Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: I'm Aaron Nathans.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: I'm Michael Ronstadt and this is the Nathans and Roncast, a podcast about the.
[00:00:16] Speaker A: Song craft and musicianship behind the songs we love. So who are we? Michael is a conservatory trained cellist who moves seamlessly across genres and instruments, playing in numerous groups and settings. He's contributed cello tracks to hundreds of albums and he's a music instructor at Earlham College. The Man is a musical beast while.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Aaron is an award winning songwriter and co founder of the Philadelphia Songwriters circle critique group and the Philadelphia Songwriters in the Round concert series. He communicates so beautifully through his brilliant journalism background, deliciously layered storytelling, and an unusual tendency to write timeless melodies. Together we perform as the acoustic duo Aaron Nathans and Michael G. Ronstadt.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: So today we're going to look at one of the best folk songs ever written, a story song that has been covered countless times when I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, as I was just starting to write songs, my songwriting mentor Eric Hester pointed out this song as an example of excellent song craft. The song is Cold Missouri Waters, first released in 1995, and the songwriter is James Keelahan of Canada.
[00:01:27] Speaker C: August 49, North Montana, the hottest day on record in the Forest Tender, dry.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: This song is a harrowing portrait of the man Gulch fire in the mountains of Montana, which took place in 19 49, 75 years ago. This week, we are proud to have James Keelahan as our guest in this two part interview. The first version of this song that I ever heard was on the album cry, cry, cry by the super group of the same name. The group was made up of Richard Schindell, who sang lead on this track, as well as Dar Williams and Lucy Kaplansky. If you lived in Madison in the late nineties like I did, those three artists loomed big on the music scene. So any song that was important to them was important to me.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: I first was floored by this song when I heard the Paul McKenna Band from Scotland perform it while they were touring in the US and taught at common ground on the Hill music festival in 2012. It pulled my heart in about ten different directions and I think my mouth was on the floor because I couldn't move. It was so beautiful.
My brother Petey Ronstadt sat next to me and immediately learned the song the next day. This is what a great song does and why it can travel into the timeless. I know both Aaron and I are truly inspired by this level of storytelling and we think you'll love what James has to say about his process, craft and inspirations.
[00:02:52] Speaker A: Okay, here's part one of our interview with James Keelahan.
Well, we're here with James Keelahan. What an honor it is to have you as a guest on this podcast. Thank you for joining us.
[00:03:05] Speaker D: Well, thank you for thinking it's an honor.
[00:03:08] Speaker A: How did you find the story?
[00:03:10] Speaker D: Oh, the story is pretty famous where I come from.
I'm originally from Calgary in southern Alberta, so right above Montana. And, you know, culturally, that part of Alberta and Montana are pretty well linked. And so the story of the Mangoldge fire and the death of the smoke jumpers is actually part of the lore of where I'm from. When my dad was from Ireland, when he came over in 1952, went to work in the oil fields, this would have been three years after the, after the fire. It was one of the first stories he heard about the area that he, that he had come to. So it's always been part of where I'm from. And, but I got reacquainted with the story when, like, I'm a voracious reader and I had a good friend, also a fantastic songwriter named Tom Phillips, who used to manage various bookstores in Calgary. And I would regularly go into whatever bookstore he was working in every week or so and just walk in and say, what should I be reading? And he never steered me wrong. And one week I went in and I said, what should I be reading? He goes, oh, I just finished this. And he handed me Norman McLean's book Young Men and Fire, which I sort of devoured in about two and a half days.
And it was sort of becoming reacquainted with the story of the fire through that book that reignited my interest in it.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: And what was it about that story that you found so compelling that made you read it so fast?
[00:04:44] Speaker D: Well, I'm interested in, I'm interested in stories of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.
I mean, I'm interested in history in general. It's what I studied and it's mostly what I read.
And so just the story itself is compelling. But for Norman Maclean's writing of it, like, I don't know if you know the book, but Norman McLean was sort of, the fire was an area of specialty for him, for, you know, it was one of his little private obsessions. And he always meant to write a book about it. And he started to write the book, but he died before it was finished. And the book was then sort of completed by his editors and also by his son.
