Cookeville, TN, July 23, 2019, –Songwriting With Soldiers is a unique, fiercely dedicated collaborative of professional artists dedicated to working with our returning veterans to salve the wounds of war. This one-hour concert special speaks to the power of art and music to heal and to bring diverse people together. We encourage any Military, active or retired to please join us for this event. Military personnel will receive up to 6 complimentary tickets with Military ID.
Please use code: SWSMIL
To purchase tickets to this event, go to wcte.org
Illuminating a powerful process, Songwriting With Soldiers celebrates songs born of hard truths, shared by PBS via national broadcast, by deeper digital platforms, and by local PBS station community engagement with potential pledge components. Partnering with Communications & Positive Psychology/Educational Programming expert Mary Judd, Smith brought SongwritingWith: Soldiers (SW:S) to life. Since 2012, the program has shared the stories of these servicewomen and men—often for the first time—through collaborative writing with highly acclaimed musicians.
In a tranquil retreat settings, SW:S pairs professional songwriters with both active- duty soldiers and returning veterans. The songwriters mine each individual’s story utilizing direct words and phrases of their veteran partners, composing songs with input from their soldier co-writers; songs of combat, suicide, resilience, fear, mascara, rations, the pride of soldiering and sadness of transitioning out.
In Nashville we just call it, “Three chords and the truth.”
The songs for this special will be pulled from the catalogue of compositions gathered over time from the Songwriting With Soldiers program. The songwriters’ are some of America’s best, and their soldier/collaborators are totally diverse in gender, geographic, ethnic and economic backgrounds. A truly fine example of this collaborative spirit is here in No Me Preguntes, a Radney Foster co-write with veterans Mario Candela, Erminio (Manny) Orona, and Jimmy Perez.
Listen here:
https://songwritingwithsoldiers.bandcamp.com/track/no-me-preguntes
This Songwriting With Soldiers special will be taped before a live audience in SW:S’s home in Nashville, also the home of the perfect venue for this project, the Tennessee War Memorial Auditorium 301 6th Ave North Nashville.
Built of classic design, adjacent to the Tennessee State Capitol in 1925, this stately auditorium was created to memorialize the lives lost in World War I, commonly referred to at the time as, the ‘war to end all wars.’ For a time, this 2,000-seat venue was home to the Grand Ole Opry. Fort Campbell Army base,
home of the 101 st “Screaming Eagles” Airborne Division, is located just north of Nashville; we expect great number of service members stationed there to be in our audience.