 I don't want to die like James Agee in the back of some taxi on the run. So much time wasted, the feast of life just tasted, then it's gone. But the life that he was living, and the gift that he was giving were all. The bad comes with the good. The madness and love, it's all or none. Arby Morris has had, as he puts it, a long and ever-changing relationship to James Agee and his work. You might say that Morris has been conducting an extended study of Agee. He's written a one-man play about Agee's life, grieved for Agee in the first verse of his song, Take That Ride, and helped found a part in Agee's honor in the Fort Sanders neighborhood where both men grew up. Agee left his first mark on the songwriter's life when Morris was just a boy. Morris was 10 or 11 when his father took him to a screening of the movie based on Agee's autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family. Despite his history with Agee, Morris had no inclination to write a song solely about him until he was approached by the University of Tennessee Libraries to participate in a project called Boundless, Artist in the Archives. The project brought Morris' interest back to a death in the family, and he was soon immersed in the James Agee Archives at UT Libraries, soaking up Agee's handwritten letters, journals, and manuscripts. Agee has almost an oceanic way of looking at things, and he will view it, he sometimes, rather than seeming to be sure of himself or whatever, he will view it from opposing views, and he'll cover all that. And just the, I think that's a big influence, just to say, get a bigger picture of this, you know. Please join me now in making you welcome RB Morris. Thank you. Morris had found his springboard, lifting up the material into a unique song experience. In RB's song, The Story of the World, we encounter the spirit of Agee himself. Calling his song a co-write between he and Agee, Morris draws on the two versions of A Death in the Family, the original 1957 edition and a new edition reconstructed from Agee's drafts. Agee's phrases and ideas shimmer in and out of RB's tune. Characters from A Death in the Family make appearances, and halfway through, Agee himself becomes the main character. A melodic shift and the narration moves from first person to third, much like, as Morris says, the prologue and book proper of the original A Death in the Family.