50 Years Entry # 11

Songs

I can only tell you what I see.

That’s the first line from a song I wrote once. In a way it describes the songwriter’s job, or really any artist’s job. That’s the best a songwriter can do. It’s his or her viewpoint and once he or her shapes it for the listener to hear it in words supported by melody, rhythm, and underpinning harmony, the songwriter offers it to the ear of the listener. The unspoken, assumed request from the songwriter is, “Listen and see if what I’m saying makes sense to you.” He or she also asks, “Does this seem real? Does it sound anything like your experience?”

Imagine the first artists. They would probably have emerged independently in different pockets of early humanity, where during the quiet hours, maybe during the dark months of the year when there was more idle time in a cave dwelling, someone is thinking about their life. He grabs a leftover stick from last night’s fire and draws an animal on the rock wall above where he sleeps. Maybe he’s successful enough to describe what it is to the others in the cave with him. They get the idea of what animal he’s drawn. They form thoughts on his work. They are the first critics, comparing notes. The artist draws another picture, more comment follows, and soon others are drawing their own pictures.

Maybe those first artists used noises in rhythm to describe the animal in action, maybe he or she modulated the voice up and down. Anthropologists and linguists suggest that the use of pitches and rhythms to signal group movement anticipated language. If so, music was communication before speaking was. Song lyrics can serve up visual images on a plate made from those pitches and rhythms. Words and music can be a powerful combination and there’s a fair amount of mystery about how you join them together.

Now fast forward in a hyper, quantum way , bypassing Homer and the singing historians, and storytellers of old, to Shakespeare, to James Joyce and beyond. The proverbial monkey with a typewriter has by now come up with all this stuff that many critics agree is great work. It involves layer upon of layer of commentary and storytelling and reflection on experience, expressed through paint and carving and music. The process has involved work, play,  and comparison. The transfer of art to art-lover has been hastened by the printing press, by film, by records, by radio and television, by computer and internet … and now here we are.

On November 1^st, I played a songwriters in the round show with Thomm Jutz and Ed Snodderly at the Bluebird here in Nashville.  In preparation, I looked back through my song catalog and chose a few older ones. One had been tugging at me and it seemed a good one to sing as the election approached.

I can only tell you what I see

Two lonely people, you and me

Both want out and both want in

Neither knows where to begin

You can draw a line there in the dirt

Stay on your side, you won’t get hurt

But if you’re not afraid to fall

You can take a chance, maybe win it all

You’re at the crossroads once again

Afraid to lose, you’ll never win

Let love lift you, let love in

Let love take you back again

The Bluebird is a Nashville institution. Amy Curland opened the café in 1982 and invited friends to play music there. As the country music business grew, Nashville had become a songwriter’s town. The “Outlaws”, headed by Willie Nelson, had made the music and the town more hippy-friendly. The “guitar pull” – where one guitar is passed around a room, each singer taking a turn before passing it to the next singer – was already an identifiable thing here. The Bluebird had an in-crowd reputation by the time four songwriter friends – Don Schlitz, Fred Knoblock, Thom Schuler, and Paul Overstreet – debuted the songwriters-in-the-round format. Rather than sit on a stage in a row, they set up in the middle of the room facing each other, bringing the guitar pull to a paying audience. The writers joked and told stories that led into song and there was a little bit of competition involved. They spurred each other on and tried to bring their best stuff forward. That in-the-round format became the nightly norm at the Bluebird. Like a fiddle contest is for a fiddler, an in-the-round is for a songwriter. You’re forced to tighten up your game in real time. I’ve known Thomm Jutz for 20 years, first through his live playing with Nanci Griffith, and in recent years we’ve co-written some songs. I first met Ed in about 1980 when he came through Denver, and got to know him better when Hot Rize performed at the Downhome, a venue he and some friends started in Johnson City, Tennessee. The three of us in a triangle in the middle of the room at the Bluebird represented a particular strata of the songwriting scene, very much influenced by the John Hartford and Norman Blake models. It was inspiring to sit next to those two, I got to experience their music in a more focused way, and I got paid for it too!

Songs can be snapshots of feeling. They can employ any number of literary techniques.  They can be allegoric, metaphoric, alliterative, comic, and tragic. A classic country song, ala Hank Williams, can feature crucial, hyper descriptive phrases that are Hemingway-like in their brevity and power. Songs can tell stories. Story in song seems akin to myth, which is story that teaches a lesson. Parables in the bible are much the same thing. Audiences are often hungry for stories. The concert hall, the coffee house, the festival field are all modern versions of the campfire. The dark of nighttime signals to humans on an embedded cellular and cultural level that it’s story time. My parents watched the six o’clock news, then after a meal, they watched “Gunsmoke”. I like to read, watch movies, play and listen to music at night.

