Charles Anthony Silvestri

teacher author lyric poet musician composer artist today and kitty are present in them he thought the street i'm j mcintyre and on today's program a visit with the author a silver thread the lyric poetry of charles anthony is still the street tony great to see you today it's great to be here thanks guy i interviewed many many poets over the past twenty years but as far as i know your the first lyric poets can tell you what that means we'll see a lyric poet would write poetry that specifically designed to be set by composers almost all poems have music in the morning that's why poets do what they do but not all poems are sort of designed specifically for being set to music some homes are are crafted to look a particular way on the page and when a composer would get that like ok well i do with that and how to weiss at that and they might be able to paint though the floral look of a poem or something you know based on the shape of the poem on the page i will be an example of a kind of combat

that isn't necessarily crafted for a composer but what a lyric poet would do is from the very beginning of the process created a poem that has music embedded in it in the choice of words the choice of owl color in a particular place thinking ahead to the choir that's going to sing that val we're in that melodic line with that towel go to try to give the composer of colorful words things that they can paint with music thinking about the lilt of each line making that an intentional part of the process from the very beginning i would say that that's what a lyric poet does as opposed to the broader definition of poet were all points on the lyrical it is just a particular source of the craft of three the act of putting art of poetry so which comes first the music or the words of both or either i had done it either way the most common

way that this whole collaborative process works is the composer will ask for a poem that's that's completed and if i've crafted the poem right there's plenty of music in the poem that the composer will find or be inspired by that's the normal way that the process works i would say nine times out of ten when i work with a composer they want me to finish the poem before they see it but there isn't the occasional a collaboration where for whatever reason the music is written first and on the composer needs me to craft a poem to go up underneath music that's already been created either they've written something in a different language that they would like to publish in english and so they need an english text or in the case of sleep to replace a lyric that had already existed that the composer couldn't use them the most fun kind of collaboration though is the kind when the composer and i can sit together at that music stand and the piano bench and really craft the piece together the music and the poetry come together at the same moment that those pieces are magical

and organic and the meek for fantastic choral works that's my favorite way to work but i rarely get to do that with composer friends all over the world it's very difficult to want to do that via skype or email i'm visiting the tiny sylvester he's the author of a silver thread the lyric poetry of charles anthony is still the street twenty the first time i've heard your work was gospel then ten years ago one of my kids had their incredible opportunity to perform at the leed center a work written by you and your best friend eric whitacre describe how that friend said take you down this path of writing lyric poetry yeah he he's a remarkable guy and i'm really blessed to to have been friends with him now for twenty five or more years i am when i was in graduate school i lived in los angeles and i'm a group in las vegas and as graduate students sometimes need to do i needed to take a break and save some money and so i moved home to live back with my parents in las vegas but i had been involved in choirs for

a long time and you can just knock the inquiries it's you know it's spiritually necessary and so i went to you will be in las vegas and i i joined one of their coral organizations you just you know because i'm a student at the time i just approached the choir director and said hey this is my experience in india which choir is good for me and he put me in one of their top choir is based on the number of years that i had been singing in the choir was an undergraduate eric whitacre and we had never met and he had never written any music but we hit it off we became great friends and brothers even just the closest friends that you can imagine and this was right at the beginning of his compositional career i am i remember being in that kind of pick up acquires that he would get us at two to create in the stairwells of the music building to try out cords and things like that as he was kind of learning his language his compositional language and after a few years after that he he he had a problem with a piece that he was writing and he needed your text problem

and he came to me and said hey would you would you help me solve this problem mr nyman i'm not a poet and historian by profession i teach history and i hadn't written any poetry at all and i told him i said you know i'm not a poet why do you want me he's like no i know you're good with words and i'd like you to help me with this and it was a latin exercise i mean he had a brief poem are in english and he wanted to set it in latin and so the first thing i wrote for him was a translation which became the choral piece called luke's a room quiet what does that mean to luke's means light and knew that and then our rumor means gold and there are two ways of rendering the word and in latin you can use the word at so looks at our maps would be light and cold or you can put a little tag on the end of the second word quiet so luke's our quest means little light and gold so that's that's the meaning of of luke's quite tiny tiny what to listen for in this recording this is a tender

