Distant Dots

The library's J. A. PARKS web pages have twice been found by people with intersecting interests who ultimately provided additional information to expand our knowledge about Parks' work.

Several years ago, a Scottish researcher interested in John More Smieton contacted us to obtain copies of J.A. Parks's songs using arrangements of Smieton's music. He alerted us to his compilation of information about the Smieton family.

More recently, a question from Gerald Massey's home town of Tring in Hertfordshire resulted in an exchange of e-mails that provided us the link above, and provided British researchers copies of Parks' musical setting for Massey's lyric poetry.

Neither of these interchanges provides any clues toward answering the next questions -- how did J.A. Parks become aware of these people's works, and did he correspond directly with either of them? Massey (1828-1907) was still alive when Parks published his first musical setting for Massey's "Together" in 1902, but had died before the solo voice version was published in 1909. Smieton (1857-1904) was dead before Parks used melodies from his works as the basis for several songs.