On March 27, Joseph Sobol will bring his song cycle, “In the Deep Heart’s Core,” to the Grace Note at Stissing Center. Performed in this iteration by five musicians, the work is a musical biography of William Butler Yeats, tracing the poet’s life from his early years through his middle period to his later reckoning with mortality and “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” Sobol describes the show as “a persistent piece of work, still evolving.” The production, whose title is taken from the closing line of Yeats’ poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” has been central to Sobol’s creative life since the early 1980s.
The roots of the project stretch back even further. As a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College in 1972, Sobol landed a seat in a small writing seminar taught by Grace Paley, the legendary short story writer, activist and teacher. She opened the semester with a recitation of Yeats’ poem “The People,” which wrestles with the gap between the poet’s solitary spiritual pursuit and the gritty clamor of the streets. Paley guided her students to bridge that gap in their work, or at least to try. For more than 50 years, Sobol has done just that through a career that interweaves music, storytelling and poetry.
“In my 20s I identified with Yeats’ early and middle periods. Those poems suggest a kind of adolescent striving after the pain that yields wisdom,” Sobol said. “Any young poet will find in that a compelling arc.”
Raised in Port Chester, N.Y., Sobol trained since childhood as a classical guitarist. In the early years after college, he led an itinerant life of sign painting and treating café patrons to the filigree stylings of Andrés Segovia and Julian Bream. For a while, he chugged down the Mississippi River on a dilapidated houseboat, guitar and paintbrush in hand, offering his services at every landing. Along the way, he picked up stories. Listening to them, experiencing them and telling them would provide the scaffolding for his lifelong vocation.
In 1983, he enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to pursue a master’s degree in folklore. Grace Paley’s transformative class had already enshrined Yeats as a touchstone for Sobol. Yeats’ deep engagement with folklore — the spiritual lifeblood of Ireland, the poet contended — helped set a template for Sobol, who was entranced by Yeats’ blend of scholarly inquiry, poetic imagination, political engagement and mysticism.
Yeats had spent years traveling through counties Galway and Sligo, interviewing people and laborers about their lives, work, and beliefs. Some of the poems he wrote during this period are rhymed and metered versions of the tales he documented, filled with haunting apparitions, immortal archetypes and harsh but cherished landscapes. The Appalachian storytelling tradition that Sobol began exploring at Chapel Hill is a direct descendant of Irish oral culture. In both cases, stories are told, or performed, in a rhythmic cadence that mirrors the lilt of Irish speech. Sobol found in that continuum a place of his own.
While “In the Deep Heart’s Core” traces the arc of Yeats’ life, it also reflects Sobol’s own artistic evolution. He first set Yeats’ poem “A Young Man’s Song” to music in 1982. Over the years, more poems followed.
“The tone, tenor, and lyric would dictate to me the musical response,” Sobol said, explaining that as the work developed, “different idioms came to bear on the compositions.”
He grew up listening to Brahms and Palestrina, and the early songs reflect that classical influence. Before long, the plaintive strains of Irish folk music began to weave in, along with its rollicking reels. He also applied his playing technique to a lesser-known cousin of the guitar, the 10-stringed cittern.
Meanwhile, Sobol flourished in the academic setting, using his perch to engage with and sometimes oversee storytelling partnerships such as veterans’ history projects, African American cultural festivals and innovative collaborations like one with the National Science Foundation called “Skytellers; a Resource for Science Classes and Portable Planetariums.” His Ph.D. thesis, earned at Northwestern University in 1994, investigated the contemporary revival of storytelling in America.
By then, Sobol’s Yeats project had become a fully realized stage production, performed by an ensemble of musicians and vocalists. His “mystic cabaret,” as he calls it, enjoyed an eight-month run at Chicago’s Bailiwick Repertory Theater. It traveled nationally and throughout Ireland, appearing at venues including the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and the National Concert Hall in Dublin.
Fittingly, in 2015 the show was mounted at Thoor Ballylee, the 15th-century tower in County Galway that Yeats bought in 1917 and lived in until 1929. The performance was central to the celebrations marking the reopening of the tower after decades of flooding and neglect. Thoor Ballylee is now a thriving cultural institution dedicated to Yeats and Ireland’s literary heritage.
In 2000, Sobol joined the faculty at East Tennessee State University, where he was tenured in the department of communication and performance and ultimately ran the graduate program in storytelling. In 2017, he moved to the University of South Wales in Cardiff, assuming the post of director of the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling Research. Throughout those years, he steadily refined “In the Deep Heart’s Core,” incorporating biographical elements and prose from across Yeats’ oeuvre.
Sobol retired from academia in 2022 and returned to the United States with his wife, settling in Amenia. Today, he remains a vital presence in the traditional Irish music scene. Whether on guitar, mandolin or his signature cittern, now with 12 strings, he continues to hone his craft in sessions throughout the Northeast. At Stissing Center, audiences will encounter a work that has accompanied Sobol for decades and continues to evolve with him.