There is a massive 710-page book titled The Complete Johnny Cash: Lyrics from a Lifetime of Songwriting

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back on April 4, 2011 I blogged about Stories in words and music: country edition. Of course, I mentioned Johnny Cash (February 26, 1932 to September 12, 2003) and his songs Folsom Prison Blues, I Walk the Line, and Tennessee Flat Top Box. Songs are magical – they tell a story in a few minutes with poetic words and music.

 

At my friendly, local public library I found and am leafing through a massive 710-page book from 2025 assembled by Mark Stielper and titled The Complete Johnny Cash: Lyrics from a lifetime of songwriting.

 

Folsom Prison Blues (from 1955) appears on page 26. I Walk the Line (from 1956) appears on pages 40 and 41. Tennessee Flat-Top Box (from 1961) appears on page 120.

 

I Still Miss Someone (from 1957) with Roy Cash Jr. appears on page 52. There is a video from  1990 with Highwaymen – a duet with Willie Nelson. The lyrics lament:

 

“At my door the leaves are falling
A cold wild wind will come
Sweethearts walk by together
And I still miss someone

 

I go out on a party
And look for a little fun
But I find a darkened corner
'Cause I still miss someone

 

No, I never got over those blue eyes
I see them everywhere
I miss those arms that held me
When all the love was there

 

I wonder if she's sorry
For leaving what we'd begun
There's someone for me somewhere
And I still miss someone”

 

Elsewhere there is a curious description for a song Johnny wrote with another person. That song, Tiger Whitehead (from 1973), is listed as being with Nat Winston. An article at Bob Cox’s Yesteryear on February 24, 2014 titled Dr. Nat Winston Fondly Remembered as a Noted Psychiatrist, Musician says that:

“Martha Winston recalled that Nat often talked about the time he received a call from June Carter Cash urging him to treat her husband. Although Johnny would not agree to enter a hospital for rehabilitation, he was perfectly willing for Nat to come to his Hendersonville, Tennessee home for private therapy. Nat did this over a period of one year, visiting Johnny every day after work without accepting compensation. He did it out of friendship and love for Johnny and members of the Carter family. Also, since he was serving as Commissioner of Mental Health, he felt it would be a conflict of interest to continue to treat patients for a fee while he was serving the state.

‘Johnny Cash credited Nat,’ said Susan, ‘both in his biography and publicly on the Larry King Show for his medical treatments that restored his life and career.’

‘On one visit,’ Nat told him of James ‘Tiger’ Whitehead, a colorful Carter County mountaineer, mill operator and bear hunter (reportedly killed 99 bears during his lifetime). On another trip to Nat's cabin, he took Johnny to visit Tiger's grave on Tiger Creek Road between Hampton and Roan Mountain. Johnny was so impressed by the story that he wrote ‘The Ballad of Tiger Whitehead,' which he later recorded on an album. Nat had no idea that Johnny gave him credit as co-writer until one day when he received a royalty check. Listen to Johnny talk about Tiger Whitehead and sing the song.”

 

There also are some clearly mistaken attributions in the book. Gold All Over the Ground (from 1967) on page 192 is listed as with Brad Paisley. But Brad was born later, on October 28, 1972. Chinky Pin Hill (1970s) on page 248 is listed as with Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan, and Sara Watkins. Sarah Jarosz was born on May 23, 1991. Aoife O’Donovan was born on November 18, 1982. Sara Watkins was born on June 8, 1981. Those three women formed a band, I’m With Her, in 2014.

 

There is a 2016 posthumous book by Johnny Cash titled Forever Words: The Unknown Poems. And there is a 2018 album by that same name. The thirteenth song is Chinky Pin Hill  by I’m With Her. There is a review of it at RedGuitarMusic on April 23, 2018 titled Johnny Cash – Forever Words (Album Review). The song Gold All Over the Ground by Brad Paisley is the second one on the Forever Words album.

