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The Music of Robert Louis Stevenson

I Have Been East, I Have Been West

By J.F.M. Russell ©2019

Robert Louis Stevenson began studying the piano and composition at age 36 and learned the penny whistle two years later. He played the flageolet, a version of the whistle equipped with keys, almost until the end of his life. His arrangements and compositions include more than 120 pieces. This site describes his complete works through facsimiles, transcriptions, recordings, quotations and commentary.

"An interesting chapter in his life will be written when all his scattered pieces are brought together, and the musical side of his character unexpectedly revealed to the vast public that knows him now only as the winsome versifier and the accomplished romancer."

Robert Murrell Stevenson (1916-2012) in Robert Louis Stevenson's Musical Interests, 1957.

Setting:

Recording:

Manuscript Locations:

There is probably no manuscript by RLS for this music.

Sources:

Scots Musical Museum. Edinburgh: Johnson, 1788:

Surenne, John Thomas, and G.F. Graham. Songs of Scotland without Words. Edinburgh: Wood, 1856:

Gems of Scottish Song. Boston: Ditson, 1866:

Booth, Bradford A. and Ernest Mehew. Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995:

Comments:

Stevenson's unfinished work Diogenes in London, a collaboration with his friend W.E. Henley, contains two song lyrics. I Have Been East appears at the end of Diogenes, and was probably written by RLS to Burns' version of Johny Faa, also known as The Gypsy Laddie and in its Jacobite version as Wae's Me for Prince Charlie. RLS would have been aware of the version in the Scots Musical Museum because he was soon to complete an essay on Robert Burns. At one time he possessed a copy of Surenne's Songs of Scotland, which contains a piano arrangement of the music, and he may also have owned at this time a copy of Gems of Scottish Song, which contains the Jacobite version.

Diogenes, of course, was the Greek philosopher who used a lantern to look for an honest man. Stevenson and Henley put him in London, where he has his lantern stolen. Diogenes is a wanderer and so there is a similarity between these lyrics and those of Gypsie Laddie. The phrase "I have been East, I have been West" does not appear in Burns' lyrics but does appear in other Scots lyrics found in Child Ballads 200E.13:

The same line of lyrics also appears in the song The Ploughman in the Scots Musical Museum, and in fact Stevenson's lyrics fit more closely to this song, however it is more about having found a lover than about travel and does not appear in Gems of Scottish Song or Songs of Scotland. RLS also wrote out in manuscript a melody in E minor which has many similarities to the song Raggle Taggle Gypsies and which uses the same lyrics as Gypsy Laddie to a different melody.