Robert Root

Recently, deep in a crowded box in our garage, on a different shelf from the box with typed copies of all my lyrics, I found three cassettes with recordings of some of my songs. One cassette has seven songs on one side and six of my earliest radio scripts on the other side—I taped them the first year I wrote short essays for my university's "Morning Edition" broadcast. Another cassette has thirteen songs, including some on that other cassette. A third cassette records the audio of an interview on "Northern Michigan Morning," a local television show, where I discussed the Michigan Songwriters Guild and performed "When Does A Man Get Fully Grown?" The tapes all date from 1981.

 

The sound quality on the "Root Songs" tape isn't very good; my guitar sometimes drowns out my voice. I taped those songs at the kitchen table in my apartment. The sound is better on the radio essays tape—I understand almost every word I sing. Since I've found no other tapes with songs, I can't confirm melodies for other lyrics I collected in that binder, five written fifty years ago, the other thirty-five composed around forty years ago. I haven't written any newer lyrics since then.

 

Listening to lyrics performed by a self-accompanied singer creates a different sense of the song than reading those lyrics in silence does. If I read them aloud, I'd likely dramatize them, as if they were monologues designed for oral interpretation. (My undergraduate Advanced Oral Interpretation course served me well when I recorded those radio scripts decades later.) The dramatic reading attends to pace and tone and emphasis guided by punctuation and internal rhythms of the words; performance of the lyrics requires obeying the melody, conforming to tempo and meter, and being guided in expression by the musical notes. The melody affects the personality of the singer even as he expresses the attitude of the lyrics.

 

To compose songs, I once claimed, I would "sit down with my guitar and let the melodies tell me what's on my mind." I recall a few times when a melody told me I wasn't composing words to match the mood of the music. I'd learned a few different finger-picking strums watching Laura Webber's Folk Guitar show on "educational television" years before and found that shifting the time signature or picking pattern altered my attitude toward my lyrics. It wasn't until I played those tapes that I remembered how much else went into my songs besides the lyrics.

 

Listening to the lyrics, I felt, with relief, that most of the taped songs were pretty good. Perhaps I chose the best ones to record. I haven't played guitar in so long I couldn't guess which chords I was playing or which finger-picking patterns I was using, but, while I listened, at times I felt my right hand try to imitate the strums I was hearing and my fingers moved in some vague approximation of the finger-picking I might have been doing. But I'm unlikely to ever get my playing back up to the level recorded on the tapes.

 

I was curious about what the lyrics would say about the man who composed them. Some are pretty confessional: "When Does a Man Get Fully Grown?" admits to folly, loneliness, doubt, uncertainty, in plaintive images. Other songs reinforce the singer's sense of isolation: "Freedom of the Highway," "The Highway Calling Me," "Roll Like a River," "It Gets a Little Lonely in the Night." Later songs celebrate a more positive direction in the singer's life, songs of love and longing: "Standing at the Door of Love," "This Is My Love," "The Words I Long to Hear," "Spending Time." When I played a recording of one for Sue, we both were on the verge of tears. On the other hand, a few songs convinced me that I shouldn't write on political themes.

 

Songs often run through my mind. I wake up mornings with last night's tv show theme song or something I heard on the car radio playing in my head. (I don't know why I woke to the chorus of "Luckenbach, Texas" the other morning.) A song sometimes haunts me all day. Since I listened to those old cassettes, some of my own songs have popped up when I've entered a silence of some kind. Sometimes I try to sing along or pretend I could. I don't mind listening to them that way but I'm careful about how much attention I give them. Whether the song lamented or celebrated whatever inspired it, I need to choose how much lyrics from the past affect the way I feel about the life I live now, so far in the future.