 

And To June, This Morning on page 320 (1970) is listed as with Ruston Kelly who only was born on July 31, 1988, and Kacey Musgraves, who was born on August 21, 1988. The song is the second one on the Forever Words album. There is a video of them from April 6, 2018 titled Ruston Kelley, Kacey Musgraves – To June This Morning (Johnny Cash: Forever Words).

 

The 1977 image of Johnny Cash came from the Library of Congress.

 

 

Brian Jenner raps about what he does as a speechwriter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was looking at a post by David Murray at his Writing Boots blog on February 4, 2026 titled Apparently, it takes diff’rent strokes to move the world of professional speechwriting. He had embedded a two-minute YouTube rap video by Brian Jenner from February 21, 2018 titled The Speechwriter Rap – Brian Jenner – Speechwriter. Text for the first minute is:

 

“I expect you’re here because 

    you’ve got a speech to make

You need to impress, there’s a lot at stake

You’re wondering – what can a speechwriter do?

That’s my job title; I’ll explain to you

On the phone, because that’s the inexpensive way

You tell me in your own words, what you’d like to say

I’ll then quiz you gently about your ideas

The journalist in me will calm all your fears

When’s the event? What’s the setting?

How many guests? Won’t that joke be upsetting?

With a clear understanding, I’ll be ready to go

Whoah! Did we agree on a fee? Oh dear no

Before that’s sorted, nothing begins

In business, we like it, when everyone wins

As a writer, for years I’ve scribbled and spoken

Check out my books, with your next book token

My skill is: I’ve written dozens of speeches

My, my. There’s a lot that experience teaches”

 

On October 19, 2025 I blogged about when Brian Jenner discusses the state of speechwriting.

 

An image of a man typing on a laptop was cropped from one at Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

An often parodied, thirty-three-word, unpunctuated poem from nine decades ago

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back in 1934 family physician and poet William Carlos Williams wrote a poem which I have shown above in a form that might have been taped to the door of an icebox. It even has a Wikipedia page.

 

Originally it was:

 

This is just to say

 

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

 

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

 

forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

 

It appeared on the wall of a building in The Hague. There is an 80-page 2012 book by Gail Carson Levine titled Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It: false apology poems that describes how to do a parody on pages 22 and 23:

 

“Imagine his wife coming downstairs in the morning after dreaming about those plums all night and waking up tasting them. Possibly she opens the icebox door (no refrigerators then) and finds a poem in the neatly washed-and-dried plum bowl. Maybe she laughs or maybe she goes for a very long walk or maybe she seats his breakfast and then writes her own false apology poem-

 

Which you can do too. Many poets have written them, following the form invented by William Carlos Williams. But don’t even consider writing this kind of poem unless you can get yourself into a grouchy mood. You will be wasting your time.

 

If you do decide to write, your poems should be mean, or what’s the point? Mine are, and William Carlos Williams’s is too, in its subtle way. He’s glad he got to those plums first!

 

You don’t need a title because William Carlos Williams has given you one, which can be repeated endlessly until your reader is completely sick of it. You also don’t need a new ninth line, because that’s always the same too: Forgive me. Notice that there are three stanzas, which you may agree are quite enough, and each stanza is four lines long, which you may think are four too many. The first stanza states the horrible offense. The second stanza describes the effect of the offense. The last stanza begins with ‘Forgive me,’ and continues with the false apology, because the writer is not sorry at all. There is no punctuation (how nice), and the beginning words of only the first and ninth lines need to be capitalized. The line beginnings and endings substitute for capital letters and punctuation. Normally, capitals and punctuation help the reader understand, so be careful to end your lines in a way that is very clear, unless you want to confuse your reader, which might be the wisest course.

 

Also, think about the rhythm of the lines. After you’ve cleared everyone out of the house, read your stanzas aloud to help you decide where to end a line. Funny poems are still poems.

