Interview with Tony Baker

 

How did you become a songwriter?

I have fifteen albums of original songs, but wrote sixteen individual songs, two albums, for my wife. My songwriting began with Lavada and has tracked with our fifty years together. If you are properly talented in something - talent is not a virtue but an un-earned grace - then you will express with your gifts what is urgent to express. It was always urgent that I express what I felt for her. 

She and I had twenty-eight addresses in our first eleven years and lived eight years in a van with a dog named Lilly. My first six albums, and a 300-page memoir, came from that. There were a lot of people and places and adventures to describe and so my songs were  always less about feeling things than about seeing things. None of this is to say, however, that one need live in such a way to find things one is eager to express. A mother may write about mothering; a coal miner may write about that life. Art looks at what the world presents, and then re-presents it. The most fundamental need is to understand and be understood. Look deeply at what is before you and the words and music will arise.

A person writes songs because he or she is a songwriter and not the reverse - "I AM a songwriter!" - then he or she must be willing to be a very bad songwriter while doing the work to become a good songwriter, though intensity of desire can shorten this process. It's a sort of "be-do-have" situation: if you can feel deeply enough what you ARE, then you will know what to DO, and as you learn to DO it better, then you will HAVE are better and better songs and, transitively, a better and better life.

Which came first in the creative process, the music or the words?

I once had an extended time when I could not find work as a performer, so I went to work in construction. I would come home very tired, shower and rest, then take a guitar out into the front yard, barefoot in the grass, for an hour or two and let it play itself. My fingers found arrangements and one arrangement took shape over time until I was able to hear words rising up from out of the music. It became my song ANDREW, about, in turn, my father, my brother, and my son, all of whom were named Andrew. After awhile I noticed that the music that had formed under my fingers sounded very like the hymn Faith of Our Fathers. If you can hear the chorus to that song in your head, put it to these words

Andrew my father, brother, son

These are my thoughts all the days of my living

To you, of each the only one

I say that love is for giving

I once wrote a song called My Kindred Friend, that was expressive of certain friendships. It developed first as music.

My Kindred Friend, the words and music

speak to the heart of me

and there's no end and there's no other

way that I'd want to be

Another song for the old man who taught me to fly fish, a very long song describing the physical world of fishing, but ending with this sentiment

I'll learn the ways of the wind

how she moves colors through the sky

and earn the praise of the wide ocean gleaming

And as the people come and go

and places disappear, I know

I'll yearn these days were living and dreaming

Writing that was driven by an urgency to express love and wonder. I remember our returning to a place where Lavada and I had lived in the very earliest years of our love and describing her reaction to seeing the place again.

Returning from travels, my love and I chanced

down a road where we lived long ago

where under the bright alpine moon we once danced

two bodies that cast but one shadow

Twas spring and not thirty years old yet was she

in the warm emerald light of love's nativity

We sailed from our Island, our home in the sea

to the mountains of north Colorado

In that cabin beside the fast brook we did dwell

and our home was the sound of that stream

and through all the long years we've lived under that spell

and walked within that same dream

In fresh recollection, her green eyes did shine

with mem'ries so long in her keeping

She laced her sweet fingers so tightly in mine

and softly did speak through her weeping

"No-one ever will know how it was!" she did cry

"No-one ever loved so well as we!

"Tender nights 'neath the cold, starry canopy sky

"and our days so loving and free!"

But One Shadow

But One Shadow

There have been many instances where songs, especially my more personal songs, have arisen from the silence and begun to speak words in that way. 

But I have written a great many songs on commission, wherein I would consult with a client on what he or she wished to say in a song. I would listen very carefully and produce a lyric that spoke their own words back to them in poetry, then would recite the words over and over and listen carefully  until a melody and chords floated up out of them. I wrote, in one instance, twelve songs on commission for a couple in northern Virginia. The songs were about the five hundred acres of pristine wilderness they owned along three miles of the Shenandoah River and the three dogs that shared their lives with them there. We would take walks across the property, by twos or the three of us, and they would talk to about what they wanted expressed, and I would write the poetry and listen out for the words. 

And lifting his eyes to the crest of the hill

The slender oaks bend in the brisk ev'ning chill

that rises from unwearied river below

Long curves in the darkening vale

This is talent-based skill, the best kind, and gets easier with repetition over time.

What did you do to develop your art?

There is no substitute for practicing your craft with great diligence. If you want to be an author, you absolutely must read extensively. Songwriters must listen to songwriters, and all of us have our heroes. Mine are Jimmy Webb, Paul Simon, Tom Waits, Kris Kristofferson, Nanci Griffith, James Taylor, John Prine, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Jimmy Buffett, Jackson Browne and a dozen or so more. Also, I always had a lotta gigs - lucky for me - and when you're performing six nights a week, that's over three hundred songs performed in a week. When such is the case, and damned lucky, your "chops" are always at your command.  But, without gigs, if you're not practicing at least six times a week, at least an hour a day and preferably three, irrespective of conditions, then you may consider that you are not serious.

Did you always want to share your art publicly, or were there times you kept songs private? 

That is a very insightful question. I do have songs, a scant few, that are just for me. For the most part, however, the challenge before any performer is to bring his audience into intimacy with him, and he with them, where the secrets of the heart, deep and precious, are divulged and shared in safety.

What has been your favorite outcome of your art?

A happy and deeply fulfilled life. At age 76, I can say that I have expressed what was within me, so that what was within me has saved me. If it had all stayed inside me, what stayed inside me would have destroyed me. On my final album, Holy the Sound, there were these words

So much joy in the silence between ev'ry word

Joy in the craving to sing

Oh, but nothing my hand finds to do wakens joy

Joy wakens every thing

What advice would you give to aspiring songwriters?

Get a real job.

About the Artist

Tony Baker, is a folksinger and songwriter in the 18th and 19th century minstrel tradition.
He was among the first generation of musicians to perform on Savannah’s Riverfront in the late sixties, and came in with the first group of performers to Underground Atlanta from 1970 through 1974.

He performed with Jimmy Buffett in Key West, in the Good Friday concert of 1976, and was a street musician in Estes Park, Colorado as well as Santa Fe, New Mexico during the late seventies.

Since the mid-eighties he has performed in the five star resorts of coastal Georgia. He was the principal performer at the Sea Island Golf Club from 1995 until 2000, and at the Jekyll Island Club Hotel, where he played weekly for twenty years, from 1986 to 2006.

In 1994, he performed privately for President and Mrs. Jimmy Carter at the Windsor Hotel in Americus, Georgia. His song lyrics were published within an Atlanta Magazine article about the Golden Isles of Georgia, written by best-selling author William Diehl in 1997.

He has written, produced and recorded fifteen collections of original songs, one selection of which, Bubbas and Bozos, he performed on national television from Opryland Studios in the early nineties.

From 2006 to the present he has been a free lance writer, completing his newest CD release, entitled St. Simons Song: Anthems and Incantations, and a hardcover art book/CD entitled Walk Along the Ocean Road: the Poetry and Songs of Tony Baker as Illustrated by David Dickerson, released in November of 2011.

In 2013 he released a second art book/CD with David Dickerson entitled The River Oak Suite, a 12-song collection of illustrated songs concerning a tract of wilderness land in northern Virginia and the family that live on it.

At age 73, Tony Baker completed a final album, Holy the Sound, having spent the prior three years recovering his musical skills sufficient to hit the 'record' button.

TO CONTACT TONY BAKER
136 Meadows Drive, Saint Simons Island, Georgia 31522
912-223-0034 tonyba@bellsouth.net