 Backroads is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. Do we have any sing-alongers this evening? Anybody who's in the choir? This song is for you all. This is a song where you get to sing along as loudly and as out of tune as you'd like and no one's gonna judge you. Except for maybe yourself, but be brave. I'm gonna sing a couple old labor songs to start off the evening. Part of a project I've been working on for a little bit over a decade. This song is called Hallelujah, I'm a bum. It's a celebration of being a bum, but it's kind of a sarcastic celebration. So, instead of choosing to be a bum, you're kind of forced into it, which is not always the best of circumstances. But we're gonna sing about it, which always makes everything better. Your part goes like this. Hallelujah, I'm a bum. Hallelujah, bum again. Yeah, hallelujah, you'll give us a hand out to revive us again. I know you're thinking that's really fast, but Troy's been recording me and it's actually like I'm half, I'm like half timing it right now for y'all. So, you wanna try it with me? Yeah, hallelujah, I'm a bum. Hallelujah, bum again. Yeah, hallelujah, you'll give us a hand out to revive us again. You guys got it. And they say, why don't you work like other people do? How the hell can I work when there's no work to do? Hallelujah, I'm a bum. Hallelujah, bum again. Yeah, hallelujah, you'll give us a hand out to revive us again. And I went to a house and I knocked on the door and they said, Scram bum, you've been here before. Hallelujah, I'm a bum. Hallelujah, bum again. Yeah, hallelujah, you'll give us a hand out to revive us again. And I went to a bar and I asked for a drink and they gave me a cup and said, there's the sink. Hallelujah, I'm a bum. Hallelujah, bum again. Yeah, hallelujah, you'll give us a hand out to revive us again. This is going out to my old boss at the crunchy health food granola store down in Wichita, Kansas. Who fired me for having mono in a right to work state? Y'all know what right to work state? It means you got no rights to work. It's cleverly named. Well, I love my boss. She's a good friend of mine. That's why I'm starving out on this bread line. Hallelujah, I'm a bum. Hallelujah, bum again. Yeah, hallelujah, you'll give us a hand out to revive us again. And they say, why don't you save all the money you earn? And I said, if I didn't eat, I'd have money to burn. Hallelujah, I'm a bum. Hallelujah, bum again. Yeah, hallelujah, you'll give us a hand out to revive us again. My name is Shannon Murray and I am a storyteller and a historian. I play folk punk music and utilize that medium to do just that to tell stories, to preserve history, to connect our past with our present, to connect political struggles with personal struggles. And what is your history with music? When did you become interested in it? When did you become a performer? It's actually quite a tale. I've always been really interested in music. I was running around making up probably horrible attitude songs from as long as I can remember. I started playing clarinet in maybe fifth grade or sixth grade and was told that I was terrible and that I should quit and do something else with my time. I also got told that I shouldn't be in the choir because I couldn't match pitch, so a lot of discouragement early on. I'm tenacious, so I kept doing those things. I got better with practice. I went to college for music, actually, for clarinet performance and then walked into the northern and open mic night and saw people playing and that just hit me. That atmosphere, that vibe, that everything that was there, I wanted to get up on stage and play and so I got a guitar and a month later I was up playing terrible Neil Young covers and another month later I was playing terrible originals and just kept working at it and practicing. This next song I wrote about Mother Jones who was part of the IWW and she was pretty formidable at the age of 83. She was called the most dangerous woman in America, right? She looks like your grandma. She's wearing like a high-collar dress, very prim and proper, but she was feisty, she got arrested a bunch. So this is going out to Mother Jones and all the folks who are fighting right now today using the similar tactics and putting their lives on the line to make the world a better place. And like a phoenix she rose up from the ashes abiding by no laws but her own. She stoked the flames of rage and sparks of hope just doing what she knew must be done. Oh Mother Jones, Mother Jones though she's the toughest gal you'll ever know. Oh, Mother Jones, Mother Jones oh don't you mess with her you ought to know. She fought tirelessly for the workers steadfast unrelenting in her aim there was no jail cell built strong enough to hold her and no matter what the cause she fought to win. Oh Mother Jones, Mother Jones oh she's the toughest gal you'll ever know. Oh, Mother Jones, Mother Jones oh don't you mess with her you ought to know. And she stared down all those men with their guns or no national guard was gonna spook her and with her hands over the barrel of a gun she dared them to shoot her. She was just doing what she knew must be done. Oh Mother Jones, Mother Jones though she's the toughest gal you'll ever know. Oh, Mother Jones, Mother Jones oh don't you mess with her you ought to know. She said we'll pray for the dead and we'll fight like hell for the living. She said we'll pray for the dead and we'll fight like hell for the living. She said we'll pray for the dead and we'll fight like hell for- I W-W songs where I was just hanging out with a friend reading Rise Up Singing which is a great book of folk songs and we found that song Hallelujah I'm a bum and made up a melody and we were singing it and laughing and it's so resonated with me this song about poverty and kind of the when you don't have the choice to be poor and it's forced upon you because you can't find a good job or you're not making enough money or you get fired and it was still really relevant and really new and fell in love with that song and started researching the I-W-W and found out later that my great-grandfather and his brother were both in the I-W-W so it's kind of a neat family connection made me feel like a little less alone in my politics and my love for those songs. I find a lot of comfort in history that is so similar to today in that the struggles that we're dealing with a lot of people have dealt with and have been dealing with for hundreds of years but it's sort of at the same time depressing but also there are these tools and this long and rich history of people fighting back and trying to create different systems and so these next two songs I got an artist residency through Springboard to go to Fergus Falls and live for a couple weeks on the grounds of the old state hospital there as a mental hospital and I've been doing research on patients who were there from about 1890 to 1920 and researching their lives and sort of looking for the connections kind of the confluence of poverty and trauma and mental health