Folk and country lyrics have long doubled as poetry, from Appalachian ballads to Dylan’s Nobel Prize. This piece explores the connection, highlighting Texas songwriter Steve Feemster’s “Make Another Angel” as an example of how song lyrics read on the page. Visit https://stevefeemster.com for more.
Somewhere in a desk drawer, a shoebox or an old hard drive, there is almost always a stack of song lyrics that never made it onto a record. Take those lyrics out, read them on the page without a guitar or a melody behind them, and a surprising number of them still hold up as poems. Today I want to talk about that overlap between poetry and songwriting, and why it runs so deep in folk and country music, where the words have always carried as much weight as the tune.
Let’s start with where these songs came from. Long before there were recording studios, ballads traveled by voice, from one singer to the next. The old English and Scottish ballads that settlers carried into Appalachia were stories told in verse. People sang them from memory, and each singer changed them a little along the way. In the 1800s, a scholar named Francis James Child collected hundreds of these ballads in print and studied them as literature. They held up on the page for a simple reason. They were poems first, set to whatever tune the singer happened to know.
Country and folk songwriters kept that habit going. Hank Williams recorded spoken-word recitations under the name Luke the Drifter, letting his verses stand on their own without a melody. Kris Kristofferson studied English literature at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before he moved to Nashville to write songs. Leonard Cohen published several books of poetry before he ever recorded an album. And in 2016, Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature for creating new poetic expressions within the American song tradition. That award settled a long-running argument about whether song lyrics belong in the same conversation as poetry.
That said, the two forms do work differently, and it’s worth being honest about that. A song can lean on its melody to supply rhythm. A chorus that sounds powerful when it’s sung four times can look thin when it’s printed four times on a page. A poem has no band to help it out, so it has to create its own music through line breaks, through the sounds of the words, and through the space around them. Folk and country lyrics tend to survive the move from the stage to the page because they’re built out of plain speech, concrete images and a clear story.
Woody Guthrie is a good example. He left behind a large archive of lyrics that he never set to music. Decades after he died, Billy Bragg and the band Wilco wrote melodies for some of those lyrics and released them on an album called Mermaid Avenue in 1998. Those words had been sitting on paper for years. They were complete enough to read and strong enough to sing.
The same pattern shows up with songwriters who never became household names, and I want to share one of them with you. Steve Feemster is a Texas songwriter who has written songs and poems for most of his life. Some days he would finish two or three of them. At one point his son found close to 490 of these pieces saved on a single USB drive. Most of them started out as songs, and many have now been printed, one to a page, in a two-volume collection called Stone Angel.
One of his songs is called “Make Another Angel,” and it shows how easily a lyric can cross over into poetry. Here’s one verse.
Why didn’t he just make another angel Why in the world did he need you With all this hate sin and destruction Is there something he thinks only you can do?
Notice what’s going on in those lines. There’s no elaborate imagery and no clever wordplay. They’re plain questions, the kind a grieving person might actually ask out loud, and that plainness is exactly what gives them their force. When it’s sung, the verse works as a lament. When you read it silently, it works as a short poem about loss and faith, and that final question is left hanging, unanswered. Feemster still performs around Dallas-Fort Worth, and a performance of this song with Richard Bowren and Donny Dorr is on his YouTube channel, so you can hear how the melody shapes those same words.
If you’re curious about this connection, here’s a simple exercise to try with a favorite folk or country song. Read the lyrics out loud, slowly, without humming the tune. You’ll start to notice which lines carry the meaning and which ones are there mainly to fill out the melody. Pay attention to where a line naturally wants to break. Notice how often a phrase repeats. And ask yourself whether the story or the image would still make sense to someone who had never heard the song.
Some lyrics will lose something without their music, and that’s fine. Songs are written to be heard. But the ones that hold up on the page tend to share the qualities that make good poetry. They use honest language and specific details, and they carry a feeling the writer clearly lived through.
As more songwriters’ notebooks and digital archives come to light, collections like this one give us a chance to meet those words in a new way, one page and one verse at a time. To explore more of Steve Feemster's work, click the link in the description. Steve Feemster City: Red Oak Address: 109 Mabry Website: https://stevefeemster.com Phone: +1 972 268 5261