harvard Memorial Church, in Cambridge, he followed a program precisely designed by its subject. Jack’s knowledge of his own fragility had given him the chance to choose for a last time the words, the music, the cast — and most characteristic of all, to stress, said Burkhard, that this should be not a matter for grief but “a celebration of life and an expression of gratitude.”
His ashes lie at the center of a stone labyrinth that was one of his last eager projects; he and the family set it out on the hillside near the Vermont house. Though it’s there for meditation, it employs of course the same ancient circling pattern around which Jack led his joyful Revels audiences every year as the Lord of the Dance. The labyrinth was finished not too long before he died; he was very pleased with it. The wind sings through the trees, up there, under a quiet sky. By the time of the winter solstice, the hillside is deep in snow.
But the seasons turn, in their own time, and before long, sweet spring is out. The scent of the lilacs drifts over the labyrinth. You can almost hear that voice, full of delight and gaiety and tumultuous, irrepressible ideas.
A Revels Garland of Song
The Christmas Revels Songbook, with Nancy Langstaff
Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: Heroes of the Bible in African-American Spirituals, illustrated by Ashley Bryan
Frog Went A-Courtin’, illustrated by Feodor Rojankovsky
The Golden Vanity, illustrated by David Gentleman
Hi! Ho! The Rattlin’ Bog and Other Folk Songs for Group Singing, illustrated by Robin Jacques
Hot Cross Buns and Other Old Street Cries, illustrated by Nancy Winslow Parker
“I Have A Song to Sing, O!” An Introduction to the Songs of Gilbert and Sullivan, illustrated by Emma Chichester Clark
Jim Along, Josie: A Collection of Folk Songs and Singing Games for Young Children, with Nancy Langstaff, illustrated by Jan Pienkowski
Making Music: How to Create and Play Seventy Homemade Musical Instruments, with Ann Sayre Wiseman
Oh, A-Hunting We Will Go, illustrated by Nancy Winslow Parker
Ol’ Dan Tucker, illustrated by Joe Krush
On Christmas Day in the Morning: A Traditional Carol,
illustrated by Melissa Sweet
Over in the Meadow, illustrated by Feodor Rojankovsky
Revels Book of Chanteys and Sea Songs, with George Emlen
Saint George and the Dragon: A Mummer’s Play,
with David Gentleman
Sally Go Round the Moon: Revels Songs and Singing Games for Young Children, with Nancy Langstaff, illustrated by Jan Pienkowski
Shimmy Shimmy Coke-Ca-Pop! A Collection of City Children’s Street Games and Rhymes, with Carol Langstaff, photographs by Don MacSorley
Soldier, Soldier, Won’t You Marry Me?, illustrated by Anita Lobel
The Swapping Boy, illustrated by Beth and Joe Krush
Sweetly Sings the Donkey: Animal Rounds for Children to Sing or Play on Recorders, illustrated by Nancy Winslow Parker
The Two Magicians, illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg
What a Morning! The Christmas Story in Black Spirituals, illustrated by Ashley Bryan
These have all been reissued on CD by Revels, Inc.
At the Foot of Yonder Mountain
(Appalachian ballads and folksongs, with John Powell at the piano, 1961)
The Lark in the Morn
(folk songs and ballads recorded at Abbey Road 1949 – 1956)
Nottamun Town
(British and American folk songs and ballads, accompanied on guitar by Martin Best, recorded for EMI in 1964)
Songs for Singing Children
John Langstaff Sings The Jackfish and More Songs for Singing Children
(both the above recorded in the 1950s and 1960s at Abbey Road Studios in Britain, produced by George Martin)
The Water Is Wide
(American and British folksongs and ballads, originally released by Tradition Records in 1959)
The heart of Revels is still in Massachusetts. With Patrick Swanson as Artistic Director and Steve Smith as Executive Director, Revels Inc. has passed its 40th birthday. The national office is at 80 Mount Auburn Street, Watertown, Massachusetts 02472, and though Christmas Revels performances at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre are still the peak of the year for the parent company, a whole calendar of its other activities can be found at Revels.org.
The website will also lead you to details of the nine other production companies in the Revels family:
California Revels Artistic Director, David Parr
Executive Director, Dirk Burns
Revels Houston Artistic Director, Beth Sanford
Executive Director, Peggy Curtis
New York Revels Producer, Nancy Petaja
Revels North Artistic Director, Maureen Burford
Producer, Sherry Merrick
Portland Revels Executive Director, Debby Garman
Puget Sound Revels Executive Director, Mary Lynn
Rocky Mountain Revels Producer, Karen Romeo
Santa Barbara Revels Producer, Susan Keller
Washington Revels Artistic Director, Roberta Gasbarre
Executive Director, Greg Lewis
Photographs are reproduced by courtesy of Roger Ide, Sam Sweezy, Revels Inc., the Langstaff family, Washington Revels Inc., and the Milne Special Collections at the University of New Hampshire.
SUSAN COOPER is the author of the classic five-volume fantasy series The Dark Is Rising (including the Newbery Medal winner The Grey King) as well as many other books for children and adults. She is the recipient of two Writers Guild Awards for television films, was co-author of the Broadway play Foxfire, and is a board member of the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance. She lives on an island in a saltmarsh in Massachusetts.
Copyright © 2011 by Susan Cooper
Cover photograph copyright © 2011 by Roger Ide
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Excerpts from the New York Times reprinted with permission from November 14, 1949, and November 13, 1950 New York Times. Copyright 1949 and 1950 by the New York Times Co.
Excerpt from Ann Bradley Vehslage from the Elephant’s Trunk, vol. II, no. 2, May 1967. Reprinted by permission of Ann Bradley Vehslage.
First electronic edition 2011
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Cooper, Susan, date.
The magic maker : a portrait of John Langstaff, creator of the Christmas Revels / Susan Cooper. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-7636-5040-7 (hardcover)
; 1. Langstaff, John M. 2. Baritones (Singers) — United States — Biography.
3. Theatrical producers and directors — United States — Biography.
4. Revels, Inc. I. Title.
ML420.L2383C66 2011
780.92 — dc22[B] 2010053682
ISBN 978-0-7636-5657-7 (electronic)
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