little poem pots very short light warm and heavy as pure gold and the angels sing softly to the newborn babe and it's it's just very short arm and eric and i argued about what it was about and i think of course it's about baby jesus write what i thought either baby with the angels they would have a newborn with the angels be singing softly about him at the time eric's insisted no no it's not about and baby jesus is not christian at all on the bubble and i said yeah ok it gets performed at churches think it's performed at christmas time and so i mean everyone brave people bring their own theology to a concert or two a piece of music and i love that about art that that viewers or listeners can can haiti project onto a work of art whatever the need and so the thing that i learned about luke's room quiet and that i've tried to couldn't all of my poetry afterwards is the universality aspect of it

where i tried a scrubber a few layers of specificity oh way so that it's vague enough that it can be universal and that anyone experiencing inning amber of things can can latch their experience on to have an ever more personal experience so looks a room quake is is this tender sweet poem it's an exploration musically of the concept of light but eric does something really wonderful in this in this piece he he teaches the audience how to breathe in the first few measures and then he it's like a primer for the whole rest of the piece and so he creates this pattern of breath at the beginning of the piece and then as the piece progresses that ideas develop and the sounds develop and then at the end once he's trained the audience how to breathe at the end he pulls the breath away from the audience and he creates musically a

kind of tension where the audience is holding their breath until until he he says that they can breathe again you know i'm reminded of the bugs bunny cartoon where that the third the bugs bunny is holding his hand up and the singer has having to sing and never stop singing uno into his face turns blue and all that and the audience will literally hold their breath have seen it time and time again i've heard it and experienced at that after the piece is done and the director's hands are still up no one in the room breathe says not a single sound and then when the director's hands go down at the end of the piece oh the entire audience almost gasps for air because there or they weren't even aware that they hadn't breathed for fifteen seconds or whatever it is that but the piece insists on it it's really masterfully done and i think a lot of eric's pieces have that kind of structure where there's a primer at the beginning that that teachers the audience what the language of that soundscape is so that later when that soundscape changes or when that language is

altered in this revolt of the of the poem or of the piece then sparks up and it's very exciting a new low fat singing in arabic nice and he's

oh ain't is danny and used in all you ain't our out ain't that earl

oh whole road at ten day for in and at the end at in the

oss no no ah ho ha ah and in that's looks a room choir composed by eric whitacre from

his two thousand ten cd light and gold the lyrics are based on a poem by edward ash and translated into latin by today's guest tony's sylvester ii he's also the author of a silver thread the lyric poetry of charles anthony silva street so tony nice job with look the room quake but your partnership with eric whitacre didn't end there what's next shortly after that he had to sleep problem which is kind of a now infamous story let's hear it anyway he had set robert frost stopping by woods for a commission and the piece was performed an end and i got good reviews and then the robert frost estate contacted him and said you don't have permission to use this text and you can't ever perform it again and so on and so he thought perhaps the piece was dead and so then he asked me hey would you mind writing a new poem that replaces stopping by woods on a snowy evening and makes it sound like you that i had set your poem

instead of his it was a great challenge especially for somebody that i don't know what i was doing but it was one of those remarkable experiences where do all the serendipity is lined up and somehow lightning struck and in a matter of hours i had created the poem that now appears in his music and that piece called sleep it was a unique challenge was a fun challenge and it it taught me a lot about about how to approach this craft and it also set in motion a sort of series of events that led to you and i sitting here now and twenty or more years of writing poetry for composers all over the world i've had the most amazing mountain top experiences listening to my words being sung and enjoy it in the most amazing spaces around the world i guess to travel all over the world it has one of those things where on a whim i said yes to a friend who proposed a kind of enterprise that i didn't know what was going to happen as a result of it

and and and here we are i have the most amazing blessings as a result of it let's give a listen to sleep by eric winick her lyrics by tunnels or the street to meet us would listen to in this piece well my favorite part of sleep is is the sort of blooming climax toward the end the original text the robert frost text i'm stopping by woods has this man in the winter and he is is tempted to stop his journey and freeze to death basically that's the standard interpretation of that poem is lots of differing interpretations but the poem is so famously ambiguous whether whether he gets up and goes on his journey has miles to go before he sleeps or do you know is he is he losing consciousness is that why that line is repeated at the end i am and eric said it in this way that meditates at the

end on this word sleep on at its source to the highest heights and then retreats into almost nothing just as the choir repeats the words we choose like the last minute of the pieces is is what i always listen for an end to your life is thrilling it's usually performed with large choirs as a kind of concert ender we have multiple choir is doing their thing and then all the choirs come together and perform sleeping it's amazing with hundreds of voices and sometimes acquire surrounds the audience when they perform it on my been to some really really fantastic performances of it the day one on this

