I have been trying to construct songs since I first strung rubber bands over a cigar box, and later with the old Silvertone you could have driven nails with, and later with the little classical that I did finally make real chords on. I think it was Pat and Victoria Garvey that showed me how powerful a well-written song can be. I didn't have to backtrack very far before I discovered Fred Neil, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Malvina Reynolds and Tom Paxton. Utah Phillips came and stayed at my house once and showed us that a song could be both poetically beautiful and socially meaningful.
In my forties, I finally started coming up with songs that I felt were worth saving, thanks in large part to encouragement from and partnership with a consummate songwriter, Kim Dumford. We performed a few times as The Delberts. There were no recordings but we did self-publish a songbook of our collaborations titled "Ignorance is Bliss".
Still, I had to find my own voice. About six years ago, I started attending the Wichita Songwriters Circle and found great companionship and camaraderie, and also began to craft songs that at least approached a level of poetry and melody that seemed to be what I was looking for. Time passed and my life took some unexpected turns, and I struggled to hold on to some things that turned out not to have handles. Music in general, and my own songs in particular, were instrumental in preserving my sanity, and giving me some hope for a future that I hadn't thought about in a long time. Still, they were mostly songs just for me, introspective and self-indulgent, because that's what I needed at the time. No regrets, of course, but no reason to share them with the world, really.
However, I feel differently about the songs I began writing as 2007 came to a close. Somehow, these are songs that I want to bring into the open, their birth as fundamental to me as the births of my son and daughter. Are they great songs? It no longer matters, all that matters is that they are the songs I have been searching for for over forty years. They come out of the air around me, from the voices I hear on the street and in the cafes, from the crashing of the surf in Oaxaca to the winter silence in a cabin above Fairplay, Colorado. Three of my favorites came directly from stories told to me by dear friends. Boston, New York, Detroit, Oklahoma, Kansas, they're all in there somewhere. Every book I've read, every song I've heard or sung, every poem shouted to the rafters or whispered to a lover late at night has become the body of these songs. Every story given or taken is a story of the human race, and I've tried to remember every one. And failed miserably, of course. But I do have these nuggets sifted out of the mountainside, and am driven, with merit or no, to release them like worried pigeons, to see if they'll come home.
T.J. Just a note to say I enjoyed your MUSE. Give my CD-"Years With No Tears" a listen and give me some thoughts on the tunes. This one is "CoCo Shuffle" Coco Shuffle
Thanks and see you at Winfield-I'm in the fingerstyle contest this year Vince
