Songs From Here, For the People Who Live Here

Every town has its stories. Some get printed in the paper and filed away. Most get told at kitchen tables, passed from grandparents to grandkids, and slowly forgotten when nobody writes them down. At Verve Music, I've come to think one of the best things a songwriter can do is catch those stories before they slip away and hand them back to the community they came from.

That's what my last three songs are about. Each one starts with real people, in real places, doing ordinary and sometimes extraordinary things.

The Pumpkin Dance

This one started on a bright October morning at a pumpkin patch. Families from all over western Mass were out in the sun, kids hauling pumpkins bigger than they were, parents arguing happily over which one belonged on the porch. Nobody there was famous, and nothing there would make the news. But it was one of those mornings that reminds you why you live here. I went home and wrote a fiddle tune for it.

The Pumpkin Dance is a celebration of the everyday ritual that brings this whole region out into the fields every fall. If it makes you think of your own family's trip to the patch, it's doing its job.

Listen and download: https://vervemusic.bandcamp.com/track/the-pumpkin-dance

The Reluctant Hero of Duxbury

My great-grandfather was the town butcher and fire chief in Duxbury. By every account he was a grouch and a bit of a rapscallion, but he was good with men and good with horses. One day, out delivering meat and dairy, he came on one of those big white mansions on the coast in flames. Everyone was out on the lawn except the master of the house, trapped upstairs.

Without a second thought, he unhitched Beauty, one of his best Percherons, from the team, rode him bareback into the fire and brought the man out. Then he hitched Beauty back up and went on with his deliveries.

Some time later he got a letter calling him before the town elders. He assumed he was in trouble for one scrape or another. Instead, they gave him a certificate. The man he'd saved was one of the elders. That certificate and the newspaper story are still in my parents' records.

I wrote this one New England string band style, on fiddle, guitar and mandolin, because that's the sound of the kind of town he lived in. Heroes don't always look like heroes. Sometimes they're the grumpy fellow with the meat wagon.

Listen and download: https://vervemusic.bandcamp.com/track/the-reluctant-hero-of-duxbury-another-verve-original

The Ballad of Sergeant Kielty

I've been working on this song for a few years. It comes from the stories my mother told about her father, Sergeant Kielty. In the Great War, when the gas came rolling across the fields of France, he left his trench to pull his comrades out. He saved them, and it cost him his lungs.

He came home to the valley, to a bed under a canopy of gauze, because he could no longer breathe the open air. And still, by every story I ever heard, he was the liveliest man in the house. Hair slicked back, waxed mustache, cracking jokes in an Irish brogue and singing right through that linen tent.

It's an Irish folk ballad, written to be sung along to, because that's how he'd have wanted it.

Listen and download: https://vervemusic.bandcamp.com/track/the-ballad-of-sergeant-kielty

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/NTusjwQcPvU

Why I write these songs

A pumpkin patch, a butcher and his horse, a soldier singing in a sickroom. None of these are big national stories. They're ours. And I believe that when we know each other's stories, we treat each other better. We recognize the family two rows over at the pumpkin patch. We remember that the cranky neighbor might be the one who runs into the fire. We hear an old man's song and understand what it cost him.

That's the goal of Verve Music: to write songs about the events and the people of this place, so that the folks who live here feel a little more connected to one another and to the people who came before them.

If you have a story from your family or your town that deserves a song, I'd love to hear it. Send it my way at LinkTr.ee/VerveMusic. Every song is $1.50 on Bandcamp, and every purchase keeps an independent musician in western Massachusetts writing about the place we all call home.

Adam Sweet