yeast is the arid air last the summer it will he's the it is ouch

ouch ouch is the oil seed hour long geez it is yale us in

the faust knees do as the need that he sees the honey ale dana's day

last pirate is being in the end is this as bed

by eric whitacre lyrics by tony self mastery performed here by the earthquake or singers on his cd light and gold to me that piece was performed at the university of kansas leed center many years ago now as i mentioned earlier one of my kids had incredible opportunity to be a part of that event it was such a magical evening people stopping me on the street saying that the cancer was very special for them and it was it was a really wonderful evening it was so special that tell you what that meant to you performing here at the university of kansas it was it was very special for me i just

moved to lawrence from los angeles where i lived for a couple of decades my wife had just passed away and my kids were little and i relocated to lawrence because my sister her husband her cue professors they lived here my parents are retired and moved here and i just needed to be where my parents were and i had made this trek i quit my teaching job i moved across the country from los angeles to torrance and you know i don't really know what my new life was going to be like and i was very grateful that i am the choir director's the high school directors here in lawrence got together artillery morton cabbage crispy know i was high and end free state high and they invited her to come and to do this thing with the two schools and with cuba's well and it meant a lot to me to have to have a little bit of my la life come and and live here in lawrence with me and so i could show the lawrence my new community my new home i'm what my life in los angeles was like in the kind of things that i was busy

doing and it was he was he was a wonderful time for me i would like to give him that i keep putting eric about coming back towards well i have to say as someone who knew you just a little bit from church and i remember thinking wait what does tony dealing with this link to having no idea like wait he wrote us that only i do get that does that fairly fell to fifth that how writing lyric poetry writing for someone else is different than a few words you just sit down and with a blank sheet of paper and write something create something out of whole cloth why contagious from my own experience staring at that white piece of paper the blank piece of paper is the most terrifying and time consuming part of the whole process whether i'm writing for myself or writing for four commission worker for someone else what i find is the more constraints are put on my creativity the faster things work right once i can

find the key to unlock the door to the place that i'm supposed to explore i i can explore like a kid in a candy store but it's finding the key to unlock that store and so a composer that's why i like working with tailor made poetry for composers they tell me exactly what they what it a poem in used to be in latin it needs to be about a bell that could the concert is for belle choir as well as for double chorus so it means to have this element it needs to have that element i'm seriously writing down all these notes and and that gives me a kind of rubik's cube that i have to solve it gives me a creative blocks to living and once i can figure out ok this sounds like a force stanza poem because that composers style was pretty dense and it's only a six minute work and so i kind of know how much tax to give them and to locate the poems to be about this they wanted to be about a bill o'reilly bellows made of bronze old bronze used to be used for weapons too so what if the bronze was mined out of the earth and made into weapons of war and then melted down and they made a bill out of the same problems

now that's a cool metaphor wrote that down and then it became the nexus of this poem and it you know all the while i'm thinking about sing ability and chanting through all of the lines that i'm writing to make sure that that it feels good in the mouth that it feels good to saying that they're non vowel sounds are crunchy consonants where they dont belong i've been in enough choir rehearsals to know what the choirs in a struggle with i try not to put s's at the end of lines because they'll never get the cut offs right and that's two weeks of rehearsal right there just to get that cut off know even owls at the end of a line especially a line about rising or soaring or something that the composer is gonna set with an ascending melodic line that leads the tenors on the sopranos screeching on i'm not a very good vowel i try to be mindful of those sorts of things that's all the kind of nitty gritty craft of making a lyric poem but it's that first it's that first staring at the blank page that's the real

terrifying part and i'll say ten times more terrifying is to write just for myself or i don't have a deadline i don't have another artist's creative output at stake where they've told me exactly what they need when i was a little kid if you'd asked me what my dream job would be i would've told you english butler and the third time i thought about this a lot and i think everything i wanted to be a priest at one point to i think every catholic kid thinks about that i think for me it's this deep need to serve others i became a teacher for that reason as well i love being a parent for that same reason and so i approach this writing of lyric poetry for a composer as a deep form of service to another artist or my job is to be completely consumed with giving him or her exactly what they need to be able to hit it at all park were in their compositional process i know that once that's done the lyric becomes came and when the choir gets the music

