for SATB choir, flute, and piano - Georgetown, South Carolina (2003)
From an Indigo Choral Society press release for July 2003
During the first week, he was given a crash course on Georgetown's history and heritage, including visits to the Rice Museum, the Kaminski House, Hobcaw Barony and the Hobcaw Barony Visitor Center, Santee Coastal Reserve, Hampton Plantation, Brookgreen Gardens, Huntington Beach State Park, and the Dreamkeepers Center, as well as a kayaking trip on the Black River. During week two, he visited several Georgetown County schools, introducing students to the concept of musical imagery.
The three movements of Tidelands of Georgetown capture many facets of the low country.
Georgetown's early history comes alive as Jim wraps the names of local Indian tribes in an unhurried cadence around these poems like a master basket-weaver.
Gloria Barr Ford from Georgetown wrote the lyrics for the second movement, Come on Let's We Go. Using Gullah and jazzy rhythms, Jim and Gloria portray images of slaves working on a rice plantation.
Put een dee sickle, Lay down dee bundle, Watch out dee bad snake, Kill up dee skeet-a, Work een dee hot fiel', Come on let's we go.
The words to movement three, On Goes The River, come from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses.
Jim's flowing music allows the words to meander gently like a low country river. One soon imagines boating on a dark brown river with trees on either hand, and with castles of the foam as fresh water meets salt water. Listeners are left with a sense of peace and future prosperity for a community along a river, bringing to mind especially the Black, Pee Dee, Waccamaw, and Sampit rivers as they merge to form Winyah Bay.
Compositions