A Few Words About American Storyteller Songs, Part I

A few words about American Storyteller Songs, Part I…

This record is a collection of songs I have written inspired by the musical styles I grew up listening to with my parents, grandparents, great grandparents, as well as the music I first experienced being performed in living rooms, cookouts, get togethers, bluegrass festivals, vacation bible school, Sunday school…

Music was such a big part of our life growing up in rural Southeast Alabama. My family, like all families from that area, bonded over three things: church, hard work, and (cooking/eating/growing) food. No matter which circumstance was happening there was music being played. Played on the radio, played on the piano, played on the church organ, played on a guitar, hummed or sang aloud by a parent or grandparent or an aunt, uncle, cousins, friends, neighbors. All participated in song and all shared a love of stories.

Music breaks, whether from instruments being tuned, or radio stations tuned in to new stations, record players awaiting the LP to be flipped, or even the not so occasional power outages, turned very quickly into story time. While not everyone was gifted with a singing voice everyone was gifted with the ability to share a story. And my how we loved to listen and share stories.

There were tall tales, there were fishing tales, there were memories of love ones past, and there were true tales that you wished were made up. There were stories of hard times and stories of good times and most of the time they were one and the same. Us little ones, little back then, would love listening to scary stories told by the older kids and wait with great anticipation for the scare from a well-hidden cousin ready to spring from the shadows to scare the bejesus out of us all.

Storytelling is how we bonded as a familial community. It was our internet, our Social Media. That era’s “clickbait” was a “did you hear about the ol’ boy in Chunchula? Well, he…”

Many of those stories and many of those experiences stay with me daily. I still laugh today at little inside jokes and funny circumstances that happened in those moments and acted as punchlines to those tales. I still cry at the sadness that I have come to know from the stories fading into the wind as each storyteller found the end of their story here on earth. Too many to name here and, to be honest, it hurts to name them all. I prefer to hear them in my memories and sing them into a song instead of remembering that they are gone.

All of this to say, I love story songs. After all, I love stories and I have always loved music. I started writing songs just because it felt natural. I like writing poems, stories, and essays. I like writing melodies and chord progressions. Add them up and you get a songwriter, right? Well, not always.

Songwriting is a unique craft. Words that sound good on paper don't always sound good while being sung. Images painted with words set to the wrong melody make a sad song feel angry, or an angry song feel happy, or a happy song feel isolated and alone. And those juxtapositions can be beautiful when intended but horrid when not. Unintended and you get just the chorus of You Are My Sunshine, happy and loving but in contradiction to the verses. Intended you get the verses, the suicidal, manic depressive verses, that together with the chorus give you a beautifully tragic story of a one-sided love that is not going to resolve itself.

For this reason, storyteller songs might be the hardest of all, in my opinion, because you have to have a complete story that the listener can follow, a melody that makes them want to listen and sing, and create a musical atmosphere that brings the characters to life and makes them feel real. And, if you are good enough, a tale that means something a little different every time you revisit the story.

That Americana style of story telling is what I grew up hearing and loving. The songs were deep but easy to understand. Harsh in their honesty but soft in the delivery. Case and point: To this day I can not get through Dolly Parton’s Me And Little Andy without tearing up. (And you are a soulless so-and-so if you can!) I revisited that song a few months ago and my years of being an adult made me hear details in the storytelling that I didn’t quite get in years previous. What a damn song, what an amazing songwriter.

Over the years I have taken numerous stabs at this writing style. This album is a collection of a handful of those attempts. I hope you will listen to them and I hope you will get some satisfaction from them. I also hope you will get to know my loved ones’ stories, their timing, the subtlety of their voices that have all found their way into my songwriting, my singing, my playing, and in my stories. Alas, I hope you can hear your family and friends in there too.

Thanks,

Dale Drinkard, Jr.