Songwriters

Buffy St. Marie

The great writing of my generation does not always appear in novels or poems. It’s mostly been spent on songs, which, in performance or recorded, had a lot more audience. The great opening out of American culture in the 1960’s and 1970’s absorbed amazing lyricists. Especially if you count the Canadians among them! It is hard to write about the music of this time in a short blog post, but also impossible not to mention how much we lived, and learned, from the messages in songs.

Civil rights marches and the protests against the Vietnam war were powered by song. I’ve read how the Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama, starting point for all of the civil rights marches out of Selma, reverberated with songs and spirituals. All of the marches I was on began and ended with speakers and singers. A friend of mine was in love with Phil Ochs, whose songs were very much to the point at the time.

I bought a cheap record player to be able to buy and listen to albums. Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell albums were the first two, and after playing them over and over, I knew the songs by heart. This became a pattern. I didn’t listen to the radio or buy pop singles. I bought the albums of songwriters for whom the lyrics were as important as the music. That doesn’t mean I didn’t love a good rocking beat. I remember how we danced! But the albums I knew best were about the words.

Bob Dylan and John Lennon were perhaps the most influential songwriters. We had The White Album and George Harrison’s triple album All Things Must Pass.  We waited for Dylan’s albums: Nashville Skyline and Blood on the Tracks. I loved Kris Kristofferson, for both his writing and his acting. He wrote some of the anthems of our lives, such as “Me and Bobby McGee.” I knew all of the songs on Music for Big Pink, many written by Robbie Robertson. The title of my current book, Pulled Into Nazareth, comes from one of his songs.

Kris Kristofferson

Buffy St. Marie’s voice and her lyrics as well were mesmerizing. They are still wonderful. Joni Mitchell’s lyrics grew tiresome pretty early for me, and Carole King was way too poppy. Carly Simon was everywhere, and therefore uninteresting, though I got to love some of her work later. We all hoped for a lot from Phoebe Snow, but we only got one album. Linda Ronstadt covered Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s wonderful songs, though I didn’t know them until later either.

I resonated to the words of John Prine and John David Souther, as sung by Linda Ronstadt. Sad songs like “Angel from Montgomery” and “Silver Blue.” But also I loved Boz Scaggs, who was from our town (San Francisco) and wrote his own unique music. I had Moments and Silk Degrees, his best selling albums. I cut photos of him dancing out of The Rolling Stone and taped them to the walls of my office! I also loved Ray Charles, who was a little older, but actively writing and performing during this period.

By this time I wasn’t in much control of the stereo. These were the days that, unless you put on headphones and shut everyone else out, everyone in the house (and maybe the apartments above and below you!) listened to the same music. I loved Bob Marley, but only got to know him thoroughly later. Same with Randy Newman and Jackson Browne, whose work I find amazing. These are only a few of the many wonderful songwriters whose lyrics and music soared through our lives.

Recently, Neil McCormick wrote of a 2010 performance by Kris Kristofferson at Cadogan Hall: “At 74, standing tall and straight at the centre of an otherwise empty stage, he held a London audience completely spellbound by the magical power of an open spirit and truly great songs … Now that Cash, his first public champion, has passed away, Kristofferson provides a rare link to an old idea of a mythic, honourable America. His English audience responded with generosity and respect.”

My character Paul is a reasonably good folk guitarist. He is often made welcome because of it and the number of songs that he knows. I can’t help but quote some of these songs in the stories I am writing, and I hope that the songwriters will be happy with my declaration of “fair use” as commentary and criticism, as noted in copyright law. Their great work united us and expressed what we were thinking. Literature may have been the poorer, but public life was enriched.