Great American Road Trip: Nebraska & Kansas

The Great American Road Trip travels across the plains and rivers and hills of Kansas and the wheat fields and grasslands of Nebraska. For your listening on this journey, an album of songs about farm life, a recording from an artist who grew up in Kansas farm country, and a link to a website about a musical.



Tim Grimm is a farmer. He knows first hand the hard life, the quiet joys, and the never ending questions that a farmer’s life entails. In Farm Songs he writes of farms to day, farmers in the past, harvests, a farmer’s view of weather, the generations of families on the farm, and crops brought in and those that were not. His song titles include Pray fro Rain, Heart of Winter, Autumn Garden, and Pumpkin the Cat.
In addition to being a farmer and a musician, Grimm is also an actor who in the midst of a career in Hollywood decided to move back to the farm. He still acts, he tours as a musician, and he and his wife Jan Lucas, who co wrote several of the songs and appears on the recording as well, are raising their family on a farm in the midwest.


Martina McBride is a top country star with shelves of awards and fans world wide. She’s also a woman who grew up on a Kansas farm, and got her start in music playing in her family band. In addition to her powerhouse voice, McBride is known for her courageous and thoughtful song selection. She’s recorded songs by several artists you have met here along the music road, including Matraca Berg and Gretchen Peters.

A good place to meet McBride is through her
Live In Concert CD/DVD combo package.


To explore andother side of Nebraska, you may want to visit the website for the play Local Wonders. It is a story about a Nebraska poet, about facing changes, and living through them, told in the voices of the poet and his wife. Musician Anne Hills, an artist you met when the Great American Road Trip was in Pennsylvania, is an actor as well as a singer, and plays the part of the wife.

you may also wish to see
Music Road: Road Trip Music: Ohio
Bruce Springsteen: Nebraska
Music Road: Julie Fowlis:Uam
more music from the road trip


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 what the Library has in mind to inspire travels through Nebraska and Kansas.
For more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins

-->Your support for Music Road is welcome and needed. If you are able to chip in, here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this. Thank you.

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

-->If you'd like to support my creative work at Music Road and elsewhere,
here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this.Thank you.