 

You don’t have to follow William Carlos Williams’s form exactly if you don’t want to. I haven’t. You can add or subtract lines and stanzas. Or you can abandon the form completely and write false apology poems in your own cruel way.

 

For those of you who lack an ounce of mean and are reading this book only for research into the psychology of unpleasant people, you can write a real apology poem. However, even this will not be possible if you are too angelic to have anything to apologize for.

 

Whatever way you do it, have fun and save your poems!”

 

An example of her parodies (from page 8) is:

 

This is just to say

 

My bulldozer

has flattened

the thorny

hedge

which

you mistakenly

expected to sleep behind

until the prince came

 

Forgive me

I’m charging tourists

ten dollars

to visit the castle

 

She also has versions based on stores for children like Jack and Jill (page 14), Jack and the Beanstalk (page 28), Red Riding Hood (page 55), Rapunzel (page 62), and Humpty Dumpty (page 66), etc.

 

There is another 48-page book from 2007 by Joyce Sidman titled This Is Just to Say: Poems of apology and forgiveness. She has apology poems written by a class of sixth graders and responses to them. One example from page 8 is:

 

This Is Just to Say  

 

I have stolen the jelly doughnuts that were in the teacher’s lounge

and which you were probably saving for teachers.

 

Forgive me. They were delicious, so sweet and so gloppy.

Too bad the powdered sugar spilled all over my shirt

and gave me away.

 

By Thomas

 

I got started on this topic by finding a blog post from David Murray at Writing Boots on August 22, 2025 titled Friday Happy Hour Poem (and a true story). His parody is:

 

 This Is Just to Say, by Eddie [the dog]

 

I have eaten the chicken shawarma (I think it was)

that was on the picnic blanket and which my owner

subsequently made me understand you were surely

eating for dinner with your young daughter,

when I ran over from playing with the other dogs

in the middle of Smith Park because I smelled something good, and ransacked before you and the little girl knew what hit you.

Forgive me. It was delicious, so moist, and so savory.  

 

 

Did Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. really say to: “Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, he did. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (August 29, 1809 to October 7, 1894) was a physician and poet. That quote comes from an extremely long poem (over 5,900 words) titled A Rhymed Lesson (Urania) which you can read here. It was delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association on October 14, 1846. The entire 39th stanza (out of 62) says:

 

Once more: speak clearly, if you speak at all;
    Carve every word before you let it fall;
    Don't, like a lecturer or dramatic star,
    Try over-hard to roll the British R;
    Do put your accents in the proper spot;
    Don't, - let me beg you, - don't say "How?" for "What?"
    And when you stick on conversation's burs,
    Don't strew your pathway with those dreadful urs.

 

The length of that poem fits the definition for a megillah, a twentieth century slang term for:

 

“a long, involved story or account”

 

Megillah is the Hebrew word for scroll and originally was used to refer to the Old Testament Book of Esther that has 10 chapters, 167 verses, and 5,637 words.  It explains how the feast of Purim came to be celebrated. 

 

The 1879 portrait of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

Willie Nelson tells stories behind his songs in the book Energy Follows Thought

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At my friendly local public library I found and enjoyed reading a 2023 book by Willie Nelson (with David Ritz and Mickey Raphael) titled Energy Follows Thought: The stories behind my songs. It is big: 9.25” wide by 11.25” high by 1.25” thick, has almost 400 pages and weighs 3.83 pounds. On the back cover it says:

 

“I see these lyrics as little postcards from a long life. I see them as expressions of sadness or joy, fear or frustration, heartache and hope that are all part of our daily struggle to stay sane.”

 

Willie was born way back on April 29, 1933, so he is almost 91. He wrote Night Life, recorded it in 1960 and reissued in 1963. You can listen to it here on YouTube. The lyrics are:

 

“When the evening sun goes down

You will find me hanging round

The night life ain’t no good life

But it’s my life

 

Many people just like me

Dreaming of old used-to-be’s

And the night life ain’t no good life

But it’s my life

 

Listen to the blues they’re playing

Listen to what the blues are saying

 

Mine is just another scene

From the world of broken dreams

And the night life ain’t no good life

But it’s my life”

 

In the book Willie says:

 

“When I first met Ray Charles, who became one of my best friends, he said, ‘Willie, I gotta be honest. When I first heard ‘Night Life,’ I was sure it was written by a Black man.’ ‘Thank you,’ was my quick reply. It was one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received.” 

