[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 59 (Monday, May 3, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Page S4736]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   FAMOUS MUSIC CORP/HORNBUCKLE MUSIC

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I wish to talk about songwriters. Italy 
has its art, and California and Oregon have fine wine, Hollywood has 
movies, Dalton, GA, has carpets, and Nashville has songwriters.
  There are a great many beautiful songs that come from Nashville--
poems--but I want to especially commend to my colleagues a new song 
called ``Letters from Home.'' You may hear John Michael Montgomery sing 
it. It is a poem that touches the heart of Americans at this time. It 
is especially meaningful with the men and women of our military in 
Afghanistan and Iraq and all over the world fighting for freedom.
  This is a story about their loved ones awaiting their coming home. 
The last stanza goes like this:

     I hold it up and show my buddies
     Like we ain't scared an' our boots ain't muddy
     But no one laughs 'cause there's
     Ain't nothin' funny when a'
     Soldier cries.
     So I just wipe my eyes
     Fold it up and put it in my shirt
     Pick up my gun and get back to work
     And it keeps drivin' on, waitin' on letters from home.

  That song was written by Tony Lane and David Lee. I saw them a couple 
weeks ago at Belmont University in Nashville. Belmont celebrated the 
introduction of a course on ``Poetics in Country Music,'' to explore 
literary criticism of song lyrics as we do for other poetry. I salute 
Belmont University for its leadership.
  When Johnny Cash died, the New York Times streamed a headline: ``Poet 
of the Working Poor.'' Bob Dylan once said Hank Williams was America's 
greatest poet. I said on the Senate floor, if that is true, why don't 
we have English professors somewhere criticizing their poetry? They are 
all up in Northeastern schools writing good criticism of mediocre poems 
while we have poets of the working poor and some of the best poets in 
Nashville writing poems.
  ``Letters from Home'' is yet another great poem from Nashville 
songwriters and one more example of why Belmont University's pioneering 
work to discuss ``Poetics of the Working Poor'' is a good idea.
  There might be more in common between Shakespeare's sonnets and Hank 
Williams stanzas than one at first might imagine.

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