I want my girl and I want my pay

[sovay]

For some reason I did not know until tonight that W.H. Auden's "Roman Wall Blues" existed. (Thank Cyril Tawney.) Or that it had been set to music by Benjamin Britten in 1937 as part of a radio play called Hadrian's Wall, of which it is the only surviving part of the score. Or that a recent recording had been briefly available for download free of charge in 2013, which is most certainly not the case anymore.

spatch worked internet magic and got it for me. It's quite good and it does suggest that Britten had just heard Porgy and Bess for the first time.

Anyone with a decent tune for Rosemary Sutcliff's "The Girl I Kissed at Clusium," please feel free to chime in now.

Comments

[sovay]

The wonderful Cyril really had an eye for that sort of thing!

He credited Auden's "Roman Wall Blues" and the opening lines of the film On the Town (1949) as inspirations for "Sally Free and Easy," and I knew one of these things.