Ray Charles’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You” borders on being a different tune than Kitty Wells’. Janis Joplin not only sings an arrangement that’s much different from Kristofferson’s (which must be deemed the most authoritative, even though it’s probably a collaboration between him and the other musicians, not actually orchestrated by him), but she also sings a melody that’s somewhat different, both rhythmically and in what notes she actually sings. One obvious lesson from such endeavors is that, by and large, it’s the lyric that lies at the heart, not the music. When I hear two different versions of a song-say, Kitty Wells’ 1958 recording of Don Gibson’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and Ray Charles’ 1962 recording-and they both work, it’s a chance for insight into what lies at the heart of the song, what makes it what it is. One of my key steps in this undertaking is to listen to different recordings of the same song, ideally at least five or six different versions, seeing how they resemble each other and how they differ. A lot of what Kristofferson can do with an eight-piece, guitar-based country band, or what Joplin can do with a six-piece rock band, is simply beyond my reach (especially since I’m nowhere near as good at my instrument as they are at theirs). If I’m going to sing “Me and Bobby McGee” with only my own piano as accompaniment, it’s important to sort out what’s going on in a song, what the crucial elements are that I have to incorporate into my performance and which I can afford to let go. Partly this is in aid of my own songwriting, but it’s also essential to my own performance of other people’s songs, which I still do more often than I perform my own. I’ve looked carefully at how I respond to a given song, and tried to figure out (I don’t presume to be sure that I have figured out) why the song makes me feel that way. Since I started performing as Tennessee Walt in 2016, though, I’ve delved deeper into the art-and it is an art, not a science-of understanding a song. In other words, I’m no stranger to the idea of breaking down a song and seeing what makes it work (or, more often than not, what makes it not work).
I’ve also earned a college degree which included a major in English literature, and I published a generally well-received book on the operas of Gilbert & Sullivan in 2001. Since then I’ve sung innumerable songs in my work with that choir and the one at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, as a cast member in lots of musicals, as a member of the seminal Christmas-rock band Bah & the Humbugs and, most particularly, as a 45-year member of the Gilbert & Sullivan Light Opera Company of Long Island.
I’ve been singing publicly since 1968, when-at age 7-I joined the men-and-boys choir at Grace Church, the Episcopal landmark on Broadway in Manhattan.
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