“And the evening sings in a voice of amber, the dawn is surely coming,
The morning road leads to Stalingrad, and the sky is softly humming.”
Al Stewart - Roads to Moscow
It’s a chicken-and-the-egg question: Which came first, the music or the lyrics? I guess you’d have to get a good definition of what each word means. If music means a cave man imitating animals or pounding on a long and lyrics means grunting to some thought then we are at a stalemate.
But then came folk songs and opera and all the other forms where lyrics tell a story. I don’t mean the fanciful serenades of wooing or of nationalistic bravado but sagas put to music. These are songs that make you listen closer and want to hear the song again and again to make sure you got he meaning.
What comes to mind are cowyboy songs, the forerunners of country and popular music. The cowboy lived in an amazing time and his music reflected this life. And if we went back further we would find Irish, English and Scottish folk tunes influenced the cowboys who learned them from their immigrant parents. Bluegrass can trace its roots to the British isles and Ireland.
Harry Chapin and Gordon Lightfoot lead the list of modern storytellers. The Taxi and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, tell two completely different stories but more people know the story of these two songs than almost any other song written. It’s not because the stories were sad but that adds to the poignancy. Bob Dylan wasn’t a storyteller but their were snippets of stories in his work. Except for songs like George Jackson and The Hurricane, which were stories, his work was philosophy and getting people to listen. Lightfoot and Chapin wrote songs as if they were telling us, “Gather ’round the fire and I’ll tell you a story.
Al Stewart wrote very long stories like Roads to Moscow and Nostrodamus. These were historical tales which emerged before Chris DeBurgh although the latter’s Spanish Train is one of the greatest “Devil vs. God” ever written.
The songs in Marty Robbin’s album Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs are the quintessential storytelling songs. El Paso ranks as one of the most popular country and western songs ever recorded. And Alan Toussant’s Pancho and Lefty, a huge hit for Willie Nelson, carried on this tradition.
With today’s beat and riff-driven dance songs, fluffy, airy panderings of love-sickness and betrayal and the bawlings of the disaffected-white-guy-band the story is lost because there is no story. They are themes that have been beaten to death.