🌹🎶 Writers Who Sing, Singers Who Write
Celebrating artists playing across literary and musical forms.
“When Life does not find a singer to sing her heart she produces a philosopher to speak her mind.” - Sand & Foam (1926) - Khalil Gibran
For orators, singers, poets, writers, spoken word artists, rappers and songwriters the pen, microphone or megaphone has long been mightier than the sword. The multiple forms of spoken, scored, sung and written word dance fluidly in and out of each other in the vast interconnected living continuum of human expression.
Whilst the modern Western mechanistic mindset constantly attempts to pigeonhole creativity, many great artists remain resolutely uncategorisable and explosively prolific across musical and literary forms. Here are seven examples of musically enchanted authors and word-wooing musicians.
Statue of Thomas Hardy on a rainy day trip to Dorchester as part of my Road Trip to Dorset
Thomas Hardy
Hardy’s world on and off the page was underscored by the ‘innate love of melody.’ (Tess of the d’Urbavilles) His grandmother, Mary, a great storyteller and collector of folklore, enchanted the young Hardy with tales of the Napoleonic War which inspired his epic poem The Dynasts. Three generations of Thomases played musical instruments - Hardy’s grandfather, Thomas 1, was a keen musician, who played bass viol/ cello with his son, Thomas 2, on violin in a West Gallery Quire in Stinsford Church. So Thomas 3 inherited a rich oral tradition and also played violin. His characters inhabit lives accompanied by music - lullabies, hymns and agricultural work songs. Mourning the replacement of the West Gallery Players by organ and surpliced choir, he preserves his father’s music in poetry:
And, too, what merry tunes
He would bow at nights or noons
That chanced to find him bent to lute a measure,
When he made you speak his heart
As in dream,
Without book or music-chart,
On some theme
Elusive as a jack-o'-lanthorn's gleam,
And the psalm of duty shelved for trill of pleasure.
Thomas Hardy - My Father’s Violin (1916)
J.R.R Tolkien
I have little musical knowledge. Though I come of a musical family, owing to defects of education and opportunity as an orphan, such music as was in me was submerged (until I married a musician), or transformed into linguistic terms. Music gives me great pleasure and sometimes inspiration, but I remain in the position in reverse of one who likes to read or hear poetry but knows little of its technique or tradition, or of linguistic structure
Letter 260 (1964), The Letters of J.R.R Tolkien
Born into a family of piano makers, Tolkien learned piano and violin and married pianist and singer Edith Bratt. Whilst he was disparaging about his abilities, his mythical worlds are infused with music. Inspired by Old Norse music and poetry, The Lord of the Rings contains 60 poems and songs as the hobbits write and sing on every twist and turn of their epic quest. Namarie, the fifth of the six songs set to music by Donald Swan in The Road Goes Ever On, (1967) is based on a melody Tolkien hummed and his singing voice is captured in 1952 tape recordings.
Photo of Leonard Cohen taken by Dominique Issermann, 1982
Leonard Cohen
“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash”
- The Book of Longing - Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen’s prolific output includes 15 albums, 13 poetry collections, two novels and two posthumous works. In a 1993 interview he defines poetry “as a verdict that we give to something that moves us, that has authority and music and resonance - we call that poetry. It exists in lots of places - some people talk that way.” When interviewed by Paul Zollo, Cohen describes being driven to write songs by “a kind of appetite …to discover my self-respect. To redeem the day. So the day does not go down in debt.” Alongside a rigorous writing work ethic, he acknowledges the mysterious aspect of writing - “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.”
Patti Smith Facebook 2015 - “piles of napkins scrawled with incomprehensible rants.” - Writer’s Debris
Patti Smith
“Most often, the alchemy that produces a poem or work of fiction is hidden in the work itself, if not embedded in the coil and reaches of the mind… ‘Why do we write?’ Of course, the answer writes itself: ‘Because we cannot simply live.’”
- Patti Smith - Windham-Campbell Lecture 2016 at Yale
Creator of multiple albums, poetry books and an award-winning memoir, Patti Smith’s daily writing practice was inspired by Jo March, the feisty tom-boy character in Louisa M Alcott’s Little Women. She affirms that her writing moves fluidly across forms saying: “I have always considered myself as a writer. I wouldn’t categorize myself as a songwriter… It’s just one of the things that I do. I do so many things. I just spend my time on whatever way I’m trying to communicate, whatever it calls for.” Patti’s songwriting arose from her teenage poetry - she describes writing poetry in “a world of solitude” and songwriting whilst imagining herself in performance - “it’s for the people.”
Dolly The Book Lady
Dolly Parton
“Any time you work with anybody, whether it’s a song or book, it’s a very creative process. You have to think about the subject matter; where this should land and where that should land. So it’s very similar, but you just don’t have to rhyme so much. Your mind is allowed to be a little freer as you go, because you don’t have to keep it down to two and a half minutes for radio or that sort of thing. So you have more freedom in writing a book than you do a song.” - Dolly Parton Interview
The dizzying Dolly discography includes a record-breaking 44 Top 10 Country albums and 3,000 songs. Dolly’s first musical influence was her mother Avie Lee Owen, and her father’s illiteracy inspired her to set up Imagination Library which has gifted 264,181,752 books to 3,197,250 children across the UK, USA, Canada, Ireland and Australia. Convinced that the seeds of dreams are often found in books and reflecting on her ‘giant leap’ from“the cover of Playboy to being called the Book Lady,” in her commencement speech at Tennessee University she invites us to dream more, learn more, care more, and be more.
Elle Magazine: “Zadie Smith is an Incredible Singer … is there anything she cannot do?”
Zadie Smith
“I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.”
- Zadie Smith Interview
Having worked as a jazz singer, award-winning author Zadie Smith’s love of music powers her novel Swing Time (2016). Alongside authoring 13 books, she has collaborated with musicians including Jon Batiste and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Before performing The Lady is a Tramp with Lady Rizo, Zadie Smith describes her early singing experiences: “I was quite a big black girl with a shaved head doing Sinatra impressions in old peoples’ homes. It was a very odd scenario, you could see their faces - they were confused.”
Maya Angelou performing in Calypso Heat Wave
Maya Angelou
The groundbreaking author who inspired many a caged bird to claim their voices was also a calypso singer and dancer. Maya Angelou released an album Miss Calypso and performed in the Broadway show and film Calypso Heat Wave in 1957. Her inaugural poem, On The Pulse of Morning (1993) was included in LTJ Bukem’s song Horizons, and her words feature on tracks by Common, DJ Shadow and Buckshot LeFonque. All that she says of The Music Community could also be said of The Writing Community here on Substack and beyond.
The Music Community
When you listen to music
of your own time,
you are with your peers.
But when you listen to music
of previous times,
you are with your masters.
The music community
is an ancient order,
a hidden parallel universe
where rhythm, melody, and harmony
are the language of emotion,
where like-minded people
find their own kind,
where they are never alone.
And what is more,
music creates community.
It joins people of different ages,
cultures, and backgrounds
in a single, harmonious experience.
So let us celebrate
the music community,
the source of so much joy and solace,
the place where we find
our truest selves.
