One never knows where a trail untaken would end. Over the past fifteen years I have found myself on trails that I never envisioned when younger. Yes, when I was fourteen I wanted to be a horse trainer. It did not seem practical so I set the thought aside. I always wanted wild horses, but I never thought it would be possible to own one. I always was drawn to music, but I have also always known the difference between being able to figure out how to make a tolerable sound come from an instrument and being truly talented. I have never been under the illusion that I had any significant musical talent.
I have never cared for innovation of any sort. I have always been drawn to rediscovering which has been lost and preserving that which is nearly gone.
Now I sit at a point in my life that I never imagined. I have a herd of formerly wild horses and I teach children how to tame and gently train them. My hearing is fading significantly but, ironically enough, I am a much better musician than I have ever been. I have always been able to make words do the heavy lifting for me. When I was still a teenager I was an experienced political speech writer. Before Lido died there was no trial lawyer around here that could give a jury as powerful a closing argument as I could. That door in my life closed years ago, but I can still call out the English language to perform tricks for me as the situation demands.
I began actually putting pen to paper on song lyrics forty years ago. The shelf life for these lyrics was quite brief. Few lasted more than seconds after completion. I promptly destroyed written lyrics after reading them and not being satisfied with the amount of emotional punch they delivered.
About three years ago I started putting lyrics on the computer instead of on yellow paper. After yellow paper gets torn up and thrown away it is gone forever. But with a computer I can throw away a set of lyrics and keep them saved all at the same time--out of sight, out of mind but within the reach of a key stroke.
I have a group of riders that I am teaching to play ancient instruments and ancient songs. They got excited about one or two of the songs that I wrote--I had only performed two songs that I have written for anyone else up to that time. I started playing some of the more recent songs that I have put together and did not tell people where the songs came from. To my genuine shock many of these songs were very well received.
The biggest criticism, especially from happy young women, is that the topics are too dark and depressing. I do not find them to be so. I merely find them to be descriptive. Some are of actual events like Nat Turner's Slave Insurrection or the near lynching of Shirley Winnegan. Other topics include the effects of the Vietnam War on a small fictional Pentecostal church in Tennessee, alcoholism, a family of German pacifists whose father is forced to fight in the Civil War, a young couple who drown as they are trying to elope while being hotly pursued by the bride to be's father, the unusual cemetery kept by a rural killer and the funeral of an old man who taught kids to play music and ride horses.
While I expected these songs to mean nothing to anyone but me, to my shock, it seems that they strike a chord with some people.
Which brings us to the picture above. One of my most unprofessional (and uncontrollable) quirks on stage is that I constantly find myself slightly changing the words (and even sometimes the tunes) to songs with no warning. I consider this to be spontaneous creativity. Others view it as the musical equivalent of Tourette's Syndrome.
Over the years I have had many people on stage with me. No one of them has ever had the ability to adapt to my mistakes and flow with them the way Ashley does. Now the girl has a great voice, but there are a lot of people out there with great voices. What is so wonderful about here voice is that it not only sounds wonderful, but it is flexible.
All this leads up to our announcement that I will be recording a cd of original songs with Ashley singing on many of them and my brother Joseph, who is one of the best fiddle players that I have ever seen, playing on nearly all of them.
I hope to have the project completed by the end of spring. All the proceeds will go to our efforts to preserve the Corollas and continue our natural horsemanship program. I am sure that Ashley won't mind and when I get around to telling Joseph about it I am sure that he will sign on.
As we complete conversion to being a nonprofit we will be selling many more things on our web site. There will be books and I suspect more videos.
This cd will likely be one of those things.
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