Professional objectivity aside, writers tend to identify with their subjects in an almost possessive sort of way.
I think, based on conversations I have had, that it’s true for others in this business. It certainly is for me and was especially so when I was writing more about music and musicians. An interview and profile of someone whose work I admired often led to an association much like that with a favorite sports team, but even more personal.
It can become akin to collecting autographs, I guess – ‘I got so-and-so, last week. Who did you get?’ – or wall-mounted trophies from successful hunting trips. At its worst, it devolves to name-dropping: ‘I am significant because I interviewed someone famous.’
I’ve tried to keep it somewhere between that and the obsessive-fan level: professional, respectful, but with a much deeper connection than, say, with someone whose songs I just happen to hear on folk-radio from time to time.
Those I’ve met, talked with and, if only on a superficial interviewer-interviewee level, got to know, have become – not in an ownership but an identification sense – mine.
And one of mine died last week.
New England-based singer-songwriter Bill Morrissey, one of the most literate of the generation of songwriters who emerged on the folk scene in the 1980s, died in a motel room in Georgia of what was determined to be heart disease. He was 59.
Bill had just played a house concert and was taking a break from driving north to visit his mother in the Philadelphia area and then returning home to New Hampshire, according to a number of published reports and a statement on his website.
His was never an easy route.
As Bob Franke, a legend in folk-music circles, shared on Facebook: ‘Learned today of the death of Bill Morrissey, a fine songwriter and one of the funniest performers I have ever enjoyed listening to. Bill traveled a difficult road and wrested a great deal of grace from it.’
It was difficult, indeed. As Bill, himself, wrote and posted on his website:
‘Most everybody knows that I’ve had some rough sledding for the last few years including my well known battle with the booze. A couple of years ago I was diagnosed as bipolar and I am on medication for depression but sometimes the depression is stronger than the medication. When the depression hits that badly I can’t eat and I can barely get out of bed.
‘Everything is moving in the right direction now and throughout all of this I have continued to write and write and write. I now have enough songs for 2 new albums and I am very much looking forward to getting back in the studio.
‘My health is better than it has been in a long time. I look forward to getting back on the road and seeing familiar faces and old friends who have stuck by me.’
It was the writing that attracted many of us – reviewers often said Bill Morrissey’s songs are like novels, and he eventually wrote one: ‘Edson.’ It was the writing and the humor, and Bill’s sense of it was wicked.
Of his mixed ancestry, he often said: ‘I inherited the charm of the poles and the self-discipline of the Irish.’
On teaching his dog to drive: ‘It was like he was born to drive in Boston. He was cutting cabbies off, giving people the paw. He didn’t care.’
The combination of the two – sensitive, honest and highly literate songs about ordinary working folks struggling to get along, and an impish, irreverent, unable-to-keep-from-saying-it-no-matter-how-outlandish sense of humor – made for some unforgettable performances.
‘It comes from just growing up and playing in bars – bad bars – where it didn’t really matter what you said,’ he once explained to me. ‘You were just trying to have fun yourself.’
Nothing could have been more fun than what has been described as Bill’s ‘electrifying’ and ‘break-out’ performance at the 1985 Newport Folk Festival. Tom Rush, another folk legend, introduced Bill as ‘one of the best singer-songwriters, not only of the ’80s, but forever.’
Bill, in perfect ah-shucks mode, said of his first song, ‘I learned this off a Tom Rush 78’ – for those of you who listen to downloaded-only music, that’s 78 as in 78 rmp recordings, long before vinyl was vinyl.
Hilarious. Then he sang one of the sad, gripping songs he was soon to become known for.
I was at the ’85 Newport Folk Festival, the first at beautiful Ford Adams State Park on the peninsula after a 15-year hiatus in the aftermath of an anti-Vietnam War demonstration.
‘Look at all the boat people,’ Bill said of the expensive sailboats in the harbor on that simply gorgeous summer afternoon. ‘They can afford boats like that, but they’re too cheap to pay the cover.’
Then another song about working the night shift – or rather, not working: sitting Tuesday night out in a local bar – then another song and another. The audience was his.
He didn’t care – or so it seemed. He grinned, and with the 1970 disturbance well in mind, said, ‘Let’s trash this place.’
Bill’s guitar playing was little more than adequate. His voice, far from pure, was compared to that of Bob Dylan or Tom Waits. I once used a line from one of Bill’s own songs – a reworking of the traditional ‘Handsome Molly’ – to describe it: ‘like the wind hung up on barbed wire.’
But the voice was perfect for the song.
‘When I first started playing, I had two notes – I had my high note and my low note. I learned out of necessity to phrase a song,’ he told me. ‘As my voice expanded, I had that phrasing as a foundation.’
I asked him, rather gingerly, about the drinking references in many of his songs. He shrugged it off. ‘That’s what people do. It’s real life.’
How can one explain some of life’s coincidences – if anything can truly be called a coincidence?
In the aftermath of my recent move, I literally stumbled across a box that was sitting under another box beneath two more in storage for years. When I opened it, I discovered my dog-eared, blue notebook from that 1985 Newport Folk Festival. I hadn’t opened it for two decades.
In another box, I came across a file of old newspaper articles, including ‘Bill Morrissey – ‘forever’ folksinger,’ which I wrote for the Easton, Pa., newspaper in 1991.
Then I listened to his songs again: ‘Handsome Molly,’ ‘Small Town on the River,’ ‘Turn and Spin,’ ‘Off-White,’ ‘Birches.’
Rest in peace, Bill Morrissey. Thanks for the songs. And the stories. And all the grace you wrested from a hard, hard road.
