BILL MORRISSEY
Backward and Forward
by Bruce E. Baker

Bill and John

On a mellow, overcast Saturday after his first performance in Charleston, South Carolina, Bill Morrissey faces a delightful dilemma: What do you do when things are going well, when those couches and Fords have become motels and planes? Known for well over a decade now as one of the finest craftsmen of songs, he could continue to turn out gems like "These Cold Fingers," "Birches," and "Winter Laundry." That might satisfy some people, but not Morrissey. "I've got to make it interesting for myself," he says. "If you can't make it a challenge and do new things, I'd rather pump gas." So, what direction does a folk singer go in to find new challenges? Backward, to his roots, and forward, to see where the songs lead.

Going backward for Morrissey means going back to 1966 and his teenage years in New England. Even then, Morrissey knew he wanted to write songs. "Yeah," he recalled, "I had a guitar for about a year, a year and a half or so. And the reason I bought a guitar was to teach myself how to write. I was never interested in hot licks or anything. I wanted to learn how to play well enough to do the songs." In those pre-Windham Hill days, though, there just were not too many models for up-and-coming fingerstyle guitarists. Then in 1966, a month or so after Mississippi John Hurt died, Morrissey picked up a copy of his album Mississippi John Hurt Today [Vanguard]. The record stayed on the turntable for months. And John Hurt's music is still in Bill Morrissey's music 30 years later.

You can hear Hurt's influence primarily in Morrissey's guitar work. "John anchors it with his thumb," explained Morrissey, "and then works around the melody on the treble strings. And sometimes he's hitting the melody, and sometimes he's hitting harmony notes. That's affected the way I arrange the guitar lines behind my own songs. You have enough happening on the treble strings that you're hinting at the melody, but it doesn't get in the way of the lyrics."

The idea of doing an album of John Hurt songs has been with Morrissey for a few years now. "I'm sort of amazed that nobody has done an album of John Hurt songs before," said Morrissey. So he and Peter Keane and Ellen Karas worked out some new arrangements for 15 of Hurt's masterpieces. "I can do the songs just like John Hurt, but what's the point?" Morrissey said. "I wanted to make it sound like a Bill Morrissey album, bring my stuff to it, but still be very respectful of John's stuff, and maintain that sort of bounce and lilt that he had and make it swing." And what's the point of that? For Morrissey, it's simple: "I just hope some of the singers in their twenties, many of whom don't know where the music comes from, might hear something off of this and go back and buy a John Hurt album. That's what I did."

Going back to his roots is one way Morrissey keeps things interesting; going forward into writing novels is another. He wrote his first novel, Edson, in motel rooms and tour buses as he traveled the country. The move from writing songs to writing novels was less a leap than just one big step. "I originally thought Edson was going to be a song," Morrissey said, pausing, "but the more I looked into it, the more I wanted to explore it. And I needed more than four minutes to do it." For a songwriter known for making every word tell, writing a novel posed new challenges. "Well, with a song, because you're so limited by its size and the time, you have to evoke more and hint at what's going to happen. And with a book you have that much more room to really walk around and explore things from different angles. After 25 years of trying to compress it into three minutes, it was both liberating and terrifying to have all this room."

A new novel, Imaginary Runner, is in the works, and Morrissey is settling into his role as novelist now. The main character differs from Henry Corvine, the road-worn musical protagonist of Edson. "He works in high-tech in New Jersey," said Morrissey, "doesn't smoke, drinks moderately. So it called for a lot of imagination. He's a blues fan, but he's just sort of a fan." Certain themes, though, are bound to find their way into Morrissey's writing, whether the format is a three-verse song or a 300-page book. "How people make their way in the world, especially as they get older," he pointed out, "is fascinating. When you realize the dreams you had in your 20s just aren't going to happen. And what kind of deal can you make for yourself? What's the best that you can get out of it? And everything's a trade-off. What are you willing to pay in order to get a degree of happiness?"

But there's no need to worry that Bill Morrissey the songwriter is fading away. "I consider myself a musician as well as a writer, but I don't really write songs when I'm working on a book. They come, ideas come. I might write a verse and a chorus, and then I'll put it down on tape and forget about it. So at the end of a book, I listen to this tape, but that gets the songwriting juices flowing. And then the new ideas start happening." So, with guitar, microcassette recorder, and laptop, Morrissey is heading for his first winter tour of Alaska. A new album is just out, a new book is almost finished, and Bill Morrissey keeps on moving forward.