Search - Leo Connellan :: Crossing America

Crossing America
Leo Connellan
Crossing America
Genres: Folk, Jazz
 
  •  Track Listings (56) - Disc #1

In the 1950s Leo Connellan hitchhiked across America, a bum and a drunk, scribbling notes about his travels on scraps of paper. Eventually he sobered up and rewrote these scraps as a hitchhiking epic, Crossing America, fir...  more »

     

CD Details

All Artists: Leo Connellan
Title: Crossing America
Members Wishing: 0
Total Copies: 0
Label: Skuntry.com
Release Date: 6/1/2003
Album Type: Explicit Lyrics
Genres: Folk, Jazz
Style:
Number of Discs: 1
SwapaCD Credits: 1
UPCs: 791381817928, 791381817928

Synopsis

Product Description
In the 1950s Leo Connellan hitchhiked across America, a bum and a drunk, scribbling notes about his travels on scraps of paper. Eventually he sobered up and rewrote these scraps as a hitchhiking epic, Crossing America, first published in 1976, which ends with a brutal and lyrical account of a bum's rape of a bag lady. Near the end of his life (he died in 2002) Leo met a group of young musicians from the arts collective Hoobellatoo, who recorded Leo reading the entire poem. They then traveled the country with a barebones mobile studio packed into a car, recording music to accompany the poem. This record presents Leo's readings (in his Skid Row Elmer Fudd twang), with each pause between the poem's 29 sections illustrated with a musical interlude, ranging in feel from old-time fiddle to post-bop jazz to swaggering rock to tone poem. Consider it spoken word, punctuated by musical miniatures that add up to an experimental folk symphony.