Music in Prose

By Johnny D. Boggs

Micki Fuhrman called me the other day to pass on good news:

The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City had called to let her know that her album Westbound (do we still call them albums?) was winning this year’s Western Heritage Wrangler Award for Outstanding Traditional Western Album.

Which answers that album question.

“So,” Micki  says, “you have a song on a Wrangler-winning album.”

That’s not why Micki’s getting a Wrangler next month.

But it’s cool. Hey, I can’t carry a tune – I don’t even hum well – or pick a chord. A note is something I pay off. A meter is what I feed quarters into to keep from getting a ticket. Scales are what I scrape off fish. Rhythm is something I ain’t got.

But sometimes I string a few words together that aren’t half bad.

The song Micki recorded as a duet with Jon Chandler is “Loving County.” It’s inspired by Elmer Kelton’s great novel The Time It Never Rained, about a ranching couple’s struggles during the 1950s drought. And a comment I overheard from an old cowboy/rancher in a West Texas café:

“A cloud ain’t nothin’ but a high school tease.”

But for a guy with no musical ability, I often think musically when I’m writing prose. I try to follow Johnny Cash’s instructions: Tell the story and get out of the song. Don’t waste words.

Is the rhythm right for this scene, this paragraph? Is this the right word? Do I need something else? It’s the right word, but what if I place it here instead of there? Hmmm … I’m stumbling over this phrase, which means the reader will, too. What if I repeat this word for effect? How does this sound when I read it aloud?

Since we’re talking music, we might as well get to songwriters. My favorites, other than the aforementioned Man in Black? The usual names: Guy Clark, John Prine, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Bruce Springsteen, Townes Van Zandt, Mickey Newbury, Bob Dylan, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Tom T. Hall, Merle Haggard, Bobbie Gentry, Bonnie Raitt, John Fogerty  …

And many prose writers I admire – Wallace Stegner, James Agee, Dorothy M. Johnson, Loren D. Estleman, John Steinbeck, Harper Lee, Raymond Chandler – have a lyrical style. 

Rarely do I listen to music when I’m writing. Not because it’s distracting. I worked for newspapers, so I’ve had to write fast with people screaming two desks down from me, or dictate a story from a phone booth with sirens blasting and someone asking me if I could loan him a buck for cigarettes. 

All I want to hear when I’m writing is the keyboard clicking.

Anyway, I’m not moving to Nashville or Austin. And when I play Westbound, I usually listen to “What a Moon” or “Runaway Heart,” both of which Micki wrote.

She’s got that songwriting thing down. I’ll stick to prose. But sometimes when I’m driving at night, a song idea will percolate, and I’ll start noodling for words. Maybe I’ll jot down some lyrics later.

Just don’t ask me to sing anything.

 Remembering Peter Cooper

By Johnny D. Boggs

“Somehow, Johnny Cash is dead.”

We’re taught in Journalism 101 to tell readers what they need to know in that first paragraph. Make every word count. And force those readers to keep reading.

Peter Cooper nailed it on September 13, 2003, when his obituary of The Man in Black appeared in The Tennessean, Nashville’s daily newspaper.

For 19 years, I’ve been saying that’s the best lede to any newspaper story I’ve ever read.

Peter, newspaper journalist turned musician, songwriter, historian, music producer, author of liner notes and senior director, producer and writer at the Country Music Hall of Fame, died Dec. 6. He had sustained a head injury after a fall the previous week.

He was only 52 years old.

We both hailed from South Carolina. Peter was born in Spartanburg – he wrote Hub City Music Makers: One Southern Town’s Popular Musical Legacy about his hometown’s music scene (the Marshall Tucker Band, Walter Hyatt …) – and taught school in Rock Hill (“I used to live in Rock Hill/South Carolina, South Carolina/I’m glad I’m not living there still/I feel much better now” he sings in one of his songs).

I grew up farther south in the Pee Dee country. Living in New Mexico, I feel much better now, too.

Peter Cooper. Photo by Deone Jahnke

Courtesy PeterCooperMusic.com

After Peter’s death, I started rereading his Johnny’s Cash & Charley’s Pride: Lasting Legends and Untold Adventures in Country Music. If you want to know about Nashville, songwriters and country-music stars, that’s the book to read. And Tom T. Hall’s The Storyteller’s Nashville: A Gritty & Glorious Life in Country Music (Peter wrote the preface).

