How did songwriting begin?

Most likely, although no one knows for sure, it was a form of storytelling.  People remembering and recounting events to the beat of a drum.  The drum was the first instrument.  It is still most often MY first instrument when I write because I generally, not always, write based around a Beat.

I posted the beginning of Fever Tree, which was only bass and drums, on a New Music Friday.  I knew what it was going to sound like when finished although no one else had any idea it was a Miles Davis type of piece.  It was a form of storytelling which used interludes with African male singers to link modern music back to Africa.  You don’t need lyrics to tell a story.

Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony, The Eroica, means The Heroic.  It was the story of the French Revolution told in the different movements, I learned this is in college Music History.  Different parts symbolize different events.  In the first movement you can hear the frivolity of the court and the growing discontent.  In the second the Reign of Terror and Napoleon putting down the crowds.  He was an artillery Corporal who blew them apart with cannon.  The third movement is his rise in government ending with his coronation as Emperor.

Carlos Santana did the same thing in Soul Sacrifice.  It is an Aztec human sacrifice.   It goes through the gathering and excitement of the crowd, the sacrifice walking up the stairs of the temple, then climaxes with the organ blasts being the knife, followed by the celebration.

The academic community has largely changed its view and now believes oral history is quite accurate.  This is because when ideas are placed in an easily remembered pattern and repeated people do indeed remember them almost exactly for generations.  This means much of history was conveyed by songs and still is.

Most ballads tell a story whether the story is true or not.  The Battle of New Orleans is a humorous retelling of an actual battle.  There are many songs about Moses which are dead serious retellings of a fairy tale.

It does not have to be an epic story.  There are songs about heartbreak, joy, bitterness, love, and compassion which are brief but still stories.  There is a good chance that great epics were songs.  The Iliad and The Odyssey were epic poems passed down for hundreds of years before being written down.  There is a good possibility they may once have been sung.

I seldom write lyrics for popular music but I do have a side project writing a musical comedy, Cornpone Oz, based upon the starstruck yokels who come to Nashville believing they will become famous.  This only makes sense as one of my BFA programs was Playwriting and I have a completed, but unsold, screenplay comedy Cat and Mice.

These lyrics tell a story in the first person about those people, although I was an onlooker not that person.  If you would like to read them, the lyrics to the title song are posted here at