their job is to interpret the lyrics and using the inspiration of the music using the vehicle of the music to bring the message of the poem to the audience and so i get to have my glory at the end of the process when the choir interprets and sings my words i am sings the marriage of my words and the music the composer comes up with but early in the process i view myself as a servant of the composer and i make myself available for tweaking the poem if during the compositional process there's been even understands org she says this line isn't working for me can you really do it i can redo that that's that's the benefit of them commissioning me for a new poem rather than going with robert frost or shakespeare whatever those poems are fixed in space and time they can be altered or they shouldn't be altered so there's a benefit to getting a tailor made poem that can be crafted precisely to their needs it occurs to me though as a writer that you ever have moments where you think i know this is the

line as it should be at a while i've had those kind of fights on the fights disagreements with composers where sometimes out of a sense of cleverness or i think i'm being clever and i'm really married to a particular line that i can kind of put up a fight like no you cant alter that because because i really liked that life alternately i i give him because what is the audience need to hear what is the composer need to be able to communicate they are thought and then i'm supposed to sing sing myself in that process so it's a dialogue and i mean this with a composer right now who wanted to shorten sort of condense a poem that i had written and one of the words that the composer took out was a proposition which made the poem dramatically make sense and without that particular proposition it changed in meaning it changed the object of of changed the noun that was doing the riverbank read and answered appointed

make any sense and it actually takes the poem in a completely different direction and so i insist that i'm still working on it with that with that particular composer i insist that that i will insist that that word go back in or i'll read you that stands out to say what i wanted to say it in a way that's going to satisfy the number of syllables that the composer needs because of them love the musical process that occurred while composing so sometimes we have those discussions there are some composers that absolutely will not have that fight with me i always get to win and they never questioned what i write and they struggle with a rubik's cube to try to find the musical the musical language that i embedded in the piece i am i like tweaking i like hearing what the composer's doing i like being able to stay suggest alternatives i am and very often will come to an agreement about oh yeah this this this way is perfect because it satisfies where the melody was going on and it also satisfies me that

the poem that's left on the page it still works as a poem it's not so truncated are so amputated that it doesn't it doesn't make any sense anymore i suppose so yeah thats thats an often contentious dialogue but i enjoy having it that's that's why the clouds how collaborative process works i'm visiting with tiny silver streak of lawrence lyricist poet musician and teacher he is also the author of a silver thread the lyric poetry of charles anthony sylvester a silver thread has just been published by tia publications tony has a number of readings an event scheduled for this month you can find out more at its website charles anthony silva street dot com i'm j mcintyre my conversation with tony's the less tree will continue right after this set from the university of

kansas this is kansas public radio we're nine he won five lawrence and it won three oscar junction city we're also on the web at kansas public radio dot org where you can find many task apr prisons programs archived so if you missed my recent interview with laura's mother bring greenwood about her book the reckless both we made for my conversation about the fiftieth anniversary of woodstock you can listen to those any time while you're at kansas public radio dot org why not become a member programs like at our prisons would not be possible with our listener support your pledge keeps k pierre presents on the air show your support at kansas public radio dot org today on k pr presents tony thought the street lyricist poet musician and teacher he's also the author of a silver thread the lyric poetry

of charles anthony thaw the street tony have a number of readings an event scheduled for this month and lawrence to peak and the kansas city area you can find out more at his website charles anthony sylvester e dot com tony i want to go back again twenty years to the very beginning of your career as a lyricist and your relationship with composer eric whitacre if i were a composer which i would not i can't imagine having some trouble with the lyrics and thinking oh i'll turn to my best friend who has no experience in the matter whatsoever who's just a good friend and he's good with words sent to me and i told him he was crazy and then very shortly after that he wonders if the early part of his career where he was just sort of ramping up in and getting to escape velocity and he had won a very prestigious competition from the american choral directors association insists the commission called the brock commissions usually given to an up and coming composer it's a huge honor at a

fantastic wires going to get the opportunity to premiere this work in front of three thousand choir directors such a big deal and eric had won this competition and that this commission and he said to me and what you write is taxed here's my idea leonardo dreams of his flying machine go run with it and and again i've tried to say no this is too important in your career i'm not experienced i am not trained as a poet i don't know what i'm doing shouldn't you pick a real poet blah blah blah i i threw up so much flak to him and he's just my greatest fan and my best supporter and i really am blessed to have him he just insisted no i want you to do about what you did do it and even in that process you know i i i retreated behind leonardo himself i got out leonardo snow books and i translated all the parts of them that you were in which he referred to wings or flight or flying or or his dream of flying where the description of his machines or whatever and i crafted this poem that was all italian all leonardo his

