Dudleytown

Grade 2.5 - 4:26

Dudleytown is an abandoned, haunted village found in the Litchfield Hills in Connecticut.  Legend goes that the village was cursed by its founders, the Dudley Family, who had been related to Edmund Dudley, an Englishmen who was beheaded by King Henry VIII.  The town, which was founded in the 1740’s, was converted from a forest to a farm land.  The village was fraught with mental illness and poor crops, which was blamed on the curse.  Some conspiracy theorists have even attempted to tie Lincoln’s assassination to the curse of Dudleytown.  The song opens with a hymn, as this would be the music of New England when Dudleytown was founded.  The song slowly transitions to the haunting, which begins with the owls lining the road to Dudleytown.  The owls foreshadow the evil that is to befall upon the town, introducing the curse of the Dudley’s.  The evil spreads, taunting and terrorizing the residents until the hymn returns, now a broken and sad variation of the original hopeful song.  The closing section imitates the sudden way Dudleytown was vacated and abandoned, leaving only the owls behind. This song has some doubling throughout, and the ranges stay within an octave and half, making it playable by developing groups with a strong sense of rhythm.