For decades Australians have set the verse of revered poets Lawson and Peterson to music. In the 1970s, we did this with the work of Robert Service. Four years ago, Miramichi-born singer-songwriter Rob Currie put Bliss Carman's The Ships Of Saint John to song. So it is high time someone rediscovered the rustic charm of New Brunswick writer H.A. Cody's old verse.

Carolyn Murray has done just that on her new CD, Peninsula State Of Mind, her second release praising the beauties of her adopted Kingston Peninsula home. Lyrically or musically, few could do it better; considering she is originally from Cape Breton, her praise is that much more emphatic.

Born in North Sydney, Carolyn moved to the Peninsula in 1970 to teach music at Macdonald Consolidated School and fell in love with the area and its people. That love is eloquently reflected in her debut, and even more so in this new album of 11 songs and two instrumentals.

Carolyn moved to St. Stephen to teach in 1995, but returned three years later to join the staff of Belleisle Elementary, retiring in 1999. The past eight years have been dedicated to composing music, songs, stories and poetry. She has also travelled as part of a ministry leadership team, which is perhaps what drew her to H.A. Cody's lovely tribute poem The Old Kingston Road, composed in 1929 on the 140th anniversary of Kingston's Trinity Church.

Born at Cody's Station on the Washademoak in 1872, H. A. Cody was an archdeacon, the rector of Saint John's St. James Church and one of Canada's most beloved authors.

The same spiritual overtones that endeared him to readers inhabit Carolyn's writing; she has preserved the ageless quality of his poem in setting it to music: "As I go down the Kingston Road/ The old and time worn Kingston Road/ I seemed to meet by hill and glen/ The spirits of old Kingston men/ And some they walked and some they rode/ And in their eyes a great light glowed."

These lines are made even more haunting by the moody violin of Stephanie Mainville, Carolyn's daughter and an internationally acclaimed singer and instrumentalist.

Almost as enthralling is Carolyn's own Leaving Clifton, which has the feel of that great woods ballad Peter Emberley: "When I was just a lad of 10 I went away to sea/ I left my darling mother and my father sailed with me/ By the time I was 11 I'd been round Cape Horn/ And when I climbed the rigging I knew why I was born." When the character's father dies and he returns to Kingston, he finds he cannot stay, as the land had become a stranger.

The other nine songs are each eloquent in their own way, while the two instrumentals, Kingston Peninsula Waltz and Pearls of Friendship Waltz, are vibrantly lovely.

Copies can be ordered online at www.carolynmurraymusic.com or by e-mail at kenn@mainville.com.

Archdeacon H.A. Cody

When I came to Saint John to attend Vocational School a half-century ago, H. A. Cody books were much prized.

Of English and Irish origin, Cody's family settled on the Washademoak Lake 42 years before his birth there, in 1872.

H. A., as he became known, enrolled at King's College, Windsor, when 21; there, under the influence of Charles G.D. Roberts, was inspired to write.

He was ordained an Anglican priest in 1896 at Christ Church Cathedral, Fredericton, and assigned to the Parish of Greenwich on the St. John River, which meant traveling 8,000 kilometres a year by riverboat and carriage between its churches.

In 1904 he accepted a post in the Yukon during the great gold rush and was exposed to cabin living, log churches, northern First Nation peoples, dog team travel, Northwest Mounted policing, rowdy miners, primitive social life and bitter cold temperatures.

In 1908 he published his first novel, An Apostle of The North; in 1910 he returned to N.B. to become rector of St. James Church and began publishing a new novel annually until 1937, as well as writing shorter prose and poetry in between his lecture tours and ministerial duties.

Queenstown Dance Friday

There's a square dance Friday, 9 to 12 p.m., at the Orange Hall, Queenstown, to the music of Marjorie Howe, Allison Inch, Stirling Nickerson and Lloyd Mullin.

Gerry Taylor cgtaylor@nbnet.nb.ca has covered folk and country music for nearly 30 years.