NO VERMONTERS IN HEAVEN

Composer's Note:

When asked to compose music for the Social Band’s Vermont Poetry and Song Project I thought it timely to offer a lighthearted reflection on the cussed contrariness, political independence, and irreverent but enlightened spirit traditionally attributed to citizens of the nations fourteenth state.Looking for a suitable text, I was delighted to adopt E.F. Johnstone’s well-known verse: No Vermonters In Heaven.

Dr. Ernest Fenwick Johnstone was born in Waterville, Nova Scotia, in 1867. He earned a masters in Law at the University of Michigan. Eventually he settled in Vermont, wrote poetry, and, as an“extraction dentist,” practiced in Brandon, Orwell, Shoreham, and Bristol, where he died on April 8,1938. No Vermonters was written in 1914 and appeared in the Rutland Daily Herald. Mrs. Johnstone explained the circumstances in which the poem was conceived: “He was driving over Rochester Mountain in the Fall of the year. It was in horse and buggy days, and he had ample opportunity to review the beauty about him as his horse eased his way down the mountain.”