Road Trip Music: Ohio

A place of change and challenge, testing and opportunity, successful experiments and failed ones, exploring new ways of living and seeing how familiar ones would work beyond the edges of civilization: this was the Ohio River Valley in the early years of the American republic. As the Great American Road Trip winds through the state of Ohio, the soundtrack comprises a set of songs about the people who ventured to that frontier, and how they faced the challenges the found there. It is an album called Wilderness Plots..


Tim Grimm was in a bookstore one day, and came across a pocket sized book called Wilderness Plots, by Scott Russell Sanders. It was a series of short one and two page vignettes of moments in people’s lives from the early days of the Ohio Valley which Sanders had created from his notes from research for a novel set in the Ohio county where he was born. Drawn by the vivid stories, Grimm started hearing songs in them. He took the idea to a group of songwriters he knew, a group who met regularly to exchange ideas and share progress in their writing. Tom Roznowski, Michael White, Carrie Newcomer, and Krista Detor were the other songwriters in the group.

All of them live in the Ohio Valley, in southern Indiana, so both place and story resonated with each of them. Each is a professional musician, a songwriter who values both word and melody, but their styles and interests are varied. They decided to use stories in the book as workshop challenge, at first. Over time, that evolved into the idea of an album.

In the songs, Roznowski tells of the dreams of a man who looks at the wilderness and sees bustling cities rising; White sees people both afraid and intrigued as they marvel over recent inexplicable discoveries; Detor tells of a couple finding their way and testing their marriage at the edge of the wilderness, and, in another song, gives voice to a woman’s hopes for her children in a time of great change; Grimm looks at the life of an itinerant preacher who struggles with mending his own faith while he mends shoes to make a living; Newcomer, in two very different songs, finds a woman caught in the hard changes frontier life sometimes brings, and another who risks standing up to make a things different.

It’s a project filled with memorable people, situations both serious and funny, and connections of history and present day, in styles which move across the range of Americana music . The nineteen cuts on the album make a fine bit of listening for travels through Ohio, and chances are, you’ll remember the characters and the songs long after the album ends.

Though their schedules do not often permit them to perform together, the songwriters have done concerts based on the material on the album. Seeing one of these, producer Susanne Schwibs at WTIU at Indiana University had the idea to make a television program. It’s framed loosely as a songwriters in the round session, filled with interesting music, great ideas on songwriting process, and thoughts on the intersections of landscape and history in the Ohio Valley. It is available as a dvd.

you may also wish to see
Music Road: Voices: Carrie Newcomer: faith and laughter

video of an ensemble piece from Wilderness Plots



This is part of The Great American Road Trip, in which I’m partnering up with A Traveler’s Library to add musical ideas to the book and film suggestions for journeys through the regions of the United States which you’ll find there. Stop by and see A Traveler’s Library what has in mind to inspire travels through Ohio.
For more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins

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wilderness plots: the album

One man looks at a forested wilderness and sees the future of people who might live there; one woman sees those forests as the places which have taken her man and her children from her and yet she must keep on walking through them, looking for a home; then there’s the evolution controversy, the effect of whiskey, the persistence of family, the preacher, the hunter, the squaw... “We all must find a road that takes us to our destiny -- all know is that I want you there with me. We will go a long long way, what will come no one can say,” Krista Detor’s writes of a family’s journey.

It is history told in stories and visions, from bones of ancients unearthed to visions of futures yet unknown to connections not yet made.

The setting and subject of all this is southern Indiana and northern Ohio at the time when those places were still unknown frontier. The intrepid people who. each for their own reasons, set out to make a life and a living there were what inspired the short stories in Scott Russell Sanders' book Wilderness Plots In his stories, musician Tim Grimm heard songs yet unsung. He brought the book to his song writing friends Tom Roznowski, Krista Detor, Michael White, and Carrie Newcomer.

They each created their own stories, some directly inspired by Sanders’ work, others sparked by thinking about that frontier life and the people who lived it. Enough detail to set their visions and their hopes in time and place; enough of that vision to make real connections to today. Five great voices, dashes of humor, faith, and harmony, creating history that goes far beyond the reading of the page and yet is true to that vision, and to the lives lived out before the stories were written.

Wilderness Plots

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