Somebody once said, “Writing is easy; all you have to do is sit down and open up a vein!” I say that sometimes it is a matter of scribbling and cussing! In High School, my English teachers praised my ideas and cussed my handwriting. Early in my writing, and later in my teaching efforts, I found writing well to be hard, and I have worked hard at it… that is after I finally determined that so-called writer’s block was in reality just pure laziness. I told my students to put the point of the pencil or pen on paper, apply slight pressure and to move the writing instrument around on the paper… and they agreed that was writing. Educated as an historian, I had found myself hired to teach high school English, and I loved it, both the teaching and the fifty new students arriving each year in my classes at a private high school. Pretty soon we were in a groove as I finally realized that teaching means teaching STUDENTS and not subjects. And, before I knew it, they actually learned to write, as revealed by AP examinations and success in college.
I find, however, that different kinds of writing are harder or easier for me., and I’m pretty sure that must be true of most people. For years, I struggled with my poetry, conflicted by the need to write yet handicapped by my early teachers and their 19th century ideas about poetry. (I realize that it is always easy to blame one’s early teachers!)
Years of my own education and graduate studies in form and meter, sound and sense and in studying the works of poets I respected, resulted in a better understanding, which came at about the time I felt a need to try and create a bit of my own poetry to inflict upon the world. I found the act of creating poetry was darned near impossible until I decided that I would allow the act of creation to be an abstract experience. Now, I just keep writing until the poem wanting to be written emerges on the page! I know it is not magic, but I tend to discover the poem some time in the rather complicated writing process!
I believe that my background and early years hardly prepared me for school or for teaching others. I know this sounds like one of those “Movie of the Week” stories, but I really did grow up in the backwoods of Georgia, trudge through swamps and dirt roads of the rural south, cross creeks on logs substituting for bridges, and stand in the whatever weather encountered by all rural school children on any given day in their early journeys to catch a school bus.
This was all true in my early school years, until my family moved to Savannah for my step-father’s job in the shipyards. After Savannah, I continued in Hinesville (twice) Nahunta, Woodbine, and Yemassee (South Carolina). After I left full-time farming with an heroic Grandmother and resided with my mother and stepfather, I went back every summer to the country to help on the farm, to the wooded paths and to the country schools and farms. I have written quite a bit about these experiences in a books of poems (The Riceboro Poems, A Biography of Place) but I have not written until now about certain habits I developed during those long hikes through swamps, woods and pastures (and YES, there were angry bulls to chase me!). One particular habit may have, in some small way, led to my becoming a
poor and struggling songwriter.
On my long walks to catch that elusive school bus, I began to make up new tunes for songs I heard most often on the radio. I began with Home on the Range, and went from there. Although I was, in effect, merely re-tuning, it was the beginning of my rather limited song-writing career! This tiny skill has brought neither fame nor fortune, but it has brought a slight benefit to my band, because with my limited skills, I can provide additional verses to some of the old old songs we sing today. Initially, we were mostly just plug-away singers, but when we decided that each of us should have equal time before our imaginary microphones, I was assigned the task of writing new verses as needed…and I took that responsibility seriously. Does anybody need new verses for Pick Me Up On Your Way Down or Footprints in the Snow?
But, long before my dreams of stage and spotlights, I had been playing at poetry (for about sixty five years), and had been listening to most of the songs we try to tackle today. I had a head full of those songs, as performed by many different artists. I felt reasonably competent in writing about how to keep the back-country housewife angry at her philandering man for three minutes and how to keep the cowboy yodeling while his doggies milled about while getting ready to go stampeding.
At one rehearsal, as we were gathering together three different waltzes, and trying to choose the ones each of us could best handle, I had a thought. We had run through waltzes of the great states of Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama, put them together and called the whole thing The Mason-Dixon Waltz. At some moment, I realized that we had no such pretty song for Oklahoma, my wife’s home state, and my adopted one. I got mildly upset about that, so I got started on my version of what I thought would surely grow to be a classic: The Oklahoma Waltz, I began:
I rode into Tulsa
a cowboy alone
and I knew I’d be lonesome that day
but a raven-haired beauty
with a Cherokee name
said, “I’ll dance all your sorrows away.”
I believed I was onto something because I suspected the chorus of this mere waltz, would be easy. After all, a waltz is a waltz, always in waltz time. Why, everybody knew that! And novice songwriter that I was, I knew you only had to write the chorus once! Hallelujah! I was in the song-writing business, and I even began to think about who I’d like to record my masterpiece -.maybe Ernest Tubb, only he was dead. And every name I came up with was the name of an artist from the olden days and every last one of them was dead! Well, I thought, at least I would be honoring my adopted state!
Just in case you’re interested, I did finish the song. My lonely cowboy did get settled in that day, thanks to his lovely maiden. Early next morning he kissed the young Cherokee girl, hit the saddle and rode off “into the cold winter wind.” However, he promised her that he would return some day when they would again dance to The Oklahoma Waltz. And that cowboy surely meant to keep his promise, but you know how cowboys are. In the third verse, he never returns, but he does dream of her and wonders if she is dreaming of him and maybe conjuring up their fancy dancing to the tune of their favorite song. It’s all a big deal and I think that maybe I had completed something like a full country music song cycle: A cowboy arrives in a new town, he is lonely, a lovely lass approaches, he romances her, he makes a promises, he fails to keep that promise, he regrets and sings about it. Sure, there’s no yodeling, but there are three verses and a chorus – not bad, I thought.
So far, the only audience for my masterpiece is a large group of in-laws at a family reunion in Missouri. They agreed it was a fabulous song. An older family member, a proud Native American, cried like a baby. I did try it on a professional musician who had his piano and a computer with an App that created music. He’s a master musician, but when he plays it back, it’s OK but not quite right…not Country enough…too much lovely piano and not enough twang. I am about to blackmail my band into working up an arrangement where I can sing it with just the right heart and heartfelt sadness. They’ve been promising me for months now, but I think they are stalling!
Already, I am ahead of Hank Williams in one way. As far as I know, he didn’t bother to write a chorus, just those magical verses of his, and he sure could twang with the best of ‘em! And another example, which happens to be one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite singers (George Jones), is He Stopped Lovin’ Her Today, written by Braddock and Putnam. If you’ll notice, that song has a little bit of almost singing, a little bit of narration and then a little bit of memorable chorus! Of course that last little bit of George Jones’ chorus gives me goose bumps! “He stopped lovin’ her today. They placed a wreath upon his door….”
GRAND OLD OPRY
At the Civic Center
watching George Jones sing,
He Stopped Loving Her Today,
I thought, Hell he’s drunk
as a skunk! As drunk
as daddy in 1958
when the two of us out hunting
heard George Jones sing
He Stopped Loving Her Today
on the pickup radio – WSM.
That night I learned about
driving a 3 speed on the column,
but mostly I learned about
loving my daddy.
– Charles Brady
