Songs of Innocence and Experience is an album by American beat poet and writer Allen Ginsberg, recorded in 1969. For the recording, Ginsberg sang pieces from 18th-century English poet William Blake's illustrated poetry collection of the same name and set them to a folk-based instrumental idiom, featuring simple melodies and accompaniment performed with a host of jazz musicians. Among the album's contributors were trumpeter Don Cherry, arranger/pianist Bob Dorough, multi-instrumentalist Jon Sholle, drummer Elvin Jones, and Peter Orlovsky – Ginsberg's life-partner and fellow poet – who contributed vocals and helped produce the recording with British underground writer Barry Miles.
The album is one of the most famous attempts at setting lyrics from Blake's Songs collection to music. Ginsberg, having studied the rhyme and meter of the poems, believed they were originally intended to be sung and that a Blakean musical performance could roughly be replicated. The themes explored in Blake's poems – childhood and abuse, organized religion, institutionalization, and poverty – connected with Ginsberg spiritually. He was inspired to undertake the project by a religious vision of Blake from decades earlier and his witnessing the 1968 Democratic National Convention protest activity, as well as rock music of the era's counterculture, citing its qualities of poetry and consciousness.
The album was first released in 1970 on LP by MGM Records and Verve Forecast Records, selling poorly but receiving critical acclaim. It soon went out of print, while a follow-up release of more Blake recordings, planned with Fantasy Records, never materialized. In 2017, Omnivore Recordings released The Complete Songs of Innocence and Experience, a double CD featuring the original album and previously unreleased Blakean recordings by Ginsberg from 1971.
Background
In 1948, Ginsberg experienced what he described as a religious vision of 18th-century English poet William Blake appearing in his East Harlem apartment and reciting poetry to him. He was profoundly moved by this experience and inspired to set Blake's poetry to music. According to art historian Stephen F. Eisenman, "all at once, Ginsberg later said, he apprehended the unity of things material and spiritual, religious and carnal. Looking out the window, he saw 'into the depths of the universe' and understood that 'this was the moment that I was born for.'" Ginsberg's interest in Blake resurfaced in the late 1960s when he began to research Western Gnosticism for philosophical reasons.
Ginsberg came to believe that Blake's poems were originally composed for the purpose of being sung and that, by studying their rhyme and meter, such a performance could be roughly reproduced. He planned to record musical adaptations of poems from Blake's illustrated Songs of Innocence and of Experience collection, which thematized the importance and sanctity of childhood, featuring critiques of systemic child abuse ("The Chimney Sweeper"), organized religion ("The Garden of Love"), and "the institutionalized culture of benevolence that perpetuated poverty" ("Holy Thursday"). The poetry collection, Ginsberg said, "seemed the nearest thing to holy mantra or holy prayer poetry that I could find in my own consciousness".
Ginsberg was also inspired by the rock music of 1960s counterculture, citing acts like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Byrds, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the Fugs, the Band, and Donovan. As Ginsberg recalled, "all the lovely youthful bands that have been wakening the conscience of the world, really, were approaching high poetry and cosmic consciousness in their content, so I was interested in seeing if Blake's highest poetry could be vocalised, tuned, and sung in the context of the Beatles' 'I Am the Walrus' or 'Day in the Life of' [sic] or in the context of 'Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowland' [sic] or 'John Wesley Harding' by Dylan." Ginsberg added that he wanted to present Blake in a way that would interest Dylan, who had disliked the poet. Ginsberg's witness of the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests and riot in Chicago provided an impetus to record the album.