All great songwriters are great storytellers. Their songs can make you laugh along, cry along, or rage along with the tales of complete strangers. A great stage musician can make those written words come to life, his delivery making a great story into a legendary one. Americana superstar David Olney is a rare soul who is both an excellent storyteller and an excellent performer. Today on stage at the Southern Festival of Books, he showed that range with an hour long set that was part concert and part theater.
Olney started the show not with his signature guitar but just with him and a microphone, reciting lines of classic poetry to the captivated audience. Olney acknowledged that an Americana singer/songwriter reciting "the kinds of things that used to bore you to sleep in High School English" was a pretty odd thing. He explained that two events in his life made him start his dramatic poetry readings.
The first was when his daughter was a baby. Olney said the only thing that would reliably put her to sleep 100% of the time was when he would read from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The second was the rise in popularity of the open air festival in America. Olney stated this necessitated doing soundcheck in public and he felt like it was wasting an open mic to just stand around saying "Check... 1... 2..." so he began reciting poetry during soundchecks. He said it helped serve to bring in new audiences as people walking by would stop and say "What the heck is going on?"
Olney's poetry readings aren't just recitations, though. He told the audience that he felt like the reason kids hate English was that teachers just read the text straight without any of the emotion or inflection the author intended. He also said teachers should start telling the true history of the poems. "If teachers would admit that Samuel Coleridge was toking the bong when he wrote Kubla Khan, they'd immediately have the attention of every college student."
Olney's recitations were full of drama, inflection, and costuming. But Olney is primarily a musician and he didn't disappoint the numerous fans who came over from the Americana Music Conference across the street by playing three songs, including one called "Jesse and Robert" that tells what could have been the final conversation between Jesse James and Robert Ford on the day he died.
The Southern Festival of Books is going on through Sunday at Legislative Plaza.
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