How do writers improve their writing? They read great writers.

I read Peter Cooper. And learned a lot.

Peter wrote:

“[O]bjectivity is the mortal enemy. …

"But objectivity is dispassionate.

"And we’re in the passion business.

"We’re trying to make people feel something different than what they felt before they read our words.”

That’s a concept White House beat reporters or those covering cops in Dallas might have trouble wrapping their heads around, but for entertainment writers or fiction writers, it’s a subject worthy of discussion in the bar after deadline.

Recalling an interview during which Johnny Cash told Peter, “I read everything you write,” Peter wrote:

“Immediately, I was ten feet tall.

“Johnny Cash reads all my stuff.

“Then I shrunk eight feet down from ten.

“Johnny Cash reads all my stuff.

“All my stuff.

“Stuff I write on deadline … stuff I just can’t nail … stuff where I am writing over my head … stuff where I am unduly judgmental … stuff where I am overly kind.

“All my stuff.

“Johnny Cash.

“Writer’s block ensued.”

Peter was a writer I wanted to sit down with at Nashville’s Loveless Café and talk craft. Now, all I can do is listen to his music and reread his prose.

Because I’m still waiting for my brain to accept this fact:

Somehow, Peter Cooper is dead.

Writing That Sings

Writing That Sings

 By Johnny D. Boggs

This week finds me in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for the annual International Western Music Association convention. What makes a writer of prose want to hang out with songwriters, poets and performers?

After all, my key is “out of;” a meter is something I feed to keep from getting a parking ticket; and notes are what I owe the bank or my scribbling that I can’t read three hours later.

But when I was sloppily writing short stories as a kid, sometimes I would decide: This needs a theme song. I’d pen dreadful lyrics, which I would imagine Frankie Laine singing.

That said, my friend Micki Fuhrman and I co-wrote a song that placed second – out of 116 entries – in the IWMA’s songwriting competition this year. Micki, who also writes fiction, won a Spur Award and finalist honors this year for Western Writers of America’s Best Western Song and is nominated for four IWMA awards this year, including Songwriter of the Year.

Jim Jones, a multiwinner of IWMA awards, also writes Western novels, so I asked him how writing songs helps him with his fiction, and vice versa.

“For me, a song is in some ways a synopsis for a novel,” he said. “If you write a song, you have a synopsis. And if you have a storyline, it gives you tons of songs to write.”

Jones mentioned Mike Blakely, a Spur Award winner for Western novels and Western songs. “Mike has transformed many characters from his novels into songs.”

The song Micki and I cowrote came about when we were talking about the placement of words. I said something like, “Take signing a letter ‘Yours Truly.’ What if you flipped the words to ‘Truly Yours?’” Next thing I know, we have a song titled “Yours Truly, Truly Yours.”

Micki’s album Westbound, nominated for IWMA’s Traditional Western Album of the Year, includes a song I wrote – “Loving County,” inspired from Elmer Kelton’s classic Texana novel of the 1950s drought, The Time It Never Rained.

Studying great songwriting helps when I’m writing prose. There are beats to dialogue, action scenes, descriptions. Sentences need a rhythm.

“I came into fiction writing as a professional songwriter,” Micki told me, “and I believe the skills I learned composing songs shaped the way I write stories.

“With a song, I have about three minutes to set up a scenario with a beginning, middle and end. Every word has to work hard, and the more ‘picture words,’ the better, since I see the lines of a song as movie frames.

“Now, as I write a short story or a novel, I subconsciously follow the tenets of songwriting: rhythm, pacing, fluidity of words, alliteration, color and emotion.”

Thank goodness, I don’t try to sing while writing pros. But when I’m looking over a draft, I will often think back to lyrical styles of songwriters I’ve long admired – John Prine, Guy Clark, Johnny Cash, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Pete Seger, Jimmy Webb, Carole King, Count Basie, Townes Van Zandt, Loretta Lynn, Bob Dylan, Sam Cooke, Jon Chandler, Rosanne Cash, Woody Guthrie, Bob McDill, Johnny Mercer, Joni Mitchell, Tom T. Hall, Bob Seger, Mickey Newberry, Bruce Springsteen and, yes, Blakely, Jones and Fuhrman – and incorporate some of that into my prose.

It might not always sing, but every now and then I’ll hit the right note.