Congressman Davy: A Brand New Musical Radio Play
Congressman Davy – the new musical I have written with Dean Schlabowske about Davy Crockett's political rise and fall – has had a long journey.
I started to write Congressman Davy in 2014. Finished a first complete draft of book and lyrics in 2018. Dean finished the bulk of the songs in 2022. We had a workshop in February 2024, and a full staged reading in November 2024 at the historic True Reformer Building on U Street in Washington DC.
Our success with the November 2024 reading set our wheels spinning. Dean wanted a crack at recording Congressman Davy's songs the way he heard them in his head. I wanted a broader audience to hear a slice of American history with some startling parallels to the state of our country right now: a polarized and partisan landscape filled with bad electoral losers and naked corruption.
What have we accomplished over the past few months? All of those things. We recorded and released a soundtrack of all 22 songs in early June with a Who's Who of Americana luminaries. (It's streaming almost every as well.)
Today? We debut a (free!) radio play version of the entire show. You can hear Congressman Davy's songs exactly as they fit into a script, blending the soundtrack with a recording of the text by a cast of amazing performers and storytellers in Washington, DC. (A few of them – Gillian Shelly, Rose McConnell, Taunya Ferguson, Catherine Aselford, and Janine Sunday – were in the November 2024 staged reading. )
We do hope you will take some time to listen to our work. And if you take a fancy to the songs, we hope you will mosey over to Bandcamp and make them a permanent part of your collection. Or tell someone who might enjoy a bit of American history told with a country and folk foundation and some nods to sharply-comic retellings of American history and politics by Stan Freberg and Mister Peabody and Schoolhouse Rock and Mark Russell.
It is extraordinarily satisfying for Dean and myself to have completed what we set out to do in late 2024. But we see this as the beginning. A first leg. We have mighty ambitions for journeys yet to come with Congressman Davy. We hope you will come along for the ride!
More on Congressman Davy at our spiffy project website.
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Check out my personal website and the We Heard You Like Books website for more information about my well-reviewed new book, Beauty Doesn’t Reach Me, including how you can buy a copy.
