As the Shoe Bird Flies
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By Shannon Maughan -- Publishers Weekly, 1/8/2009
The Shoe Bird (Brilliance Audio, Sept. 2008), a new musical adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty’s only work for children, has received a 2008 Grammy Award nomination for Best Musical Album for Children. The fable about a colorful cast of birds who switch from flying to walking around in shoes, is performed by the Seattle Symphony, featuring narration by Jim Dale, and vocals by the Northwest Boychoir and Girls of Vocalpoint! Seattle.
The project represents a type of enthusiastic collaboration between the audiobook and music worlds that listeners may hear more of in the future. Appropriately enough, the recording’s flight to the top began in Welty’s home state of Mississippi. That’s where Mississippi Boychoir director Margaret Thomas hatched the idea to commission the work, back in 1999.
Thomas approached native Mississippian Samuel Jones, the current composer in residence at the Seattle Symphony, and someone who had known and worked with Welty in the past. “Margaret wrote me a letter suggesting The Shoe Bird as a commissioned work that they had wanted to commemorate an anniversary of theirs,” he recalled. “Well, if you know the story, it’s actually a 23,000-word novella, chock full of puns and allusions,” he added. “It seemed it would be more for adults than for children and I just didn’t see how I could do it,” he added. He turned down Thomas’s offer. But Thomas wouldn’t take no for an answer. “She wrote me back one of the great letters I’ll ever receive in my life,” Jones noted. “She told me that The Shoe Bird would turn out to be one of my most beloved works and insisted, ‘You’re the one for it.’ ”
After taking a closer look, Jones found the tale could be shortened and he began to write lyrics for the choir and compose the score. “I just fell in love with the story,” he said. He felt the work tied in directly with Welty’s special role in the literary life in Mississippi.
Jones had previously spent time with Welty when he created The Trumpet of the Swan, a musical adaptation of her short story. “It was a great pleasure,” he said. “She loved it and narrated it on occasion”. But while they were working on the project, Jones says he was too sheepish to mention to Welty that they had actually met once before. “When I was a freshman in college [at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss.], a friend of mine recruited me to help him write a skit,” he recalled. “We debated whether it was any good or not and my friend suggested we go ask Ms. Welty her opinion. There we were two college kids knocking on her door. She invited us in and read our skit and offered some comments. She never once gave us the feeling we were out of place, which we surely were. It was just an example of her trademark graciousness.”
Welty granted permission for the Shoe Bird adaptation, but, as the work was progressing, she was too ill to participate in any way. “She never got to hear the piece and that breaks my heart,” said Jones.
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Jim Dale performs The Shoe Bird |
Dale suggested that Schwendener meet with Tim Ditlow, v-p of Brilliance Audio, to discuss how marketing, packaging, distribution and other business facets of the project might work. Both Ditlow and Schwendener live in the Westchester, N.Y. area and Ditlow’s long history in the children’s audio world, and his former role as publisher at Listening Library (home of the Harry Potter titles and other Dale recordings) made him a logical go-to guy for advice on The Shoe Bird’s next phase. “The more I talked with Tim, it seemed to make sense to put The Shoe Bird into the market via a spoken-word label,” Schwendener said. “There are so many music recordings available out there, and the music industry has faced such contraction. By going with Brilliance [an Amazon company] we knew we could get the title placed in both the music retail and spoken word categories on Amazon.”
For Ditlow’s part, he couldn’t be more thrilled with how things turned out. “This project literally landed in my lap my first week on the job at Brilliance [in February 2008],” he said. “We quickly realized that we had a new Peter and the Wolf on our hands, which doesn’t come along very often. The Shoe Bird soon took on a life of its own.”
Once Brilliance acquired the work, Ditlow set about finding art for the packaging. He went right to the source—Welty’s book, first published by Harcourt in 1964 and later by the University Press of Mississippi, which had been out of print. After a bit of sleuthing, Ditlow was able to contact the original illustrator, Betty Krush, now in her 90s. Krush gave her approval for a composite piece of art derived from her original artwork to serve as the new audiobook cover. In addition, Brilliance’s interest in the book and the subsequent flurry of attention to the title have prompted University Press of Mississippi to reissue it.
The Shoe Bird’s life as a live performance piece is blossoming as well. Dale and the Symphony did two sold-out performances in Seattle on November 1, 2008, and Dale has performed the work in New York City. “Youth orchestras around the world have only had the same old chestnut [Peter and the Wolf]. Now they have something new,” Ditlow notes. “There’s a good possibility that Jim will travel the world performing it.”
“This has been a real pleasure to work on,” Schwendener noted. “My role has been like the spider in the middle of the web getting everyone together. But I think it pays off to take risks with something like this. The boundaries in music and spoken word have shifted around so much these days; we all need to be thinking this way.”