words nothing of me any artist get back to me and said no this is not what i want i want you to write this poem i wanted to be in your voice so even early early early in our friendship he was prodding and insisting that i find my voice as a as a creator of poems and so i really have eric to thank for for the trajectory that that has led to the publication of this book and done and all the wonderful experiences i've had as reza here's leonardo dreams of his flying machine composed by eric whitacre lyrics by charles anthony saw the street oh i says sure a new new oh yes

or that is as well as you at the p tvs us

is there is pieces on gay game jane ah gees jihad jane

deeb crow south he rauf oh ah a bit wow he is seen as a town maine that

wright who sees hoon says it is ha see a need in an hour

with it's a season it's nice eighty eight

yeah how has been it's

been it's been the pc the polls but it's been dead that's leonardo dreams

of his flying machine composed by eric whitacre lyrics by tony sylvester e and j mcintyre today on k pr present i'm visiting a tiny for the street the author of a silver thread tommy you frightened very openly and honestly about the death of your wife julie talk about the role that grief has played in your writing or how youre writing helped you deal with your grief i think any creator will tell you that that it's important to process what's going on in your life in whatever medium you use richard painter if you're a gardener if you're a cook or a poet i'm with her i'm a musician and then you go through blue periods you know or blackened redfish your ears or whatever it is you know and it for me it took a very very long time i was busy i have two little kids to raise i had a full time job i am i'm kind of a cerebral die anyway and so i i grieved but i saw below me that a lot of the emotional turmoil

that i was experiencing because i have people relying on me and hundred students or recent every semester i had two little kids at home and people needed me to be a rock and so they'll do with all that later or do it out later and then eric whitacre it in fact really encouraged me right now to write poetry there's there's this good stuff here and it'll get it'll be good and so i tried i tried early on i think a year after julie died i wrote about i sat down stared at a white piece paper thinking that water might write what i'm i can write in and i couldn't get out of my head and into my heart and so i wrote a little latin poem called roe some oleander about a dying rose just when you get to know the rose she dies it's i wrote it in this sort of a metrical rhyming latin meter right this medieval meter he couldn't get that the porn couldn't be more intellectual right it's not emotional about it expresses in a human truth but for me it wasn't a catharsis he was an intellectual puzzle fast forward like for thirteen

years and and then i'm finally ready to express the pain the longing that the missing her the anger at at her at god and myself that cancer i am little by little composers they asked me for more and more personal texts and i asked him is it okay if i write about my grief experience and into a tv composers also be added that sounds authentic to me i am one piece that it was really meaningful is a poem called then and still and it was set by the composer susan labar it's a it's a sweet and beautiful piece that i attended the premier is a hard poem to ride everywhere love poem but then she said no idiots really more personal and i said are a few in person although personal and so i wrote a really deeply personal poem about about our experience together and susan set it in such a beautiful way and we were together at the premiere and i just i burst into tears it was so

magical and so perfect and i had that experience of wow i've written about my grief and i've hinted that vulnerably to another artist to interpret and then i've attended a performance of that of my heart having been illustrated by someone else and it was a it was a i can't tell you how moving that experience was and so i keep chasing that experience by writing more and more and deeper and deeper deeply personal poetry i'm going to london in october to attend the uk premiere of the work a new major work with eric whitacre called the sacred veil and it is a profoundly deep and personal expression of my grief my relationship with julie i'm there except her medical record the sort of cold clinical language from her cancer diagnosis and just read directly from her medical record it's i just can't

describe the experience it was premiered in los angeles and vagary and there was like ugly crying in the audience and then i think getting back to keep circling back to your original question about grief and creativity i think our society our culture doesn't do pre ferry well we we can't it's a third rail and we don't want to touch it and so when artists touch that third rail on all of our behalf it becomes immensely powerful people came out to be after that concert and andy needed to actually touch me to thank me for the work force saying what they couldn't say they needed to share their own grief stories i am i've got tons of emails afterwards when we record that piece and it becomes available widely available for people to listen to with headphones and go to it go to that place and remember that person or that relationship at that loved one that they lost i think i think there'll be a lot of catharsis from that work its it's very very powerful no i've not her performed but i didn't hear you

