AUTHOR, AUTHOR, IF WORTHY

11/10/2022

When Will Rogers was doing radio (early 1930s, I think) people would listen to his form of comeliness and think of him as their new best friend. He had such a way with words and mellow temperament that he simply pleased the listener with soft truths and simple tales. One of his major watch-words was, “I never met a man I didn’t like!” Sort of make you think he was your personal friend, wouldn’t it?

Together with Mark Twains “plain ol’ books” about life on the Mississippi and stories of glorious childhood adventures, even “abroad,” Mr. Clemens would wind us up and spin us out into his world with his words! He said, “I don’t like to commit myself to either heaven or hell; you see, I have friends in both places.”  No one had a hard time understanding that nor the humor of it. He used this sort of wry humor much the way Mr. Rogers used his commoner voice. Mr.Clemens also wrote: “The most interesting information comes when children answer a question. They speak all they know about it, then quit talking.”

Poetry has never been a thing I put much effort towards, but I’ve often been enamored by certain styles of that writing more than a “form” of verse. Don’t really understand the construction of some of it. Some of what really interests me is song-writer poetry, not only the rhyme but the meter. That always seems to me to be “graduate level” poetry. For instance, I once wrote a song—about a 5 line verse or two and a sort of “chorus.” I gave it to a great musician I know and he with his partner listened to the manner in which I sang it on a tape, set a couple of instruments to it, a little “wood-shedding” later, produced a song which was not the exact same words and almost the total opposite of melody and timing and with fewer words gave the message of the song a more understandable and glorious finish! Oh, and my “chorus” became a terrific “Bridge” for connecting the two verses. Wow, what professionalism can do with an amateur poet! It is beautifully done on an album by berea, a no longer practicing group, on their album called “Frozen Lake,” done about 2008-9. It’s called “Someday Soon!” I’m almost embarrassed they kept my name as a co-writer, but they did and I love hearing it with their improvements to the poetry and the music.

Song poets can use unlikely words to make almost everyone understand what the writer wants them to understand. Recently heard these words in a song” …from a TiKi Bar on the white sand, …to your store-bought teeth in the night stand…”—I’m thinking that isn’t hard to understand.

Humorists, like the two famous ones mentioned earlier, all have individual styles as a practiced person. they just about always fall into they schtick, as it were, when the either write or speak. One such man now deceased, who died way earlier than normal, perhaps middle 40s, was that way. If you listened to one of his albums, then picked up one of his books, you “heard” the book. If you did the reverse, then you could read what or how his next words would come forth. He wrote a book after he had heart surgery entitled, “They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped that Sucker Flat!” If you had ever heard his voice, you heard it again all the way through the book. His name was Lewis Grizzard. Very entertaining speaker and writer. During his lingering ailment he also wrote a book with the title “Elvis is Dead, and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself.” Not his way of acquiring sympathy, but rather his way of diminishing his decline. 

Probably his most memorable one-liner came from some trip he was on when he coined “Life is like a dogsled team, if you ain’t leadin’ the scenery never changes.” 

I read a lot of this sort of humor back in the day when newspapers were a daily part of my reading. Back when the OpEd page was a “double truck” and filled with syndicated writers—from Mike Royko to George Will to Lewis Grizzard, or all the way back to the “Abe Martin Says” and Dr. Crane column in the Indianapolis News—(1950s), I read a whole raft full of columnists from early high school days to my middle 30s. Truly an enjoyable time of life. Now very difficult to repeat. Ah, me.

Thanks for reading, the Elder