In India, Africa, and indigenous America, the tradition of a sung, oral history continues. It’s also often danced. In India there are yearly celebrations where the singing starts at sundown and last until sunup, three weeks later the history of the people has been told in song. Homer was an itinerant bard, and long before his words were printed, the Odessey and the Iliad were sung in ancient Greece. When we read, we take in information one way, when we hear we take it in another way. Dancing while taking in the information may transfer it another way. There’s something about rhythm and pitch and accompanying harmony that supports the information, gives it a little extra to go on, a head-start maybe.

Writing a song is like solving a puzzle, where you guess, through trial and error, how it’s supposed to sound and what it has to say. For me, especially in recent years, writing songs has becomes a pastime, a diversion from the everyday that ironically describes the everyday. I once asked one of my fiddling mentors, Art Stamper, to name his favorite tune, and his answer was, “The one I’m learning now.” If you were to ask me my favorite song, I might respond, “The one I just wrote.”

Jan and I have a group of songs recorded and mixed. This record is different in that Jan is more prominent. We share lead vocals on four songs, and she sings lead on two. She’s co-written all but one of the 15 songs. We think it’s finished, but we’ve been fooled a couple times already in the past six months. In May, we started recording a bunch of songs we’d written with Tom Paxton over the past year. Meanwhile we kept writing more songs, some of which begged for our attention. We went to the studio three more times to add songs that seemed to be in response to the other songs, and that seemed to glue the other songs together into one bigger thing. Like a child that you raise and worry over and love and attend to before finally sending it out into the world, songs and recordings of them can be hard to let go. Are they finished, have I sung and played them correctly, defined them clearly? Too fast, too slow? Too high, too low? Too much instrumentation or not enough? You fear for them like you would a child. Just this past week we’ve written three more songs, one with Paxton and two with Pat McLaughlin, and damned if I don’t want to record those now too, but I guess we’ll wait. When a fiddler says, “I’m gonna play a little bit of ‘Old Joe Clark’ “, he means that nobody ever plays all of it, that his execution then and there is part of a tradition that came long before him and that will continue long after him. And so is writing a song. Every three-and-a-half-minute wonder is a short chapter, today’s episode, of a much longer oral history. So Jan and I will push the songs out on a recording soon, making way for the next season of our song series. We have named the project a couple time too. It was going to be “Here with Me”; now it’s “Paper Flowers”, after a cowrite with Tom Paxton that starts:

I was out on the west coast, somewhere singin’ my songs

I bought some paper flowers ‘cause real flowers don’t last too long

I sent my love the flowers, yellow, blue and green

One for her, one for me, and one for the miles between

I asked my brother moon, I asked my sister sky

Can you give me a reason, can you tell me why?

How’d I get myself out here and leave her way back there?

I miss the girl with the true-blue eyes and the long strawberry hair

The lyric started on a scrap of paper, which I saved. More recently I found the scrap and typed the words into a note on my phone. It was from July of 2012, after Jan and I had started dating. I sent her three paper flowers I’d bought in Washington state, along with a postcard on which was written, “One for you, one for me, and one for the miles between.” In the same box with the flowers there was also a festival badge, a piece of sea glass, a little piece of driftwood, and a feather. That little collection was a kind of art object, an expression, and all these years later it became a song.

We’re off the road now until January. I mean to finish transcribing the 40 songs that will be included in a songbook that Randy Barrett will help me publish on his Barcroft imprint. Assembling the song list was a bit of a startling revisitation of my fifty years as a professional, a survey of my growth (I guess there was some), and my aging (I wouldn’t call it maturing exactly). I can see that I keep revisiting the same topics, keep looking from different angles at the same things. Or maybe I keep looking at the same thing, which is my own self.  Norman and Nancy Blake once spoke to me about how they used their music to define their lives. I can relate to that, and see that I still need to chisel away at the definition.

In January, Jan and I will tour for three weeks in the UK and Ireland. We’re excited to collaborate with a couple wonderful Irish players, accordionist Dermot Byrne and guitarist Seamie O’Dowd. We’ll have two days of rehearsal before the tour starts. I need to make a definitive choice of 25 songs that I can send them ahead of time. It’s hard to pick which ones! During this 50^th year as a musician, I’ve made a point to revisit older material, but I’m also singing the more recent songs. In some ways nothing has changed in 50 years - I’m still having to jump into the unknown, and do my best to put on a show, sink or swim. One big change from the 1970’s is I now have the cushion of songwriting royalties to rest on, so I can take time to plan the next tour, do advance work on a new record release, and finish a songbook. There’s still pressure to produce. It’s different work, but it’s still work.

I have led a life of privilege. My parents left me to my own devices and it worked out. I found the door into music, walked through it, and never really had to look back. Moving around the country, living in different places, and touring nationally and internationally has jarred my perspective, and helped me keep an open mind. I’ve been able to read and dream and interpret firsthand experiences using a pencil, a piece of paper, and a guitar. Fifty years later, the songs prop me up and keep pushing me forward.