This Is My Beloved

This Is My Beloved is not so much a record to be listened to as an experience to be shared; the listener feels as if he were eavesdropping on an intensely private monologue in which a man is reliving a crucial love affair.

The album, a reading of a long narrative poem, is a radical departure for Arthur Prysock. Though he has made two narrative short discs (Maman and the intensely popular, A Working Man’s Prayer). Prysock is chiefly known to his army of fans as the most masculine of pop baritone singers, with hit records spanning two decades. The fans will be startled by this one! Even those who have seen him on the Johnny Carson show and noted his easy stage presence and the depth and richness of his speaking voice, are going to discover with a shock that Arthur is a natural actor. In his portrayal of a desperate man who loves, “not wisely but too well,” Prysock speaks with the same direct simplicity, the same lack of pretense which marks his singing style. The result is a very moving characterization.

The poem divides naturally into two sections. Side One is love shared, Side Two is love lost, love remembered. The first two haunting bars of music introduce Prysock’s quiet portrayal as he tells his girl how much he needs her love in a time hate, and from that moment we are caught up in the personal story of a man who shares with us his most intimate thoughts as he memorizes every detail of the woman he loves. We share the recurring premonition that it cannot last. And as the first side ends, it is already later than the lovers think.

“I waited years today. One year for every hour.”

He had bought her favorite food and wine for their private supper, he had bought the purple asters she loved, to set between them on a candle-lit table.

“But you did not come.”

As suddenly as that, the affair is over. There is only the bitter aftermath to come-and we live through that, too, in Prysock’s quiet characterization, movingly underplayed and completely real from beginning to end.

Prysock’s reading gets a fine assist from the sensitive musical score by Mort Garson, whose arrangements have enhanced previous Prysock Albums. To underline the loneliness of the lover, Garson has chosen a transparent approach in which every instrument and group-solo flute, string quartet, rhythm section-comes through cleanly and separately, each a solitary voice. Living and working in Hollywood, Garson has composed an accompaniment in the best tradition of film scoring. The original music provides a moody backdrop for the story, never intruding on it except by design, when the intrusion is that of the outside world intruding upon the lovers with the clatter of a subway train or the ticking of a clock.

The free-verse poem which provides the text was written by Walter Benton during World War II, but like all good love poems it is impervious to time. In Prysock’s interpretation, it takes on new meaning; the “time of hate” in which Prysock lives is different from that of which Benton wrote. But love does not change, and because it doesn’t the poem’s appeal is universal.

This Is My Beloved is not an album for Prysock fans alone-or for poetry lovers alone. It is an album for any man or woman who has ever “loved and lost,” the story of a love affair with Prysock telling it like it is-and was and will be.