So you not only get the story of the fire and incredible amount of detail about how the smoke jumpers fit into the National Forest Service, how they were created as a unit, but also stuff about the mathematics of how fire spreads in various circumstances. But you also get this sense of MacLean being a writer who is running out of time to tell the story that he really wants to tell because he knows he's dying. He's in a great deal of pain, I think, when he's writing the book. And all that comes through this, this impatient, irascible old man, this voice actually comes through in the book. And then I felt like, yeah, you know, I really need to write a song about this. And so I, you know, I sort of tossed it around from a lot of different angles. And then I sort of realized that the strange thing about the book is that Dodge himself, the main character in my song, Wagner, that Dodge himself in the book, is kind of a ghost in a strange way. He sort of appears as a tangential character in the book. There's not even a photograph of him.
In all the photos in the book, there's nothing, a single photo of Dodge, and he's the central character. And so I kind of thought that if I was going to tell it, I was going to tell it from Dodge's point of view because Dodge doesn't have a voice in this book.
[00:07:08] Speaker A: So could you tell us who the smoke jumpers were and perhaps are?
Do they still exist, to your knowledge?
[00:07:15] Speaker D: Oh, yeah, yeah, they still exist. They were basically a firefighting unit that sort of came out of the world war two experience. You know, like World War two was the first time that armies used airborne units and used paratroopers as a way of shock troops.
And somebody in the forest service must have recognized that, hey, we could probably fight fires and get out to fires quicker if we use the tactics of paratroopers.
You know, flew guys up over the fire and parachuted them down onto the fire in order to get a jump, if you will, on putting out the fire. So it sort of grew out of that, you know, like, out of the war experience of paratroopers and then marrying that, that sort of aerial tactic to, you know, fighting forest fires. And indeed, one of the guys, I can't remember the name of the fellow in particular, one of the guys who died near the top, had in fact been a paratrooper with 101st Airborne and then end up dying four years after the war on a hillside in Montana. So that's sort of the kernel of where the smoke jumpers came from. So in 1949, it's an extremely young unit within the forest Service. It's, you know, like it's. It's really in its infancy and hadn't worked out a lot of its procedures. You know, there were. There were a. They sort of had ideas about what they wanted to do and procedures in place for what they wanted to do. But with each fire, they learned more and more and more.
And the smoke jumpers still exist.
The head jump base is still in Missoula, Montana, but smoke jump crews are used sort of all over the country.
There's sort of a tendency now to use more helicopter crews now than actually parachuting into the fires. So in terms of air power, they've tended to move more towards helicopters and people rappelling off helicopters into hot zones.
[00:09:33] Speaker A: The song's called cold Missouri waters, but I've been reading the book over the last week. It's a great book. The river is really not the central setting of the book. It's more of a supporting role. That's the way you get to the rocky area in question. The gulch, the slope, the rocks, the trees, and the flames are kind of the center of the story. Why did you call your song cold Missouri waters and not hot Montana hills?
[00:10:00] Speaker D: Well, dive back into the book. And in the aftermath of the fire, Dodge survived, and then two other guys survived, Rumsey and Sally. But there were smokejumpers who survived the blast of the fire, and they were incredibly injured, but they were still alive. Actually, it might have only been one, and I think it was Sally.
As Dodge went to get help, he left Sally on the top of the rocks with this incredibly injured guy. And all that Sally had in terms of liquid on him was a can of potatoes and water, right? But the water was really Salty. And I think you might remember the scene from the book of him describing sitting through the night with this guy, but all he had to give him was salty water and looking down the valley and seeing the Missouri in the valley and thinking about how cold and clear that water was. And.
And that's where the image of the song cold Missouri waters, that's. That's why it occupies that place, as if you're that guy on top of the mountain, looking down at the river and thinking, if only I could get to that water.
[00:11:22] Speaker A: You know, that can of potatoes was the. The one spot in the book that gave me chills because, like, I got through half of it. And the fire's overdevelop, and the aftermath of the immediate aftermath of the fire is over, and yet the book's only half finished. And I'm thinking, what's he going to do? With the rest of the book, but then he just kind of pulls the whole thing apart and tries to reconstruct it, and he's trying to locate where certain things happened, and he's trying to pinpoint where Sally was with this mortally injured firefighter, and he finds the can with two holes in it, rusted out over however many years it had been.
[00:12:07] Speaker D: I totally forgotten that. Yeah, no, I totally forgot that.
[00:12:12] Speaker A: That was wild. It's a very compelling story, and it's a very complex story. And somehow, I mean, I was really impressed that despite all of the complex layers of this book, and there must have been, like, 30 characters, and somehow you boiled it down to one guy and sort of a nameless supporting cast in a song. It's really hard to do that.
Was this a bigger, longer song on the first draft?
