My Top 10 That All Songwriters Should Know

Musicians in the hood have been posting 10 songs that comprise a list of influential and essential songs that every songwriter should know. I’m nothing if not a conformist, so here’s my list!

America - Paul Simon
One More Dollar - Gillian Welch
The Great Pretender - Buck Ram
Coat of Many Colors - Dolly Parton
God Bless the Child - Billie Holiday, Arthur Herzog Jr.
Someone to Watch Over Me - George Gershwin
A Man Needs a Maid - Neil Young
Otherside of the Game - Erykah Badu
Mr. Bojangles - Jerry Jeff Walker
Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) - Woodie Guthrie

These aren’t in any order in particular, just in the order they occurred to me. America was a super easy choice, it’s one of my favorite songs of all time. It’s nearly impossible for me to sing it the entire way through because once I get to “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why…” I usually fall apart. It’s a brilliant and evocative song that perfectly incapsulates the restless mood of American youth at the time.

One More Dollar was another easy choice. Or at least, the artist was an easy choice. Gillian Welch is such a marvelous song writer and composer that to omit her would make the list suspect. She has so many list-worthy tunes, but I chose this one because it’s a great example of the power of her songwriting—starting with a simple, narrow theme and blossoming into a universal and timeless emotion. The repetition in the chorus, “One more dime…” also helps to reenforce the (eventually) tragic story of being stranded away from home.

I just love the Great Pretender. It uses basic songwriting conventions but comes together so awesomely. I don’t have any real reason for picking this one, other than that it rocks, especially the Platters version.

Like Welch, with Dolly there are a ton of songs I could have picked, but Coat of Many Colors means so much to me. My mom used to sing in our Yugo all the time. I grew up very poor and even when I was young this song always hit a chord with me. ”One is only poor only if they choose to be.” I also really wanted to choose Just Because I’m a Woman for its obvious feminist message and because it was a clear answer to Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man, but Coat of Many Colors won in the influential category.

God Bless the Child was a natural pick for me since I came to music from more of a jazz angle from the start. It’s significant because it’s one of the few songs that Billie Holiday actually wrote and it’s clearly autobiographical. I find that deeply personal songs like this one are typically the best.

Again, a list without a Gershwin tune is suspect to me. Someone to Watch Over Me just so happens to be my favorite song, but all of his tunes showcase what a brilliant songwriter he was. His songs are so influential that I think a lot of people forget that he even wrote them—they just became “standards,” and it’s hard to beat that.

I love Neil Young. I love his crazy voice, I love his political agendas and I love his lyrics. I thought of going for something like Old Man or Heart of Gold, which are also great songs but A Man Needs a Maid is, for me, a much more emotional and…well, deep song than a lot of his more popular ones. It’s essentially a very personal view into someone’s abject loneliness and aging and it does a great job of making one person’s story into a story that everyone can relate to. Also, the arrangement is phenomenal with dynamics that are so powerful you can feel the crippling anguish (YES!).

One thing I noticed when scanning other lists is a lack in black songwriters. Since I’m sort of a jazzhead and jazz and R&B are musical cousins I listen to a ton of modern R&B, jazz, soul and neo-soul. A lot of great songwriters came to mind: Jill Scott, Janelle Monae, Espranza Spalding, Nina Simone, Inda.Arie and Erykah Badu (all women? I dunno, I’m sexist). Honestly, I think if I did this again in ten years Janelle Monae would have a slot in my top 10. She’s absolutely one of the best, most revolutionary artists of the last decade. But, this is about Erykah Badu. I have been in love with Erykah Badu since her debut album Baduizm. Other Side of the Game is a story about a pregnant woman who is deciding whether to keep her baby while coping with her husband’s drug dealing. ”See me and baby got this situation/Brother’s got this complex occupation/And it ain’t that he don’t have education/Cuz I was right there at his graduation.” I love this song because it’s so much like poetry and so hopeful and also offers a unique perspective that is very different from the type of subjects most song-writers tackle (trees and birds and the country blah blah). Also check out Danger on World Wide Underground, which is a continuation of Other Side of the Game (and fuckin’ rocks).

Mr. Bojangles is another emotional song for me. When I was a child it was the song I always asked my dad to play for me, and since his death it’s still a really tough one for me to listen to. But it fits perfectly with my overarching theme, I think. Tragedy can be beautiful.

Finally, no songwriting list would be complete without a Woody Guthrie song, I guess. I’ll come clean, for me Woodie Guthrie (and Bob Dylan) is super overrated. Guthrie and Dylan are not great musicians, singers or lyricists but their songs are covered by a lot of famous people and I think that helped inflate their own status. That’s not to say that they didn’t write some great songs, I just don’t think they wrote enough to be “legend” level (For my money Dolly Parton is a better song writer and incredible story teller). That said, I do really love the song Deportee written by Guthrie (although I love the Dolly Parton cover of it the best, Old Crow Medicine Show has an ok version too). The song is about a plane carrying Mexican immigrants that crashed in 1948. Guthrie was struck by the fact that when the press mentioned the crash they referred to the passengers as “deportees” rather than as people with names and lives.

Anyway, that’s my list, and yes, it’s clear that I love downer music. I’d love hear what people think and what they would include on their own lists.