'Unless You Get Their Attention...'

Last year, when I was driving back from a banjo class at the John C. Campbell Folk School, I composed a little song, melody and lyrics.  I had no idea what key I was in or what the notes were, but I fiddled with it on the piano and wrote it down, and Mary Priestley helped add the proper chords.  It followed pretty much a standard blues chord progression, with a little bridge which has a high note.  So this is where songs come from, I thought.  They emerge in your brain, and you need to pay attention and write them down in the time of it or they get lost, back into the ethers.  It's like catching and caging a dream.  This is what written language has allowed us to do.

"Roadkill Blues" has become a standard for Bazzania Girls Band, and people have asked for copies.  I asked Jim Wood to add the piano arrangement, and we've written it using the software program Sibelius.  I'll publish it like old-fashioned sheet music.

The song is fun, but roadkill isn't.  Roadkill is actually carkill, and carkill is only about a hundred years old.  (The phenomenon of trash buildup is about the same age; see the book Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash.)

I wrote Professor Roger M. Knutson in Michigan and asked him for a quote for the back of the sheet music.  Knutson is the author of Flattened Fauna: A Field Guide to Common Animals of Roads, Streets, and Highways.  It's an excellent book, packed with information about the phenomenon of roadkill, the animals affected, and statistics.  Did you know, for example, that swallows are the birds most frequently killed on highways?

Dr. Knutson wrote me:  "The book was written as an educational volume, and forty years as a teacher had taught me that humor is a good way of getting people's attention.  Unless you get their attention they are unlikely to learn much."  His book got my attention when I saw it.

Here's the quote he provided for the sheet music:  

"America's highways are probably the most forlorn animal habitat in the world.  The inhabitants don't move, don't eat and are barely two-dimensional.  Learning about them can only increase our desire to see fewer of them.  Drive with care."

Years ago, an organization called the Coalition Against Paving took the position that we had enough roads and didn't need any more.  It seemed a reasonable position.  Unfortunately, raccoons and opossums don't vote, and the CAP movement didn't catch on.  Americans don't like to put a cap on anything.