 

 

According to the list of titles in my "Root Songs" notebook, the first five songs were written in Iowa between 1970 and 1971, while I was in graduate school, and the remaining thirty-five in Michigan between 1979 and 1981, where I'd been teaching and my wife and I had separated and I'd become a single father trying to figure out how to move on with my life. When I read the lyrics, memories sometimes open up, some fond, some troublesome, but just as often they stay closed—What or who was this song about? Why did I write it? Some songs seem political, the ones written during the Nixon years and the Vietnam era, and some are intensely personal, lyrics about loneliness and change and grasping for meaning, lyrics for my children and my future wife and possibly for people whose relationship with me is ambiguous. Most of them are more personal than public-minded.

 

My songwriter friend John was on our faculty only a single year; we met in the 1980 fall semester and with Barb, another singer/songwriter, eventually started what we called the Michigan Songwriters Guild. When we performed at Hobie's Olde World, John and I were interviewed by Barbara Milstein for the Lansing State Journal. "'I sit down with my guitar and let the melodies tell me what's on my mind,' Bob Root said. 'Going from music to words is easiest for me. I always seem to have an idea in my mind. If I don't put it down as soon as possible, I'll forget it at the end of the day. I've probably lost more than I've written.'" The interviewer explained, "Root tends to compose introspective music—exploring the beginnings and endings of relationships. It's 'sort of like a narrator sitting back, thinking about and looking at his own life.'" She thought my song "The Highway Calling Me" "sums up its thought with the line: 'You're never more a prisoner than when you're really free.'"

 

I was influenced by songwriters I tended to listen to, mostly folk-oriented singers. My songs were often about trying to move on and come to terms with my life, and I sometimes introduced "Highway Calling Me" by referring to "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" and claiming mine should be "Bob Root's 13th Road Song." John and Barb sometimes suggested we each write a song in the vein of another singer or from an outlook not typical of us. I wrote some satirical lyrics, like "God Bless America (Bless Her Guns and Tanks)," and the rowdy country-flavored "Free-Rolling Man," with the lyric "The barroom queens in the barroom scenes/check your bankroll while they check your jeans." I worked on one lyric for a long time until I realized I was composing new words to a melody by the Lovin' Spoonful; it made me aware of my limitations as a musician. It also made me aware that I didn't want to write poetry that didn't have a tune underlying it.

 

The lyrics that affect me most are those that grew out of my situation in the years I wrote them. The ones about lovers separated were inspired by Sue's working for two years in Missouri while I still worked in Michigan. I can tell how far along we were in our relationship by some of the lyrics: in "The Words I Long to Hear" the narrator claims, "And now I'm on the Greyhound and I'm staring at the road/Thinking of the time we'll be apart/And thinking where you'll be the time you're not with me" and his need for confirmation and assurance is clear; "Spending Time" is a declaration of commitment and longing, as in the opening verse:

 

I know too much of wasted days

I know how much they cost

But counting all the empty hours
can't measure what I've lost
If time is really money, girl,
I know where you should be,
lying here right by my side
spending time with me

 

I'm pretty pleased that I can revive the melody in these songs and several others by reciting them aloud—something of rhythm and emphasis and pace surfaces as I do—and I'm disappointed that trying the same approach with others brings back no sense of their original tunes. I've found some scribbled sheets with musical notations for some songs in that same box of manuscripts and hope to locate those tape recordings of some of them. I'd like to know just what I was searching for on every level of the songs I used to write.

 

 

Note: The original article, "Songwriters find a cheerful home" by Barbara Milstein, Journal Correspondent, appeared in the Lansing State Journal June 6, 1981.

 

 

Having found that folder of my old lyrics and tried to remember their melodies, I've wondered how they sounded to other listeners than me. I used pop songs when I taught college classes on popular culture and workshops at local high schools. I focused on their rhetoric: the way we respond to the speaker in the song, the situation the song recounts, its effect on individual listeners. Just as we all have our own reactions to what we read or what we watch, we all have our own reactions to what we hear.

