"Heart of the Heartland"

The perception of songwriting and songwriters was just beginning to change when I first picked up a guitar in the early 60’s. Prior to that time there was an accepted separation between songwriters and singers. A singer or a singing group would look to professional songwriters to find their material. For years the Brill Building in New York City was a living network of singers, songwriters, arrangers, producers, publishers and promoters working together to create music for the public to consume. (There were 165 music related businesses there in 1962.)

Back then a singer and songwriter like Woody Guthrie would call the songs he wrote “homemade” perhaps as a way of differentiating them from the more commercial “industrial” variety.
Bob Dylan and The Beatles changed all that. The fact that they wrote the songs they sang made it first acceptable and then almost necessary to sing your own songs if you were going to be taken seriously and have a successful career.

Dylan set the standard for songwriters who wrote songs without collaboraters. Paul McCartney and John Lennon fascinated by the likes of Carole King and her songwriting partner and husband at the time, Gerry Goffin started writing songs together and became “Lennon and McCartney” perhaps the most successful songwriting team in history. That name recognition remains so strong that when McCartney tried to change the authorship of a song like “Yesterday” that he essentially wrote himself to “McCartney and Lennon” the world simply couldn’t accept it.

While I have collaborated off and on with Gary Drager since college and for the last dozen years with Ted Brancato I consider myself a songwriter in the Dylan mode. It’s been interesting to see the changes in a place like Nashville where in 1975 most of the songwriters were individuals while in 1995 most of the songs were written in collaboration with other songwriters.

“Heart of the Heartland” is the only song that Leslie Eliel and I wrote together. Leslie grew up in Montana and knew firsthand about farm auctions. The first four lines of the verse are hers. I can’t remember who wrote which of the rest of the verses. We had a different idea about the chorus. We each wrote our own. Her song is called “Time to Be Planting Again.”

Both versions of the song are included here as well as the video of The Brothers Four performing that song at the Wheeler Theater.