I heard somewhere that Dolly Parton has written over 3000 songs in her lifetime. I believe it!
There’s at least one book about her prolific and talented songwriting.
No, I haven’t read it, but I should. I could probably learn something from it, and learning should be a life long pursuit.
My friend Robin Hays recently told me of another opportunity to learn more about songwriting. Lil House Songwriting Workshops. Donna Ulisse, who co-wrote “Heart of Rosine,” Rick Stanley, and Jerry Salley offer these workshops a couple hours from Rosine, Ky, down in Lebanon, TN.
The workshops are $850 for a weekend spent learning from and cowriting with professionals. Anyone interested can visit littlehousesongwritingworkshop.com.
Their price tag is too steep for me at this time, but I’m studying ways to make it happen because one of the things you gain is how to connect with people in the music industry. That is exactly what I need!
My collection is currently at 223 songs. Yes, I know—paltry compared to Dolly’s. But I bet I’m just as OCD about mine as any other songwriter. I keep hardcopies in a three-inch, three-ring binder and digital copies in Google Docs. My oldest song dates back to the late 80’s. Over 90% have been written since the turn of the century.
Of my 223 songs, only four have been recorded, and that was on my and my brother Kevin’s CD Walkin’ Jerusalem Ridge.
So four songs out of 223? Not even two-percent. That’s about right since I tell people that by far most of the songs I write aren’t good enough. Doesn’t mean they lack value. It just means they’re missing some elusive, nearly-unattainable element that it takes to go the last leg of the journey.
The title of this blogpost is “Songwriting Frenzy,” and I best move along and explain what that means—well, it’s a reference to how I write songs. I don’t average a song a day. Not even every other day. I might work on lyrics most days, but as for one that ends up printed and placed in my binder, no.
Here’s another part of my process that I need to explain. When I complete a song, it means I wrote the lyrics. But it really isn’t fully-complete unless I think it’s good enough to put to music. This is where my process differs from other writers. Many, if not most, songwriters write lyrics while they have an instrument at hand. A guitar, a piano, etc.
Look back at the beginning of this blog, and you’ll notice Dolly has a pencil in one hand and a guitar in the other.
My process has fairly well-defined increments. First, the lyrics are completed. Boom! It goes in the binder. If I feel it has something extra, I take it to the guitar to give life to the melody I heard in my head while I was writing it. Boom! If that part goes well and I think it has something even more special, I will play it for someone or somewhere, such as The Rosine Barn Jamboree. Boom!
And then there are still yet other levels. If it felt right and comfortable, I might put it on a set list for The Autry Brothers or The Caney Creek Gang. I suppose the highest accolade I could give one of my songs would be to perform it on the stage at the Jerusalem Ridge Festival. But even that is no guarantee.
One of my songs made it that far, “No One to Pray for Them”—it hasn’t been played since.
Here soon I’m planning to do some recording; therefore, I’ll have to make some tough decisions selecting which of my songs to include in the project.
Look at me! I still haven’t explained “Songwriting Frenzy.” I will now!
You see, several times a year I go through these phases where I churn out multiple songs a day for several straight days. In fact, I’m in the middle of one of these “frenzies” we’ll call them.
And there you go. The ultimate purpose of this blogpost is to share some insight into my process, particularly when I’m in a “songwriting frenzy.”
Just how productive has my current frenzy been? Ten songs in four days. And I actually set a personal best on one of those days by writing four. For reference, last month, January, 2026, I put five songs in my binder. Five songs in 31 days compared to ten songs in four days. That’s why I call it a frenzy.
Remember, though, none of these ten latest songs are guaranteed to amount to anything—nothing—zero, zilch, nada!
Anyway, I thought I would drop you right in the middle of this frenzy, February 5, 6, 7, and 8. I’ll share the ten songs and a little about each.
It started Wednesday the 5th when I completed “It’s Mighty Blue Here.” In a Notes of Blue FB post that day, I said the words “Mighty Lonesome” popped in my head and reminded me of ‘89-‘90 when I worked in DC and missed my girlfriend Stephanie. I included the lyrics in that earlier FB post, but I’ll include them here, too.
I didn’t know Wednesday would start a frenzy because I only wrote one song that day. It was the next day, Friday the 6th, when it became clear.