 

I played three recordings of the Lennon-McCartney song "Let It Be." Most familiar was the Beatles' original pop rock version; Aretha Franklin's was impassioned soul music; Joan Baez's was gospel-flavored folk music. The lyrics were the same in all three, which suggests that the meaning of the song was the same each time, but the singers' gender and race and the music they performed to varied. In class discussion students' preferences for one version over the others tended to be based on familiarity with the artist or the subgenre of popular music or their sense of the artist's sincerity.

 

This is a game you can play at home, comparing versions of songs in videos on YouTube—I just tracked down "Dream Lover" by Bobby Darin, Mariah Carey, Tanya Tucker and Glen Campbell, and Ricky Nelson, "Hello Young Lovers" by Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder, "House of the Rising Sun" by Leadbelly, the Animals, and Joan Baez, and "Heartbreak Hotel" by Elvis Presley and Willie Nelson. Or consider the music of three performers who just left us: Helen Reddy (she recorded two different versions of "I Am Woman"), Mac Davis (his song "I Believe in Music" was recorded by Davis, Helen Reddy, Perry Como, and many others), or Eddie Van Halen (look for an early song).

 

The other example I offered focused on how certain situations are presented differently in the lyrics and melody of thematically similar songs. Both Rod Stewart's recording of "Tonight's the Night" and Bob Seger's recording of "We've Got Tonight" are songs making a case for two people spending the night together, but the attitudes and the arguments of the male vocalists and their implied relationships with the women being persuaded vary quite a bit. Listeners might react to the vocalists' perspectives based on psychological or social preferences (and also to their possible preference for one singer over another), but if you read the lyrics without the melody, how would you react to either song—that is, to the message of the lyrics? If you heard the melody without the lyrics, in an instrumental version, how would you react to the song's attitude?

 

Only a few people ever heard live performances of my songs, always by me, so reading their lyrics provides little or no sense of their melodies. In poems we glean an understanding of pace and rhythm ("I think that I shall never see/a poem lovely as a tree" by Joyce Kilmer; "Whose woods these are I think I know/His house is in the village though" by Robert Frost). In my lyrics I can sometimes recognize the melody by reading the lines, like these from "Spending Time"

 

I know too much of wasted days

I know how much they cost

But counting all the empty hours
can't measure what I've lost

 

Or this chorus from "It Gets a Little Lonely in the Night"

 

It gets a little lonely in the night
It gets a little lonely in the night
By daylight I'm alright
But it gets a little lonely in the night

 

I recognize the stressed and unstressed syllables, the difference between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter lines from "Spending Time", the variations in feet in the repeated lines in "It Gets a Little Lonely in the Night." Emphasis and lack of emphasis determine the pace if I read them aloud. The texts of my lyrics tend to be metrical, but they aren't all obviously musical, at least to me. If you read both of these verses aloud, you might be aware of the metrical difference between them but be unlikely to intuit the melody underlaying them.

 

It's possible to find lyrics online with accompanying video or audio versions. If you read an unfamiliar lyric aloud, try to sense a melody, then listen to a recording to see how well your imagined song resembles the actual one. Your reaction might have something to do with how you're reacting to the lyrics. Those verses above trigger reactions in me; they open passages to memory and emotion that make me wonder how I'll feel about who the lyrics tell me I once was.

 

 

In the past, to reach our far-flung children and grandchildren, we made Facetime calls to those far away, in-person visits to those close by, and occasionally traveled long distance. In 2020 everything changed. We still interact online but don't know when we'll be in our California son's physical presence again. We still see our Florida daughter's family online but now socially distance from our Wisconsin daughter's family when we see them. Now, evading autumn allergies, we've reversed the last two approaches, Facetiming Wisconsin and visiting the Florida gang, masked, in person. Everyone keeps growing older, so we at least gain some sense of time passing even as daily housebound routines seldom suggest it is. Online and social distance connections are nowhere near close enough but they restore our awareness of what we value most.