 

He also wrote the song Crazy, which was recorded by Patsy Cline and released in October 1961. It was a hit and reached #2 on the Billboard charts both for Hot Country and Adult Contemporary. Willie claims he saw Patsy’s husband, Charlie Dick, past midnight at a Nashville bar called the Orchid Lounge (next to the Ryman Auditorium which was home for the Grand Old Opry radio show). He played it for Charlie, who insisted they take it immediately to Patsy and make her listen to it, at about 1:00 AM. On YouTube you can hear both Patsy’s 2:45 hit version and Willie’s slower 4:01 version.     

 

The title song of the book begins with these verses:

 

“Imagine what you want

Then get out of the way

Remember energy follows thought

So be careful what you say

 

Be careful what you ask for

Make sure it’s really what you want

Because your mind is made for thinking

And energy follows thought”

 

My cartoon was modified from two at Openclipart: one of a scheming boy and one of thunder and lightning.

 

What rhymes with ‘parking lot’?

Astronaut rhymes with parking lot. Songwriters (and poets) have problems most of us do not. I have been listening to Reunions, the newest album by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. Only Children is one of Jason’s songs, which you can watch here as a live duet. One verse says that:

“ ‘Heaven’s wasted on the dead,’

 that’s what your mama said

 and the hearse was idling in the parking lot.

She said you thought the world of me

 and you were glad to see

 they finally let me be an astronaut.”

Only Children is discussed in an article from May 15, 2020 at NPR titled Jason Isbell on the past lives that inspired his new album, Reunions. He said:

“The first song that I wrote for the record, the one that really kicked it all off, was a song called ‘Only Children.’ I was over in Greece, me and my wife [the musician Amanda Shires] and a couple of our really close friends, we were over there on vacation. Both of my friends are writers. We were all just sitting around one night on this little villa on the side of a mountain and we were singing and playing and reading the work we were doing for each other.

That song came out of that situation. I started thinking, now that I’m a professional creative person, this doesn’t happen as much as it used to. You’d find yourself in rooms with other creative people just sitting around playing songs for each other. That’s pretty rare once you get older and your hobby becomes your job.

Interviewer: I’m reading the lyrics about living ‘hand to mouth and reel to reel.’ That is written from the perspective of a guy who’s made it to the other side, but as you say, you’re looking back at where you came from?

There was a period in time when everybody around me was desperate in a different way, and you could hear it in what they were doing. And even peopled who didn’t have the gift, or hadn’t done the work to be really good and writing songs or writing whatever, they still had that hunger. And nowadays, surrounded by people who are all making a living doing what they want to do, that hunger is kind of hard to find.”

“Heaven is wasted on the dead” appears on page 33 in  the title story of Steve Stern’s 1995 book Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (that originally appeared in The Greensboro Review in 1985).

On March 16, 2020 I blogged about another song from the Reunions album in a post titled Be afraid, be very afraid. But do it anyway, do it anyway.

An image of a parking lot came from Wikimedia Commons and an image of an astronaut’s suit came from the Library of Congress.   

Poetry and songwriting are the opposite of verbosity

On May 11, 2019 I had blogged about Does verbosity come from having lots of time to kill? The opposite of verbosity is making every single word count - so you can tell a story in about five minutes. Poets and songwriters can do this brilliantly. Recently I have been listening to the Bruce Springsteen studio album Western Stars. A YouTube video of the upbeat song Tucson Train is shown above. Bruce’s lyrics tell most of the story just in the first and third verses:

“I got so down and out in Frisco

Tired of the pills and the rain

I picked up, headed for the sunshine

I left a good thing behind

Seemed all of our love was in vain

Now my baby’s coming in on the Tucson train….