The subject of DC and missing Stephanie was still strong in my mind. So strong I wrote the first song that day along those same lines.
That summer we missed each other so badly we met in Charleston, West Virginia, one weekend because that city is about half the distance from Bowling Green, Ky, where we were both students at Western Kentucky University, and the DC Metro, Manassas, Virginia, to be exact, where I lived with fellow Horse Branchers Jay Raymond and Garland Renfrow.
I ended up embellishing the details a bit. We couldn’t afford to go out on the town and dancing and such. We barely could afford the gas it took to meet. One thing I didn’t embellish was the ring.
Later that same day the “mighty lonesome” phrase came back to me. See, when I wrote “It’s Mighty Blue Here,” I thought “mighty lonesome” was cliche. I ended up with some throw away lines, and one of them had “It’s a mighty” in it. So I came back to it for the second Friday song.
And then, for the third song Friday, I went back in my files for a song I had started a long time before. It only had a few lines, but I, like most writers, save every song no matter how far it goes. One line or ten, they’re all kept.
All that was there when I picked it up Friday was a verse about a man digging a hole, a grave. So I thought about who the grave was for and what led to the death. Here’s what I came up with.
The personal best, fourth song Friday also came from an unfinished song. It consisted of only four lines I had written just last month. I can’t recall where the original idea came from, but I know why I had temporarily abandoned it.
It was originally going to be a typical song about a man turned to the bars because he lost his girlfriend or wife. A worn-out topic, right? That doesn’t mean it’s of no value, though, because break-ups happen all the time, making them forever relevant.
When I revisited it Friday, it occurred to me that some people are completely devastated by life’s problems, to the point of losing everything and ending up homeless on the street. What are streets made of? Concrete.
On Saturday, yesterday, the frenzy was still going strong. Early in the morning, for whatever reason, I went back to a song I promised to a distant cousin.
Back in September ’25, at the Jerusalem Ridge Festival, I was manning the parking station with Caney Creek Gang fiddler Danny Joines and my cuz Josh Taylor. Eventually, traffic lulled, and we got to talking about everything, especially our faith. Somewhere in there songwriting came up. Josh said he was a “Walking Answered Prayer.” We all agreed that would make a good song. Right then and there I told Josh I would write one. (Thank you, Josh and Danny, for being there at the point of conception!)
(from Oak Ridge Baptist Church)
For my second song Saturday, I stayed on the subject of my Christian faith and revisited another unfinished song. I started the song last year when I had this idea about our first day in Heaven being like a birth. Won’t that be a celebration! The next thing that may have factored in is how every Friday at The Rosine Barn Jamboree we sing Happy Birthday to folks in the audience who have recently had birthdays or have them coming up. So…
The third and last song was another unfinished one started recently when I heard “Hello Trouble,” a hit song for Buck Owen’s back in the 60’s. That song’s melody stuck with me. It was strong in my head as I wrote “Ol’ Rufus.” That could pose a problem. If it makes it as far as me putting it to music, I’ll have to alter the melody because I don’t want it to sound exactly like the Buck Owen’s song.
That brings us to today, Sunday, February 8. I actually started this song last night. It’s different because every now and then I start feeling like my songs are treading into a rut of sounding the same. It only has one verse and a chorus, and it’s much slower than most of my stuff. It’s definitely not Bluegrass. Many of my other songs aren’t either. I don’t usually set out to write songs that fit squarely into one specific genre. Let’s call this one a slow, acoustic country song.
And for my second and last song today, again it was me taking up another unfinished song. It started as a typical song about how a young man met his sweetheart, but I only had one verse, I think.
I chose the name Ada Mae because I remember her from when I was a toddler and we lived out at Old Salem. She was a Whitely. I’ve always liked that name Ada Mae. I suppose my memory of her is fond. She died when I was still a kid.
Well, that’s the last one! So far. The question of the day is—will this songwriting frenzy continue tomorrow? Earlier, I said I was in the middle of one my frenzies. Truth is I may be at the end. I guess we’ll find out soon enough. Thanks for reading!
Oh, in case you’re wondering, yes, I did use AI for some of the images in this blogpost. You probably can tell which ones. I could go on a rant right now about AI, but let’s save that for another post.
Over and out!