read that piece that are reading here in lawrence and i don't know if you remember my husband i attended as we were sitting right in front of you as i was ugly crying during that and feeling i guess i wish i'd sat farther back away because it so profoundly moving here and the piece is still evolving eric is famous for changing things just before the performance and so until we go into the recording studio it's you know it'll be evolving and who knows what will come of it but you know i hope immense good will come of it i think that would actually very proud i don't play the cancer card quote unquote often and when i do mentioned her and mentioned her experience i want to do so in a way that honors her and that creates something that i wanted to be on grief porn for lack of a better term you know to me i don't wanna capitalize on her experience or on my experience of grief but i

am willing to make myself and my experience public and vulnerable so that does what i do i create something so that people can project their own grief onto it and if my vulnerability can help someone else find catharsis or encourage them to create artwork that allows them even if it's just grabbing a black crayon and a red crayon and getting their rage out on a piece of paper it's helpful it's cathartic to do that and so i think it would be good work and julie would nod and say yeah please do that todd your work covers obviously a wide range of subjects from love and life to queen elizabeth two tsunamis but for many attending ear recently reading where the most surprising subjects that you tackled was a gun can you tell me the story of cold forty five this is the commission floor the turtle creek chorale in dallas and very fine and men's chorus end they were doing a program called peace keepers and they wanted

a series of texts they were in a commission several different composers they wanted me to write all the tax but have different composers set the different movements and then they wanted me to explore this idea of of being a peacemaker being a peacekeeper and what is that mean so one of the movement's is is a kind of riff on the beatitudes blessed are the peacemakers and and then multiple people who are peacemakers and how do we know that's one of the movement's another movement is kind of a gospel icon of a standup in and speak your truth kind of anthem to make peace and then it occurred to me that that the the peacemakers a gun as well that's a nickname for a colt forty five pistol so i called back the director xan and said you know i'd like to write a piece about a gun cycle where were our composers a visible hole composer again i know what i'm doing so it's never before and so you know i decided to write a

kind of country western piece about about peacemaker and then so i wrote the poem i am the kind of sexualized the va loading of a gun and and sent that to two sean and he said well it's a great poem but we can sing this poll and so i i reworked it again to just kind of be an anti gun sentiment and i knew it was a risk in my in my career posing style for that piece i kind of made out of over the top cheesy honky tonk he kind of country cowboy song it almost almost crossing the line in period perry being a cowboy song and i knew ok they're performing this in dallas and it's an anti gun piece either it was really risky and the choir had some issues with that and a weak they we talked about and they decided this was a fantastic thing and after all they were going to bring this to the audience the audience needed to hear this end and the day of the performance was

arm after the park and shooting and those kids from parker and had assembled i think it was in central park or somewhere to do this huge kind of concert and rally it was that day the whole nation was riveted on that event and in the concert that night has this this poem about about the peace maker the west was a wild and dangerous place the way things are going it was such a disgrace dark hearted scoundrels in nature untamed where the law of the land until the peacemaker came so i got me a peacemaker colt forty five you treat your going well and she'll keep you alive her smooth single action is patented best she's the revolver that tamed the wild west noah shaw told my enemies and some of my friends the game is all gone the war is at an end the engines are settled the rustlers deceased so

how come i still don't feel any peace and i got me a peacemaker colt forty five you treat your gun well then she'll keep you alive for a smooth single action has patented best she's the revolver the team the wild west and often i wonder as i wander alone passed one more ghost town another gravestone that having the peacemaker came with a cost we tamed the wild west with the deficit that was lost so word got me a peacemaker colt forty five you treat your gun well then should keep you a lawyer her smooth single action in his patented best she's the revolver that tamed the wild west now all its leftist myself and my going

alone as i ride to the setting sun nothing remains but my own peace to make there's just one more life for this pistol to take i had got me a peacemaker colt forty five are treated her well and she kept me alert but you know that she's come to the end of her quest she's the revolver that puts me to rest that's colt forty five by tony sylvester ii he's the author of a silver thread the lyric poetry of charles anthony thought the street k pr has a copy of the silver thread to give away go to our facebook page and leave a comment for a chance to win you can find out more about on his upcoming appearance is in laurence topeka an overland park at his website charles anthony saw the street dot

com tony i started out as our describing you as a teacher author lyricist composer artist and musician and in keeping with that you brought your concertina in with you today i ask you to play us out i'm kate mcintyre kbr prisons is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas yeah boom boom boom bang move