So it shouldn't surprise anybody that poets write songs too. Of course, songwriters can write poems as well. And sometimes, when the two talents or gifts or impulses are closely aligned in an artist, you might get pretty good stuff in both categories: poems that swing and songs that have some depth.
My first poem, written at around 10 years old, was a song, a cowboy song, probably because I watched 'The Lone Ranger' and 'Rawhide' and 'Gunsmoke' and 'The Rifleman' every week as a kid. Like everybody else did.
I mean, I really dug it when some old cowhand or drifter pulled out a guitar or a harmonica or a squeezebox around a campfire and sang a song -- sad, silly, serene. Forget the guns and the fist fights. I listened to the song.
So now let me introduce you to 50 Sent Songs, a project I worked on throughout 2022/23: fifty songs posted to Bandcamp every week for 50 weeks (at 50¢ apiece, or more if you've a mind to pay more -- that's how Bandcamp works). And yes, they're all still out there on my Bandcamp page and still just 50¢ apiece.
Go there & you'll find poems by Shakespeare and Thomas Gray, Emily Dickinson and Leigh Hunt, Richard Lovelace and Caedmon, and of course Yours Truly set to music, and plenty of songs where, if I must say so myself, the lyric is as much the thing as the melody. Each for a mere 50¢!
So again, head to YTLB (me) at Bandcamp and check it out. Please. Check it out.
Hi-ho Silver, away!
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