Maya Angelou (Songbird).

Elizabeth Rose

FYC - AMERICAN ROOTS SONG: The Genesis of “Maya Angelou (Songbird)”

In 1987, three celestial songbirds, Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton & Emmylou Harris produced Trio – a celebrated album of traditional and contemporary songs. In the 21st century, Ms. Ronstadt’s magnificent voice has been cruelly silenced by Parkinson’s Disease. Deeply affected

FYC - AMERICAN ROOTS SONG: The Genesis of “Maya Angelou (Songbird)”

In 1987, three celestial songbirds, Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton & Emmylou Harris produced Trio – a celebrated album of traditional and contemporary songs. In the 21st century, Ms. Ronstadt’s magnificent voice has been cruelly silenced by Parkinson’s Disease. Deeply affected by the loss of perhaps, the greatest singer of a generation, I was moved to write an old-timey mountain song that harkened back to the days of traditional songwriters Steven Foster (b.1826) and Jimmy Bland (b.1854), the African American composer best known for “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” I imagined Linda, Dolly & Emmylou harmonizing on my song in some alternate universe in which the trio is miraculously resurrected. And I’d ask them to sing the chorus which begins…

Why does she sing -when no one can hear her – why does her music go on?

A song comes in…and it doesn’t leave me alone until it’s, shall we say, “solved.” Carrying bits—phonemes-- of a song that’s counting on me to tune it, I stopped by the post office in the Catskill Mountain hamlet of Callicoon. For stamps. There was a sheet of stamps that stilled me. Maya Angelou, beautiful poet, dancer, singer, activist and scholar, had been honored posthumously with her own USPS stamp. Next to her portrait, the stamp quotes from her powerful memoir, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings:

“a bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a Song.”

I didn’t expect to get more than a sheet of Maya Angelou postage stamps. But I received a much greater gift: I got to stitch together this song…to honor Ms. Angelou and this trio of musical goddesses.

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