 

My reading keeps reinforcing that feeling. Sue and I shared Dave Barry's Lessons from Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog, a funny, thoughtful book about adjusting to ageing and making life more meaningful. Its intimate, urgent ending has substantial power. Among advice drawn from each lesson, the most essential might be, "Be grateful for what you have. (It's probably more than you think you have.)" I find that reminder necessary in these days of pandemic and political turmoil— as you worry over what you, your neighbors, and your country might readily lose, it's easy to overlook what you already have.

 

Almost simultaneously, my bedtime reading confirmed that perception. "Tears, Silence, Song," Rebecca McClanahan's essay about living in Manhattan in the aftermath of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, ends quietly focused on her relationship with Marcella, the daughter of New York friends. "Marcella loves patty-cake and nursery rhymes," she writes. When Rebecca sings to her, "she nods in rhythm or makes the motions with her hands—'The Wheels on the Bus,' 'Old MacDonald,' and her new favorite, 'The Itsy Bitsy Spider.'" She suspects that the parents "sense that I need Marcella more than she needs me" and recounts hearing the child on occasional phone calls. "The child's words were not the point. It was the lilt of her toddler babble, the song of someone who knew nothing of the attacks, whose whole world was Mama, Dada, cookie, milk, my, go, bye-bye." The essay ends with Marcella settled on Rebecca's lap on a park bench.

 

"Marcella's head began to bob in rhythm. She wanted a song. Her hands were busy, her fingers weaving, wiggling. She wanted the spider song, starring the itsy bitsy hero who won't take rain, won't take no for an answer. I placed my hands in front of hers to show her how to make him climb, up, up, up. I hadn't sung in a long time and my voice was rusty, but her bobbing head told me she needed the words, so the itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again."

 

McClanahan is grateful for the moments with the child, grateful for the perspective those moments give her in regard to the world around them both.

 

I was at once grateful to her for reminding me of my own encounters with the itsy bitsy spider. Pondering a response to the question Mary Oliver asks in her poem, "The Summer Day": "Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?", I'd found an answer in moments with two young granddaughters.
 

"In Florida, Eliza, now two, lets me push her in a swing attached to a tree in her front yard and listens to me sing. When I get to the end of lines in "The Wheels on the Bus," I hear her quietly echo the last words—"round and round," "swish, swish, swish," "shh, shh, shh." When I sing "Itsy Bitsy Spider," she indistinctly mutters some of the lyrics. I see her hands moving, fingers wiggling for the spider's climb up the waterspout, the rain coming down, the sun coming out, and the spider climbing again. She smiles and looks at my hands, expecting me to do the finger motions with her, and laughs when I do.

 

"In Wisconsin, a few days later, Lilly, now three, sits with me at the counter island in her kitchen, finishing her lunch. She asks me to sing and, after a couple of nursery rhymes, I start "The Wheels on the Bus," which she knows well. Her fingers wag back and forth like the wipers on the bus, and she holds two forefingers to her lips for the shushing. She asks for "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and readies her hands for the finger motions, singing along with me and with her eyes encouraging me to do the hand gestures, too. She smiles approvingly as I raise my fingers."

 

My moments with my granddaughters were not in troubled circumstances like those both McClanahan and Barry experience, but gratitude doesn't depend on such occasions, only on paying attention to what you are given, what you have. Out comes the sun and dries up all the rain and the itsy bitsy spider climbs up the spout again.

 

 

Note: The full essays can be found in these journals and books.

 

Barry, Dave. "One Last Lesson," Lessons from Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019: 195-235.

 

McClanahan, Rebecca. "Tears, Silence, Song," The Kenyon Review. New Series Vol 38, No. 3 (May/June 2016): 67-78. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24784279

 

McClanahan, Rebecca. "Tears, Silence, Song," In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays. Pasadena: Red Hen Press, 2020: 70-85.

 

Root, Robert. "Wild and Precious," Under the Sun. June 24, 2015. http://underthesunonline.com/wordpress/2015/wild-and-precious/

 

Root, Robert. "Wild and Precious," Lineage: Reading the Past to Reach the Present. Postscript Writers Press, 2020: 148-151.