[00:12:45] Speaker D: Well, I'm going to tell you one thing about that, and then I'm going to tell you a thing that's probably going to make you madden. When I'm writing a story song, and I write a lot of story songs, they always work best for me if I have a narrator. So I always reduce the story song down to one voice that's going to tell the story and tell it from a very personal place, because I find otherwise, you lose the emotional impact of whatever story it is you're telling by telling it in the third person.
But also, that person's point of view is going to have certain inherent things in it that make the story more attractive. I have a song about the japanese internment in Canada, Kiri's piano. And that's written from the point of view of the villain. So it's written from the point of view of the person who's going to intern these people and take all their property. And that allows for more twists and turns in the stories and allows for more impact at the end of the song. And like I said, I chose dodge for this one because he's a ghost in the book. And I felt like in the book, more than anything else, his point of view is not like, why did he do this? You know? Like, how did he feel about it? Like, that's not covered in the book at all. And so it comes down to, was it a much longer song? So here's what's gonna. Here's what's gonna get you mad. I tend to write to a deadline, you know, given. Given no deadlines, I would probably just sit around twiddling my thumbs, collecting stories and not actually turning them into it, into actual finished songs. And the album that this was on was an album called Recent Future. We recorded it in Vancouver at Blue Wave Studios. And, you know, we recorded a little bit differently in those days and that, you know, we took like a. We took like, two weeks at the studio and recorded the whole thing over. Over. This was 1993 or 94, so we. We.
What I basically had was I had a verse. The way that I'll generally write a song is I work really hard to get a verse in place because then I have a template. I know what a verse looks like. I know what the rhyming scheme is. I know how many syllables in the line.
I know what the melody is. And so it becomes much easier to write the rest of the song because I have this template that I can write to, and it allows me to be able to just sort of pull it out of my head at any time because I know what it looks like. And then I can, if I'm on a bus or I'm on a train or, you know, even if I'm driving the car, I can actually be writing it because I know what it looks like. So when we went into the studio, you know, was talking with the producer, Don Pennington. And Don and I have a long working relationship, and he trusts my process. And I said, I got this song, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be a good song, but I only have one verse at this point. So what I'd like to do is I'd like to have. Because we had the band, you know, sort of for the first three days, I said, I want to record five verses worth of this template that I've written.
[00:15:53] Speaker A: Can you tell us what the verse was that you had?
[00:15:55] Speaker D: At first, it was the. It was the first verse. It was one of the rare occasions where the. Where the. Where the first verse I wrote was the first verse. So I had that. That first verse. And so we recorded verses worth of the band and then this long play out, because I already knew that I kind of wanted the song to end with some form of shenandoah because I was going to be mentioning the Missouri, and I wanted to bring sort of a traditional folk element into it by introducing the song Shannon Doa at the end of the song. So I said, we're going to record five verses of this, and then we're just going to do a long play out, just pedaling on the one chord, you know, all the way out.
And so that we did. And then over the next two weeks, I wrote the rest of it. But I'd only given myself five verses to write the song. So I basically had. Then I had basically this outline. Verse one is introducing Dodge. And then verse two, I had to get them on the fire.
Verse three, they have to realize that the situation is out of control, and they have to start their retreat. Verse four is where Dodge pulls the trick out of his hat and the rest of the crew dies. And then verse five is summing it up.
So I only allowed myself five verses to tell the entire story. And so that really kind of focuses the mind. And then, like I say, as long as they use that outline, you know, this verse, they're getting on the fire. This verse, they're abandoning the fight of the fire. Next verse. The retreat and the. And the defeat. And then the summer.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: You know, that makes me very happy in many ways, because that takes it back to the good old five paragraph essay, you know, in a way.
[00:17:43] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:17:44] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:17:44] Speaker A: We'll be right back with more of our conversation with James Keelahan.
Hey, Michael, do we have any gigs coming up?
[00:17:55] Speaker B: I believe we do. It's at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, and we're one of the artists who are top billed. Because you're named Aaron.
[00:18:02] Speaker A: That's right, yeah. Alphabetically. We rule.
[00:18:05] Speaker B: That's right. Can you tell us about some of the people performing?
[00:18:07] Speaker A: Oh, my God. The 2024 Philadelphia Folk Festival will take place August 16, 17th and 18th. The headliners include John Oates, gangster Grass, Tony Trishka's Earl Jam, a tribute to Earl Scruggs. And there's going to be a whole lot of performers playing at this event, including us, the Adam Ezra group, AJ Lee in Blue Summit, the Alexis P. Suiter Band, Alice Howe, and our friend Freebo. Alice is our friend, too, and many, many more. Our friend Craig Beckart will be playing. Our friend John Flynn will be playing so many. We've got a lot of friends playing this festival.
