Opus 81 is a set of 14 songs written on my mission (except the first).
I wrote the music for'Footsteps' in March 1967 to a poem I wrote earlier.
In the summer of 1968, in Hong Kong, a group of Elders was assigned by the Mission President (Keith Garner) to travel to the different Branches in the Hong Kong zone and play for the Young Men/Young Women (called 'MIA' at that time). I showed the group leader (Winston Elton) my song 'Footsteps'. He liked it, and asked for more for their group, as he did not want to just play songs that were then current (and often anti-establishment to the extreme).
So I perused some paperbacks of famous poems and set some of them to music.
3 of the 14 in this set use words I wrote ('Footsteps', 'I Knew a Man', and 'Song of an Old Man'), 1 is a poem written by a friend I knew in Massachusetts ('Sand Castles'), and the other 10 are by famous poets.
The Elders played all 14 in rehearsal, and selected half for public performance. (I will let you guess which ones.)
I had the original manuscripts for decades after my mission. However, when I recently decided to make them part of my music compositions, I could not find those manuscripts. So I re-composed them from memory. (The originals may have slight differences.)
These songs are very much in the 'Kingston Trio' and 'Peter - Paul - and - Mary' style of the late 60'60's. Some are 'anti-war' (the Viet Nam war was raging at the time), others are as varied as the poems I used.
For this version I used Piano accompaniment. The originals used Guitars, which would certainly be appropriate here.
Files for all 14 songs are listed below.