History of Strangers
“Dear Carl,
Well, what are you doing? I was husking corn today, the first this year. I think the ice will soon go now. Lonzo Stewart shot himself the eleventh of Jan about eight o’clock PM. Was 15 years old.”
History of Strangers was a songwriting and storytelling project born out of the discovery of a box of old postcards sent by unknown strangers in the early 1900s. As was common on postcards of the time, the messages referenced life-changing events such as death, blood poisoning, blindness, and repressed sexuality. Emotionally-charged but succinct, the postcards were tantalizing as much for the details they left out as the details they included.
I worked with a group of 15 individual artists and non-artists to write either a song or a story based on our interpretations of the postcard text. The lack of detail in the postcard served as a constraint, requiring that each participant fill in the blanks of the story and give new life to the long-dead person. Fascinating, and often heartbreaking, artistic interpretations of the truth emerged, raising the unknown stranger to a mythic or legendary status. The project also researched actual historical research about the postcard writer and the historical context in which they lived.
The project explored using a snippet of a stranger’s life as a catalyst for creative myth-making, inspired partly by the musical genres of folk ballads and “Inadvertent Songs”. Folk ballads are narrative songs, frequently about actual events. Through mythic retelling and interpretation the details and truth of the actual events have been lost to time. They lead to multiple interpretations of the truth surrounding the story and give rise to legends.
"Inadvertent Songs" is a phrase coined by John Schaefer of WNYC's Soundcheck. It's a genre where songs take spoken or written phrases out of context and construct a new narrative around them by using them as song lyrics. The genre covers many musical styles, from electronic to folk to experimental.
It was also inspired by the Significant Object project (www.significantobjects.com), a literary and anthropological project where everyday objects are infused with meaning after people create stories about them.
“I imagined how a 15-year-old could shoot himself to death and it be reported on the back of a postcard in six sentences.”
Participants retained full rights to their own creations for the project. Songs were posted on each participant’s personal SoundCloud and YouTube and linked via the project’s website. There was also a mailing list. Participants shared their creations to their collective network of 2000+ followers and received local press coverage of their work
Fiona Carswell, 2015.