We fought hard over nothing

We fought till nothing remained

I’ve carried that nothing for a long time

Now I carry my operator’s license

And spend my days just running this crane

And my baby’s coming in on the Tucson train”

Another sadder song, Chasin’ Wild Horses has mournful pedal steel guitar along with the strings and  horns. You can listen to it here on YouTube. Lyrics in the second through fourth verses tell most of that cowboy story:

“Left my home, left my friends

I didn’t say goodbye

I contract out to the BLM

Up on the Montana line

Chasin’ wild horses, chasin’ wild horses

We’re out before sunup, in after sundown

There’s two men in the chopper

Two under saddle on the ground

In the evenings we’d hop in the pickup

Head into town for a drink

Make sure I work till I’m so damn tired

Way too tired to think

You lose track of time

It’s all just storms blowing through

You come rollin’ ‘cross my mind

Your hair flashin’ in the blue

Like wild horses, just like wild horses

Just like wild horses”

What could you edit out of the story you are telling?

Get out of a rut and add some pep

One public speaking trap for folks in marketing, sales, or training is that constant repetition eventually can lead to a bored, emotionally disconnected delivery. An article by David Stoppard in Presentations magazine back in 2005 discusses how to Put Some Pep Back Into Your Speaking Style.

One of David’s suggestions is to change your persona. I saw this done yesterday morning at the Toastmasters Leadership Institute here in Boise. George Jolley of Boise Club (aka Club 61) was Toastmaster for the meeting, but appeared as “Ralph Smedley” (the founder of Toastmasters International who died in 1965).

Recently I experienced getting in a rut. I was trying to finish the Technical Presentations manual at Toastmasters. The fourth project was presenting a technical paper (in 10 to 12 minutes). I had been avoiding doing it, although I previously had given that paper (as much longer presentations) four different times.

The topic of the paper was corrosion failure analysis of fire sprinkler systems. I gave it at the annual NACE Corrosion conference in New Orleans back in 2004, and also at the SIEO/NACE Winter Symposium in Sun Valley, Idaho in January 2008. Between those two presentations to corrosion professionals I also gave it at two different chapter meetings of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers.

I had to completely reorganize the presentation for the nontechnical audience at Toastmasters. My focus had to switch from specific details to general concepts.

There are other possibilities for completely changing the style of a presentation.

You could try giving part (or even all) of your presentation in verse. In a recent blog post Nick Thomas discusses Speechwriting in verse? Well, you could do worse! If you can’t write poetry, you can even buy it from places like the Poem Store.

The next step up from poetry is to add music and turn your presentation into a song. If that is not difficult enough, then you also could try singing a capella, like in this segment with Stan Rogers performing part of his song, Northwest Passage. It sounds like an ancient sea shanty, but Northwest Passage was the title song of his last album (released in 1981).

Or, you even could package a song as a rap music video (complete with karaoke lyrics), like the very geeky Large Hadron Rap. This video is about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) recently built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). It is pretty amazing to see an abstruse topic like particle physics explained in less than five minutes.

Storytelling: The Endless Tale

The Endless Tale is the title of a column on storytelling in the wonderful quarterly folk music magazine, Sing Out. It is written by Dan Keding, and also has the breathtakingly long subtitle of Storytelling: its events, tellers, stories, organizations, resources & points of discussion. Some of Dan’s columns open by telling specific short tales. Two examples are:

Spring 2008 - The old woman who outwitted death ( web link here).
Summer 2002 – A full cup (web link here)

The first column also contains a discussion of endings. The second column also contains a discussion of short (or small) tales, and lists four books that contain collections of them.

If you want to see more stories, then try this list of some storytelling web sites.

Folk songs are poetic tales set to music, like Richard Thompson’s Beeswing.