There’s a story behind every song. You tend to hear both during the Frank Brown songwriters fest, and sometimes the stories rival the songs as windows into the passions, creativity and sheer weirdness of the human condition.
The 35th annual Frank Brown International Songwriters Festival continues through Sunday, Nov. 17, at myriad venues in coastal Alabama and Pensacola. You can find full information at https://www.frankbrownsongwriters.com/.
Here are some of the stories they told over the course of one day at the Flora-Bama:
“This is a song about a murder in Memphis. Or, like, a self-defense in Memphis. It depends on how you look at it.” (Cherish Hamby of the Dark Waters Project)
“Speaking of kids, my baby is 19 and he thinks he’s all grown up. But when he was a little boy we wrote this song together. And I don’t know if it’s about me or about the woman that was crazy running down the street.” (Rhonda Hart)
“I wrote this song with a friend of mine. It’s for all you Louisiana people out there. It’s called, ‘If Adam and Eve were Cajun.’” (Mike Loudermilk)
“She walked in the house one day and said, ‘Baby, take me back to New Orleans.’ I thought that was kind of cool so we wrote this song.” (Tony “T-Bone” Montgomery)
“This is an old country song about my father-in-law. He’s a narcissist.” (Richard Grimer)
“I was playing this other festival in the Florida Keys a few years ago. Whenever me and my wife got there, I picked up the local paper and there was my mug on the front of the local paper. And I said, ‘My God, this is a strange thing because I’m not the big name in this festival.’ Then they started playing and I realized the reason that they put my mug on the front of the paper was that there was 40 songwriters and 39 of them all sounded the same. … I said, ‘I’ve got just the song for this occasion.’ I plugged in the microphone and I said, ‘My name is Abe Partridge and I’m from Mobile, Alabama, and I play the kind of songs that Kenny Chesney is never going to cut. And this is a song I wrote for all you bros, and it’s called “Pop Country Is for Posers.”’ I did not get invited back to that festival. I made about 60 enemies and I made five fans that will follow me to the grave. So, this is a song I wrote called ‘Pop Country is for Posers.’ I hope you like it but you probably won’t.” (Abe Partridge)
“I wrote this song about a book called ‘This Side of the River’ by Jeffrey Stayton. It’s the craziest book but I recommend it, it’s wild. It’s a fictitious story based on the events of the Civil War. Sherman has burned through the South leaving in his wake a bunch of charred remains and widows, and this highly afflicted Texas Ranger has what we would now call PTSD but he seizes the opportunity to gather up all these widows and make a battalion of vengeance to head up and burn Sherman’s house down. And that’s a wild enough place to start but it unravels from there, he ends up doing all sorts of horrible deeds and he loses his mind more and more until he’s wearing clown makeup and starts dressing in the dresses of the women, they steal an elephant from the zoo and he’s riding the elephant, it’s very weird. So it’s a book about a cross-dressing clown-faced rapist Texas Ranger during the Civil War. But here’s the song it inspired. I really just play this because I don’t want Abe to think I’m a poser. This is the least pop-country song I’ve ever written.” (Eric Erdman)
“Last year I had the honor here of being on stage with Randy Brooks, and he had his Christmas song that he sang. I didn’t have a Christmas song. So I went home and wrote one, and it came out like this. I’m an old Alabama redneck, so I wrote what I knew.” (Phil G.)
“Bobby Rush is going to be here tonight. Anyway Bobby and me been friends for a long time, I asked him one time, ‘Bobby, You’ve played all over the world, I know. I get offers all the time to play a lot fish fries and I’ll say, “What kind of budget you got?” and they’ll say, “Well, don’t worry about a budget or money, just play your guitar and we’re gone’ have fun,” and I said, “What do you tell ‘em?”’ He sits there and he says, ‘Tell ‘em you done had enough fun. You need to get paid now.’ And that gave me the inspiration for this song.” (Ricky Whitley)
“I was going to name this song, ‘Dog Named Bo.’ But I was afraid I’d run into an animal lover who’d think I was talking about a dog. And I love animals.” (Bobby Rush)
“I like to write love songs but I like to leave the word ‘love’ out. So let’s see how I do here.” (AJ Bigler)
“This is something I wrote a long time ago and Taylor Hicks called me and wanted to record it. I said, ‘Well help yourself, Taylor, I’ll sit by the mailbox.’ I’m still sittin’ by the mailbox. Taylor asked me, he said, ‘What’s it about?’ I said, ‘Man, it’s a total rip-off of one of those Shakespeare things, set in Louisiana.’ It’s called ‘Atchafalaya.’” (Tony Brook)
“My father used to catch me in the hall when I was a little bitty kid. He used to make me punch him as hard as I could. Just to see … I don’t know why dads do that. My dad would always say ‘You can’t hurt steel.’ So I told Stephen (co-writer Stephen Lee Veal) ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea for a song.’ So we came up with this one. It’s called ‘You Can’t Hurt Steel.’” (Jeff Woods)
“The next song I’m going to do was recorded by the Oak Ridge Boys. I wrote it about my mama, her name is Frances, and she was a truck stop waitress. I was down visiting my father, this was in the ‘70s, late ‘70s, and my mother had just left him. He was all tore up about it. ‘I don’t know why, I don’t know why she left me.’ Of course, I did, and I wasn’t talkin’. I got back to Nashville and ran into an old friend of mine, Roy August Horstmeyer. He brought me a stack of lyrics to look at … About fifteen minutes later we had a song. It’d take a few years for the Oaks to record it, but it became my first No. 1 song. It goes like this: I’m settin’ fancy free, because she wants to go …” (Jimbeau Hinson)
“This is one of them songs about how sometimes things ain’t going so good, people put you down, things get a little bit better and they want to pick you back up. And [it’s called] ‘It’s Too Late to Get Cold Feet.’” (Neal Lucas)
Bobby Soberg: “I wrote this song after my third girlfriend broke up with me. It’s called, ‘Why Can’t I Find a Girl Who Wants to Kiss Instead of Fight?’’
“I wrote this song years ago. I didn’t play it for a long time because it is kind of a heart-wrenching song. My mother actually brought it to my attention the other day, she said, ‘Whatever happened to that one song you used to sing that made me cry?’ I said, ‘Well, I forgot it, ‘cause it made you cry.’” (Montana Civil)
“This is a song I wrote called ‘White Trash Lipstick.’ I hope you like it.” (Abe Partridge)
“I was sitting there watching people waltz one night, and I know that’s not a popular thing to do these days, waltz, and waltzing ain’t selling and I’ve heard all that and I don’t care. Ain’t nothing selling for me, so I don’t care. This is a song I wrote called ‘The Waltz.’ I thought if life were like a waltz, you know, it’s smooth, it rises, it falls, but it’s constant and it’s kind of beautiful.” (Matt Prater)