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Dirty Linen Feature- Wilderness Plots - A Songwriters' Challenge
September 17th, 2008
by Kerry Dexter
The small, almost pocket-sized book intrigued Tim Grimm. He knew the author, Scott Russell Sanders, who is a professor at Indiana University and an award-winning author, but he'd never come across this book, which had been published in 1983 and was long out of print. "As a songwriter, I've always been drawn to telling a story," Grimm said. The chapters in the book he was holding, which are titled Wilderness Plots, are each just a page or two long. "I read one or two and thought immediately, 'these are folk tales, and they are about the real people who inhabited this part of the country. They could easily be folk songs.' "
Grimm decided to bring the book and the idea of turning the stories into songs to the group of songwriters with whom he regularly met. "I came into a session, and at the end of it I pulled out the book and said, 'Have any of you seen this?' Everybody knew Scott to varying degrees, but nobody had seen this book. I described my idea of taking these short stories and crafting songs out of them," Grimm said. "I read one of those short stories and people began to nod their head and say, 'Yeah, that could be interesting.' "
Tom Roznowski, Michael White, Carrie Newcomer, and Krista Detor were the other members of the group. "We give each other challenges," Newcomer explained. "Sometimes it might be about form: 'Come back next month and bring a song that has no chorus and make it work,' for example. Sometimes it's about ideas: 'Come back next month with a song from the stories in this little book.' That pushes you to use all the crayons in your box of crayons," she continued. "You have all these tools as songwriters, and when you step outside what you normally do, you have to think about it a little differently; you can't rely on the stuff you've been doing."
As to who would do what story, “That was pretty much thrown open to the group, from the get-go, and there wasn’t so much overlap,” Grimm said. “We all came back with a song.” Newcomer said, “and for that first one it seemed like we all stuck to the text and pretty true to the particular story. We came back with some great songs, and we all had so much fun with it, we though well, let’s just do another. It was just project that caught all of our imaginations.”
The songs are about the people, ideas, and communities of the Ohio Valley at the time when the area of southern Ohio and Indian was frontier country. In the 19 songs on the album, one meets a couple testing their spirit and their marriage as they seek the settlement of Aurora, and a man who looks at trees and sees cities, another who is both a cobbler and a preacher by trade and has an experience that changes his view of both callings, a sell of dubious medicines who also ends up] doing some soul searching, a women who is coming to terms with death and grief and another is inspired to bop and many others. Each of the musicians ended up with two or three songs drawn from the stories some directly and some in an indirect way and they enjoyed both the process and the result.
They are all recording musician, so they decided to make an album. “It wasn’t something we set out to do. It came about very organically,” Newcomer said. After sorting out the legal a logistical problems, they started to record. “We are five truly different voices. Not only the singers’ voices, but also the songwriters’ voices are so rich and unique, and the songs are all tied thematically and, in a sense, historically. To me, that helps pull it right out of the ranks that you get with a lot of CDs,” Grimm said.
Grimm had in the meantime told Sanders about what the writers were doing, and he had another idea brewing as well—to make a concert of some sort out of the project. “Time’s theater guy so it was a very natural jump fir him. And all of us perform, so then the question was how do we create something that’s a creative, interwoven production of song and Scott’s spoken word and the bits of the character that go along? We didn’t want to write a musical.” Newcomer said.
Guided by Grimm’s stage sense and their own performing backgrounds, the songwriters came up with a show that mixed all these elements. A producer from WTIU the Indiana University public television affiliate, came to one of the first shows. “She thought that this would be an interesting visual experience on film.” Grimm said. “I don’t know if she knew right away what she wanted to do with it, but she came up with kind of a unique approach. She chose not to just record a concert. It’s more of a documentary about this folk process it’s got all of us talking about making the songs, and then it’s got the beautiful locales in the southern Indiana near us, which capture in some ways the locales of the stories. “ The centerpiece of the program has the five musicians sitting in a circle sharing the songs “in this old 1902 opera house in this small town south of here.” Grimm said. The program has been aired in Indian, and a national airing through PBS a well as a commercial release for the DVE are in the works. More live concerts are planned as well.
The songwriter group continues, Grimm, Door, and Newcomer have each put versions of the songs inspired by Wilderness Plots on recent releases, and all the writers carry forward what they’ve learned and shared through the process. “ Feel a great honor that these songs have carried these stories out into the world, and the book is now backing in print.” Grimm said.
“These songs were written about people who were willing to take a risk. They left everything they knew for the hope of something better for themselves and their children. Newcomer said.” I may not get into a wagon and move west but aren’t’ we all asked at times to be brave, to step out and be courageous, to follow our hears when everything logical says not to” This music is about history and it’s about right now.”