Wrote My First Song Forty-Five Years Ago....

[TaoMannaDon]

... and, boy, was it bad.

Hello everyone. I'm an off-and-on amateur songwriter. Seems like I'm happiest when I'm writing but sometimes I lose interest in writing for a while. I just wrote an awful novelty song inspired by your "The Elephant in the Room" contest and I could feel my mood improving with every line. Even writing bad songs feels good.

I prefer classic rock styles from the sixties with a little country flavoring. Neil Diamond was my favorite singer-songwriter back then. The Beatles (Paul and John) were a close second. I tend to use traditional techniques with my lyric writing. I don't really want to read critiques of my work (too thin-skinned) and I would never post a song anywhere that I didn't think was finished. So I won't be posting much of my own work here. I will read the lyrics others post and I might comment occasionally but always from a "traditional techniques" point of view.

I've been lurking for a while. There are lots of talented writers here. It's fun to see your work.

I'm glad I found this place.

Don

Edited February 22, 2010 by TaoMannaDon

[musicthom]

Your more than welcome and i guess i was thin skinned when i came here but the guys here are only giving what they think is a good level of advice and i have learned loads on here welcome to the forum TaoMannaDon

[Nightwolf]

Hi Don, Welcome

[neoism]

welcome to the SS

[TaoMannaDon]

Thank you musicthom, Nightwolf, and neoism for welcoming me to the forum.

I think I'll just use this thread to tell my story bit by bit as time permits and respond to any replies.

I was born in 1948. My father, a WWII veteran, was a sharecropper; that just means we rented a farm from a landlord who took half the proceeds as rent. It was a small farm and we were quite poor, as you might imagine. We had electricity, but no running water and no indoor plumbing. Water came from a well or a spring. Down near the barn was our outhouse (toilet). I bathed in a big tin tub. Mama cooked our meals on a wood stove. Air conditioning was open windows and screen doors; heat came from a big fireplace in the living room. We lived on the farm until I was seven years old. Dad eventually gave up farming and took a factory job.

My first memory of an interest in music was singing to a bunch of relatives from the front porch of our little white house surrounded by cotton fields. I was four or five at the time. My father was a guitar player. He bought me a little plastic guitar and tuned the strings to an open G (or something like that -- he called it Hawaiian style) He gave me an empty bottle of wintergreen ointment and showed me where to press it against the strings to make chords that went together. After we moved off the farm (and he was actually making money) he bought me a real guitar and tuned it "Hawaiian" style also. He taught me to play "Steel Guitar Rag" on that guitar. Once my fingers were big enough to reach across the fretboard, he tuned my guitar to standard tuning and began teaching me three-fingered chords.

.........................................

I'll be back; stay tuned ...

[john]

Hi Don

Welcome to Songstuff!

A lurker eh? yay a convert! Mwuahahahahaha

Cheers

John

[neoism]

.............tuned..

[TaoMannaDon]

I'm back with my next installment of the TaoManna Don story:

We only lived at our second home a few years. It was bigger but cold and drafty. The house set on the edge of a fairly steep decline that led off down into the woods. The front of the house touched the dirt in the all-dirt front yard. The back of the house stood on four-by-four posts that were eight to ten feet high. There was no underpinning to keep cold air from under the house. In the winter it was freezing cold everywhere except right in front of the big coal burning stove in the living room.

Looking back, I don't know how this is possible, but when I was either eight or nine years old my father taught me how to sing harmony with him. He called that harmony "whiskey tenor" and often joked that the more you drank the better it sounded. I didn't get the joke back then; but I also didn't know my father had a drinking problem. World War II had been pretty tough on him.

He taught me lots of songs that had "tenor" parts. On some songs we switched who would sing the tenor part in different sections of the song. Sometimes at night we would go out on the front porch and play our guitars and sing. My mother would often join us and sing old gospel songs while daddy played. Little sister would sit and listen. I remember neighbors sitting on their front porches; daddy said we were playing for them. I felt like we were performing for the whole world.

Stay tuned ...

[McnaughtonPark]

Don, come back, I want to hear more of this story.

[Lazz]

Don, come back, I want to hear more of this story.

Yeah - me too

[TaoMannaDon]

This part of the TaoManna Don story was a buried memory for many years but began to haunt me after my father died. I eventually wrote a song inspired by the "war story" (detailed below) that my father told me when I was seven years old.

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We didn't have a television until I was a teenager; but as a child I knew about war and I knew my daddy had gone to war. I don't remember where I learned so much about it. We may have gone to a war movie or I might have heard a radio show about war. We listened to the radio a lot back then.

