Are Song Lyrics a Form of Poetry? Exploring Connections in Folk & Country Music

Somewhere in a desk drawer, a shoebox or an old hard drive, there is almost always a stack of lyrics that never made it onto a record. Read on the page without a guitar or a melody behind them, many of those lyrics still hold up as poems. That overlap between poetry and songwriting runs especially deep in folk and country music, where the words have always carried as much weight as the tune.

Long before recording studios existed, ballads traveled from one singer to the next. The old English and Scottish ballads that settlers carried into Appalachia were stories told in verse, sung from memory and changed a little with each person who learned them. In the 1800s, the scholar Francis James Child collected hundreds of these ballads in print and studied them as literature. They read well on the page for a simple reason: they were poems first, set to whatever tune the singer happened to know.

Where the Page and the Stage Meet

Country and folk songwriters carried that habit forward. Hank Williams recorded spoken-word recitations under the name Luke the Drifter, letting the verses stand without a melody. Kris Kristofferson studied English literature at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before he moved to Nashville to write songs. Leonard Cohen published several books of poetry before he ever recorded an album. In 2016, Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature for creating new poetic expressions within the American song tradition, which settled a long debate about whether song lyrics belong in the same conversation as poetry.

The two forms do work differently. A song can lean on its melody to supply rhythm, and a chorus that sounds powerful when sung four times can look thin when it is printed four times. A poem has no band to help it, so it has to create its own music through line breaks, the sounds of the words and the space around them. Folk and country lyrics often survive the move from stage to page because they are built from plain speech, concrete images and a clear story.

Woody Guthrie is a well-known example. He left behind a large archive of lyrics that he never set to music. Decades after his death, Billy Bragg and Wilco wrote melodies for some of them and released the album Mermaid Avenue in 1998. The words had been sitting on paper for years, complete enough to read and strong enough to sing.

A Texas Songwriter’s Lifetime of Lyrics

The same pattern shows up in the work of songwriters who never became household names. Texas songwriter Steve Feemster has written songs and poems for most of his life, sometimes finishing two or three in a single day. His son eventually found close to 490 of them saved on a single USB drive, prompting the creation and publication of Steve's poeetry volume, "Stone Angel." Most of those pieces started as songs, and many of them have since been printed, one to a page, in a two-volume collection of poems and song lyrics.

One of his songs, “Make Another Angel,” shows how easily a lyric can cross over into poetry:

Why didn’t he just make another angelWhy in the world did he need youWith all this hate sin and destructionIs there something he thinks only you can do?

The lines use no elaborate imagery. They are plain questions, the kind a grieving person might actually ask out loud, and that plainness is what gives them their force. Sung, the verse works as a lament. Read silently, it works as a short poem about loss and faith, with the final question left unanswered. Feemster still performs around Dallas-Fort Worth, and a performance of the song with Richard Bowren and Donny Dorr is posted on his YouTube channel, where listeners can hear how the melody shapes the same words.

Reading Lyrics as Poems

Anyone curious about this connection can try a simple exercise with a favorite folk or country song. Reading the lyrics aloud slowly, without humming the tune, makes it easier to notice which lines carry the meaning and which ones exist mainly to fill out the melody. It also helps to pay attention to where a line wants to break, how often a phrase repeats, and whether an image or story would still make sense to someone who had never heard the song.

Many lyrics lose something without their music, and that is not a failure. Songs are written to be heard. The ones that hold up on the page, though, tend to share the qualities that make good poetry: honest language, specific details and a feeling the writer clearly lived through.

As more songwriters’ notebooks and digital archives come to light, collections such as Texas poetry drawn from decades of songwriting give readers a chance to meet these words in a new way, one page and one verse at a time.

Steve Feemster
City: Red Oak
Address: 109 Mabry
Website: https://stevefeemster.com
Phone: +1 972 268 5261