Over the past couple of years I have been contributing music to the Robert Kevin Townsend play, Angola Blue. This has been a real labor of love. Studying music of the Mississippi Delta was at first an awkward fit for a classically trained composer like myself, but has grown into a passion and has freed up my thinking as a songwriter and a composer. Throughout this project I have had the pleasure to collaborate and learn from some of the best and most authentic songwriters in Nashville. I hope you enjoy the demos here on the page and maybe some time in 2010 I’ll be telling you about the play being put up. Here is a synopsis of the play:
A young man’s haphazard journey through life reveals that his ultimate destination has always been close to home. ROY is a small-town anti-hero unhappy with who he is and what he has accomplished thus far in his life. His desire to become a great musician hasn’t met real drive and inspiration until he loses everything, and it will be the one thing that will ultimately save him.
Things take a turn for the worse when an accident lands him in a brutal prison farm serving time for manslaughter. Angola is an expansive, eighteen-thousand acre penal farm on the banks of the Mississippi. Although surrounded by killers, Roy ultimately finds refuge in the open air, working in the vast cotton fields. He begins to educate himself, honing his skills with the aid of an unlikely role model, an elderly black man, a murderer, in a time of great racial tension. Against all odds, he maintains this friendship while learning the meaning of respect, loyalty, and perseverance. His work ethic and love for his craft reflect his monumental growth as a musician storyteller, but more importantly as that of a man, a good, honest, reverent man with a well deserved shot at redemption.
This brings us to the third act where Roy is put to the test. Paroled after thirteen long years, he returns home to face some old demons and get on with his life. Tension mounts when a longtime rival turns up the heat, hell-bent on keeping him down. No stranger to adversity, he turns to the one thing that never failed him, his music, and the mentors that shepherded him along the way.
Journey through the deep South with our hero who survives a lifetime of hardship to become a better man, all the while exploring the living history and original roots of the Delta blues.