[00:18:42] Speaker B: You won't be disappointed. We want to see you there. Just do yourself a favor and go back to our interview now.
You know, that makes me very happy in many ways, because that takes it back to the good old five paragraph essay, you know, in a way.
[00:18:58] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:18:58] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: I love that. That's great to hear the process that you had there.
[00:19:02] Speaker D: Yeah.
So that's. That's basically. So. It was really never longer than that. And I still. I still have the notebook, of course, that I wrote it in, and all the. The hand scratches and fly specs for it are all just basically on two sides of one sheet of paper.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: Dang. Well, the question I hate the most as a songwriter is what comes first, the lyrics or the music?
But I guess I could. Now that we know how you went about writing this song, that first verse of yours, was it the words that came first? Is it such a great melody?
[00:19:42] Speaker D: Yeah, no, there might be a couple of lines that come first, but generally what I've got is I've got a melody and a rhythm and a chord progression that I've been playing around with. And then I start singing syllables over that to see how it's going to see what fits and what sounds right over those things, and then the syllables turn into words. So for me, it's very much rhythm and chord structure. Melody words is the way it goes generally.
[00:20:15] Speaker A: Now, when you were starting with that melody, did you know that it would be for this story?
[00:20:18] Speaker D: Yeah, that one was specific to this story. You know, there's, there's a. Another story song of mine called Captain Torres. It's off the road cd. And again, that's the thing where I had. I had the story in my head for a long time about. About that particular thing. That story, eventually, by a weird road, met up with a little melody and chorus chorus piece that I had been tossing around in my head for a while. And then I found some words in a book that actually just landed like. Like they were made for that particular melody and chord progression. And then that whole song then grew out of that. But for cold Missouri water, that was basically the melody. The melody is really quite simple, you know? And so it's just, I think it was probably like the first thing that I. The first or second thing that I hummed over that chord progression that I would have been playing that chord progression and would have gone, you know, and probably quite literally like that.
And then. Yeah, it's like I say, it's then a question of sort of finding the words that are going to fit in that particular rhythm and syncopation.
[00:21:28] Speaker B: One of my favorite melodic moments is when you da da da da.
That high note that, that one gets me, you know, when, you know, it just, you know, the musically that pulls the heartstrings even further and I think really seals the deal with the song in a way.
[00:21:47] Speaker D: Oh, thank you. But it's the classic, you know, let's. Let's do two lines the same, and then let's change it up, you know, so, so we'll do two lines with the same sort of thing, and then you're going to change it up because you real. I really think about that. The thing is being like, whatever it is, five or six lines, and it's like the first two are one thing and then the next two are a different thing, and then the last two either refer back to the beginning or, you know, take it to a third place.
[00:22:13] Speaker A: Were there any spots in the song where you took poetic license from, from the book by either what you said or what you omitted?
[00:22:19] Speaker D: Well, I had to do a bit of. A bit of mathematical gymnastics because as you know from the book, it's like there's 16 of them on the plane, but one guy gets sick, so 15 of them jump, but then they're joined by the ranger from the Merryweather station, bringing it back up to 16.
And then when we get to the, when we get to the end, Dodge says, you know, there were, because now you have to rectify the 13 crosses and there's a three people that survived. So anybody doing the math would go, well, wait a minute, 15 guys jumped and. And three survived? So why are there 13 crosses instead of twelve?
So I had to do this. So although I had 15 of them jump out of the plane, it would have taken an entire another verse to get that forest ranger to the crew. So I just eliminated that part and just took it as assumed.
And then when I got to the part about who's surviving, there's actually three of them surviving. But Dodge doesn't refer to himself, he just refers to that. He says there were none but two survived, meaning those other two guys. Again, it being assumed that because I'm speaking to you, that I survived as well and those other two. So in order to make the math work out, I had to eliminate the forest ranger coming up to meet them. And I also had to have Dodge speak the survival rate in such a way that the math worked out.
And sure enough, within a year of it coming up, I had people coming up to me at the end of concerts going, hey, wait a minute. How does that math work?
[00:24:13] Speaker A: Right?
