Blue Mountain Ballads is a song cycle for a voice and piano composed by Paul Bowles in 1946 on poems by Tennessee Williams, who was his friend and mentor.
The extended harmonic language of the piano part allows a large degree of freedom in all four songs.
[1] Williams later grouped all the Blue Mountain Ballads poems under that name and published them inside his 1956 book In the Winter of Cities.
"Lonesome Man" is a piece for a medium voice (Db3-Eb4), preferably male, and it contains blues rhythms and harmonies.
It requires many colors in the voice and good acting, as the song is performed from the perspective of a narrator claiming that they are "hot stuff".