and work and so kind of looking for a different working class people's lives and looking at their stories and sort of trying to make sense of it and it's a very valuable thing to do of course there's so many pieces missing because these people were poor and often illiterate or at least illiterate in English which is the language I speak I found some really good stuff written in Norwegian but I don't speak Norwegian and so I've been trying to piece together these lives and I found some really great stories and this first one is about this woman Anna whose husband died, they were doing pretty well they had the farm you know securely in their names a lot of rare, a lot of immigrant farmers lived more on the edge and they were doing alright and then her husband died tragically in an accident and two years later she was losing the farm and she was institutionalized and she ended up passing away of tuberculosis in the mental hospital and it's sort of her life was one that stuck out a lot to me because I connected with it it's similar to a story in my family it was also interesting in that her story was so common there were so many people who lost their farm and then were institutionalized and so I kind of wanted to write this song a lot of it is fictionalized because like I said there wasn't a lot of information so I had to use my imagination which is something I'm not always comfortable with in the context of songwriting I like to find the truth of things maybe in all areas of life so part of this is sort of what I imagined happened and I'm hoping you do more research and see if I'm right close my eyes I don't want to see it how close the edge is you know we can feel it won't win an early lower plan for the year we get ahead coming home again but you never came land that we had found we are buried and it's deep in the ground accident the precipice we found held my own for two whole years and then things took my baby pieces he says I gotta rest my pretty hair becoming home when I am well and it's crushing me and I cannot eat I can't sleep oh and when I do all I do is dream of running away back to you try out some dreams they never come true there are some dreams they're always falling through I named Otto who was a painter and he got lead poisoning developed dementia or memory loss and all kinds of other problems from that lead exposure and his story was pretty hard to read and I kept just thinking about his wife and sort of like that slow decline and I was thinking a lot about his family and sort of how that played out and so I ended up writing this song from the perspective of his wife and a lot of it's fictionalized I don't know the conversations that they have in my mind this is how it went and I miss you all of the time even when you're right there next to me and I didn't know I could feel like this I didn't know I could feel so alone and I know we said we would do this until we were dead but you're always standing next to me walking right next to me breathing right next to me but mostly you're just falling down I miss your beautiful face I miss your beautiful I miss all the things that we said we'd do someday when we finally had the time you said be strong but I didn't know you meant this strong walking right next to me breathing right next I had a big responsibility to tell someone else's story and I'm looking back in history at someone like Lucy Parsons or this project I'm doing with the Fergus Falls State Hospital talking about the lives of people who were at the mental health hospital there it feels like a big responsibility to tell those stories but I try to approach it from finding a place where I can connect authentically with my story and I think those opportunities are there often I think it's also interesting so often that autobiographical singer-songwriter thing is sort of fabricated I've had friends who've written really amazing songs and I want to talk to them about this thing that happened in their life and they just actually that didn't happen PJ Harvey I think is a good example of that she just makes up characters and personifies them and so people think it's autobiographical but it's actually sort of a fictional product of her brain which is another way to approach it I've always been attached to approaching it from what I'm feeling and what I experience this next song is a it's a breakup song which I know you traditionally write after relationships end but I wrote the first verse after a first date and then I just kept writing verses until the relationship ended because I knew it was going to end obviously when I was right and then I started wondering if I had manifested it myself by being so certain but either way I got the song written so it's not a total loss right you can't make that stuff up what's it like to be a musician in northern Minnesota I love it I choose to live here I made a very conscious decision to move back here when I was touring a lot I took a break from music, lived here started back to touring I think it's certainly in some ways would be easier to go to a bigger city where there's a set scene where you can make connections but for me living here feels authentic it's where I'm from, it's my community going outside of that can both be affirming and that people are often shocked like where do you live, oh did you choose to no actually I'm from there why don't you move to the city and sort of repping for your small town and letting people know it's okay to be an artist in a small town and certainly we're blessed with a bunch of amazing artists visual artists, writers, musicians but yeah it is challenging and it's also rewarding to let people know that their conceptions of small town living in northern Minnesota are wrong this is the title track of the last album that I just released called Collecting Anchors and it was a really healing and amazing project and I got to record with a bunch of other musicians and the whole process was really really great and I'm really proud of what we created and this song is the title track and sometimes I write songs and I don't know what they're supposed to teach me and then one day it sort of just comes to me like oh yeah that's why that song is here I don't know where they come from but I'm really appreciative that they do and the song is sort of for me is thinking about heavy stuff like the traumas of our lives sort of being anchors and I was thinking about them for so long as like this negative thing like holding me back and then one day I was thinking about how in so many ways they've held me in place and how I can use those anchors to stay where I want to be in life I can write a song about an issue that's really sensitive and people will get very hot and will yell and won't be able to come to any sort of resolution but if I can sing about it in a way that asks more questions and presents more thoughts and I can get at that issue in a way that people are open to listening and hearing and connecting I think ultimately that music is a way we connect with each other and with ourselves