As a child, I actually thought we were still fighting the Germans. I would look at the sky over the cotton fields around our sharecropper farm and wonder why I never saw bombers flying over and dropping bombs on the enemy. I was always expecting to see soldiers coming down the dirt road to our house.

For years I pestered my father to tell me a war story. He wouldn't do it. I imagined the many battles he fought and won. I wanted to hear about them. Shortly after we moved off the farm I heard the first and only war story my father would ever tell me. That story eventually helped me to understand the significance of the little storage room under the back of our new house, a little room to which my father made many mysterious trips.

The front porch on our "new" house was made, at least in part, of loose and rotting boards. The grey peeling paint of the porch complimented the white peeling paint of the rest of the house. My mother and father often sat on the porch in rocking chairs in the evening after supper. Many days as the sun settled over the distant trees we would get out our guitars and play and sing as a family.

One evening as the sun was going down, and after we had played just about everything we knew, I once again asked my father to tell me a war story. His face became somber. He thought about it a few moments, put down his guitar and quietly said, "OK."

He got out of his old wooden rocking chair and sat down beside me on the porch step. Mother got up and took little sister back inside the house.

I was so excited; but as his story unfolded I became very disappointed. I expected a glorious adventure about cannons and planes and killing the enemy. The story he told had no glory. He started by telling about driving his ambulance through a town in France right after a big battle. Until that moment I didn’t even know he had been an ambulance driver.

I learned that his ambulance was filled with wounded GI's. He remembered how they moaned and cried and called out for their mothers as he loaded them. There were many more wounded than he could carry. He needed to get back to the rear and unload so he could return to the front for more wounded. It was a long muddy drive. He was pretty sure one soldier had already died in the back of the ambulance and others might die back there too if he didn't hurry.

At the edge of town an old woman put up her hands and stepped in front of his ambulance to get him to stop. Her house had been hit by a bomb or artillery shell.

"Please Doctor! My husband is trapped inside the house. He is hurt. Please help us."

"I'm not a doctor. I'm just an ambulance driver." My father said to her. "I can't stop. I don't have any room in back. I have to get these wounded soldiers to the hospital."

He turned the steering wheel of his ambulance sharply and pulled around her. As he sped off, he looked into his rear view mirror and saw her fall to her knees in the muddy road behind him.

By this time in the story my father had turned away from me but he kept on talking. His callused hand brushed the side of his face. He cleared his throat and slowly faced me as he stumbled through the rest of the story, "She stood there in front of her bombed-out home, her old fingers clasped in front of her. She was begging me to help her; to save her husband's life. Her old eyes were crying right at me."

My father abruptly stopped talking and stood up.

He jumped from the porch step and disappeared into the darkness at the back of the house. Soon I could hear him fumbling with the lock on the storage room under the back of the house. That was where he hid his liquor.

Edited May 6, 2009 by TaoMannaDon

[Lazz]

Thanks, Don.

Worth the wait.

[neoism]

great !

[TaoMannaDon]

When I was nine we moved again. This time we moved out of the country and into a small community. This was the first time I could see lots of homes from my front porch. The house was nicer than our other homes but it was far from been something to brag about. It was a wood house built in mill-hill style. Part of the roof had a deep dip in it, right over my bedroom. I had many nightmares about the roof caving in on me.

The house once was home to two families. A long hallway down the middle of the interior split it into two sections. One of the kitchens had been converted into a bathroom. Yeah! Indoor plumbing. There was an outhouse still out back that hadn’t been used in years. The outhouse had been shared by several nearby homes. Just beyond the outhouse was an old barn still full of extra wood boards used in constructing the houses.

On our side of the road was a line of shabby old wood structures. On the other side of the road were nice new homes, many made of brick, all with concrete or gravel driveways. Our houses all had dirt drives. My house had an overgrown hedge around the front yard and trees that probably looked ok at one time but now were just ugly. My time at that house clarified my understanding of what people thought about poor folks. My mother sometimes cried after talking with her friendly neighbors from “the other side of the road.”

My father and I rarely played our guitars and sang together any more. His drinking problem sucked the urge to make music right out of him. He wasn’t a typical alcoholic though. He would sometimes stop drinking for months at a time; cold turkey, he just stopped. I always knew when he was not going to drink for a while; he started playing his guitar again. And for a very short time I had my father back.

Edited March 4, 2010 by TaoMannaDon