[00:24:14] Speaker D: And boy, people listen.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
And I want to talk about those, those two other survivors in a moment. But Dodge, when I heard the song for the first time, and every time I've heard it until I picked up the book, I picture Dodge as an old man looking back on his life, thinking of, like, here's a story that I've withheld. Here's a trauma from my life that I just haven't wanted to think about. But now that I'm dying, I'm going to tell you about it before I die. But as I read the book, I realized, no, Dodge died five years later.
Was that a liberty that you took? Was that a maybe. Did I misunderstand it?
[00:24:54] Speaker D: No, I think you just imposed your vision of it on the song, which is entirely a proper thing to happen. Right. All I do is write the song.
What things people put into the song when they hear it, I think, gets added to the lore of the song. But. But that's coming from. That's really coming from you, because there is nothing there to indicate his age or. Or anything else at all. He's just speaking from a. He's just speaking from a deathbed. And you don't expect that he's going to be a young man, but he is. He's 38 years old, and he's dying of non Hodge Hodgkin's lymphoma. And it wasn't the fire. It wasn't the fire.
It might have been fire. You know, I mean, when we now think about. About. About stuff like that, like, possibly it might be fire related, might be a cancer that was triggered by a light, you know, by, you know, ten years of breathing smoke, but. Yeah. And here. And there's also, like, when. When I wrote it, he was. He's. He's very. He's. He's not apologetic at all. He's not saying that I did the wrong thing. He's not saying, I wish I'd have done something else.
And I've, you know, since found out that. That, indeed, that that was his thing. He knew that what he had done was right. He knew what. What the rest of the crew had done was wrong, that they didn't listen to their crew chief and had they listened to their crew chief, they'd be alive, but they didn't listen to him. And. And so. So they died. And Rumsey and Sally, they, as you know from reading the book, again, the reason that they survived is they ran up a different side of the fire than the other guys.
[00:26:31] Speaker A: Right.
[00:26:31] Speaker D: That they ran straight up towards the rock rather than taking the angle that the other guys did. And there was just enough of a backdraft off Dodge's fire that kept the main fire off them until they could get into the rocks. But the other guys were all caught out in the open.
[00:26:47] Speaker A: One of the other things that.
The way I heard the song colored, the way that I read it, was then I rose up like a phoenix. I always had assumed that was a helicopter, that somebody had dropped something down to him and lifted him up, but in fact, he. He just stood up.
[00:27:06] Speaker D: Yeah. Like. Like the legendary bird. Right, right. Rising from its own. Rising from its own ashes.
[00:27:12] Speaker A: Yeah. That he. He lived. He lived to stand up and fight another day that he wasn't so much rescued as he was.
He rescued himself.
[00:27:21] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:27:26] Speaker A: So that's part one of our interview with James Keelahan. Next episode, we'll hear the second half. Come on back. And now, here is James Keelahan's cold Missouri Waters in its entirety.
[00:28:02] Speaker C: My name is Dodge. Then you know that.
It's written on the chart there at the foot end of the bed. They think I'm blind.
I can't read it.
I've read it. Every word and every word it says is death. So confession. Is that the reason that you came? Get it off my chest before I check out of the game. Since you mention it, well, there's 13 things I'll name. 13 crosses high above the cold Missouri water.
August 49, north Montana, the hottest day on record. And the forest tender, dry lightning strikes in the mountains.
I was crew chief at the jump base. I prepared the boys pick the drop zone. C 47 comes in low. Feel the tap upon your leg that tells you go see the circle of the fire down below.
15 of us dropped above the cold misery water.
Gauge the fire I'd seen bigger, so I ordered them to side hill and we'd fight it from below. We'd have our backs to the river.
We'd have it licked by morning, even if we took it slow. But the fire crown jumped the valley.
There was no way down.
Headed for the ridge instead. Too big to fight it, we'd have to fight that slope instead.
Flames one step behind above the cold misery water.
The sky had turned red.
Smoke was boiling 200 yards. The safety of death was 50 yards behind. I don't know why, I just thought it.
I struck a match to waste high grass, running out of time. Tried to tell them, step into this fire, I said, we can't make it.
This is the only chance you'll get. But they cursed me ran for the rocks above instead I lay face down and prayed above the cold Missouri water.
And when I rose like the phoenix in that world reduced to ashes, there were none but to survive I stayed that night one day after carrying bodies to the river. Wonder how I stay alive 13 stations of the cross to mark their fall I've had my say I'll confess to nothing more I'll join them now because they left me long before.
13 crosses high above the cold misery water.
13 crosses high above the cold misery shore.
