The Cherished Life

/ Get Cultured

/ Movies & Music

Images to Sing By

A musical, artistic portrait of Southern life

Before March 26^th, I had never heard of Hale County, Alabama, a sparsely populated region in the western part of the state. It was that very evening, at the Reynolda House Museum of Art in Winston Salem, N.C., that I learned about the work of William Christenberry, an American photographer and visual artist. Christenberry devoted much of his career to capturing and recapturing the changing facades of houses, barns, store fronts and more in Hale County, where he was born. Each summer, Christenberry would return to the same places he had photographed in years past to chronicle the passage of time as shown in the cracking paint of walls, rusted hinges of doors and falling shingles of roof tops. Though none of his photographs include people, viewing a series of Christenberry photographs evokes a sense of wonder about the history and life of each location, and—more specifically— what transpired there. His images are hauntingly beautiful.

It was these very images that inspired composer Ken Frazelle to create a series of his own. His music collection titled “Songs from the Rear View Mirror” seems to capture that same sense of wonder through moving, luscious piano melodies and stirring lyrics, complemented by the versatile, tactile voice of his collaborator, Laurelyn Dossett. To begin work on the project, the duo took a road trip to Hale County to view some of the locations in Christenberry’s photographs.

“The camera freezes only a partial element of something. When you travel you can fill in the expanses between the photographs and get a sense of what the space is around the images. It helps you to put it into context,” said Frazelle.

As Dossett and Frazelle took in the scenery and history of Hale County and the surrounding areas, Frazelle said that poetic ideas began to emerge, which then turned into texture and melody. He began to draw parallels between the Christenberry images and experiences from his own childhood. Some of these experiences appear in the songs as poetic verses, sung by Dossett, with an emotional sensitivity that was readily apparent in her performance. At times, it was as if her voice could be that of your own mother, singing you to sleep, or a young child on the verge of tears. At other times, her voice rose to be loud and clear, commanding the space around her in the theater.

“I handed over the piece to her, vocally, and her instincts were right on the mark,” said Frazelle.

Following the successful, moving premiere of “Songs from the Rear View Mirror” last month, Frazelle explains that the work will be presented again at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and in San Francisco, Calif. in the coming months. Additionally, celebrated opera singer Anthony Dean Griffy will sing the vocal portion of the work.

“I knew all along that Anthony would also be singing this music. [When composing the piece] I tried to utilize what I loved about both Laurelyn and Anthony’s vocal gifts. Laurelyn has more of a direct American singer/songwriter style, which is very expressive. And Anthony has the ability to create very complex characters on stage, and thinks very deeply about the content with which he’s working. However, both singers are great storytellers.”