by Eric Foxman
I grew up in the folk song milieu of the 1960s and early on learned many traditional songs and ballads. With that background, I am embarrassed to admit that it wasn’t until I had been telling stories for more than a dozen years that I suddenly had the revelation: ballads are stories set to music.
Since then, I have sometimes listened to songs with a different ear; I listen and ask what can I learn as a storyteller from what the songwriter has crafted? I have taken lessons from olde tyme ballads, modern country music, show tunes and Tin Pan Alley. And I am so often blown away by how much “story” can be told in a 3 to 4 verse song that lasts only about as many minutes.
Just a little of what I have come to realize: Of course, I have to put aside the musical melody as that doesn’t transfer to storytelling except in the most unusual circumstances. And two other aspects of lyrics, rhyme and meter, also play minor roles in most storytelling.
Two things strike me about successful lyrics. One is how a song often focuses on just one or two details so the listener takes ownership of their own experience of that detail, while the lyrics paint a somewhat nebulous image of the overall picture: there is much we don’t know from the lyrics and we become active in filling in the missing information. Then, there is repetition, whether of a refrain or a particular lyrical motif, so the listener becomes more and more familiar with those images and begins to feel comfortable.
Woody Guthrie’s song Roll On, Columbia is an example of both of these points: he sketches scant details about the Columbia River project, leaving us to fill in the details, yet the repeated refrain becomes so familiar that I’d bet most everyone would easily start humming or singing if they heard it sung somewhere.
In my story about Woody Guthrie, I have tried to incorporate those lessons. There are a few images I come back to more than once to provide that repetition and familiarity for the audience. And knowing that I can’t do justice to a person’s whole life in just a few minutes, I have chosen to focus on just 3-4 details to enrich your understanding of what this man went through. Come to the Portland Storytellers’ Guild opening performance on September 1 and see whether I learned those lessons and was able to successfully incorporate them into my story.
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