Music & the written word: Deeply entrenched in Lexington’s history

As Lexington steps into the fourth month of its year-long focus on its history, organizers will split their focus between music and the written word in April.

Celebrating the founding of Lexington 250 years ago, the group organizing 12 months of event, 250Lex, looks at a different element of the city’s heritage each month, from its people and places to its sports and businesses.

In April, the focus turns to the literary arts, Jennifer Mattox, executive director of the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning said. Pairing the written word with music just makes sense since one is so elemental to the other.

“We’ve always been very well aware of how the literary arts intersect with other art forms,” Mattox said. “Whether you’re doing hip hop, or songwriting… It takes literary arts as a foundation in order for those other art forms to exist.”

She added: “That’s part of the celebration. A lot of times, people don’t think about music as a literary art, or movies or plays as literary arts. But the fact is that it first had to be written before it could be performed.”

As part of the 250Lex celebration of the written word, organizers presented a 250LEX Literary Celebration – An Evening Inspired by the Written Word on April 8 at the Kentucky Theater.

The evening featured performances by writers, musicians and other performers.

WUKY DJ Thomas agreed that music is closely tied with the written word.

“I think the written word can be interpreted in many ways,” he said.

“Every song starts with a message. That’s why songs that were written 50 years ago still resonate today. That’s one of the beauties of the written word – so many great songwriters and so many great songs are still relevant to our history and our culture.”

Mattox said the Carnegie will host another event celebrating writing and writers on April 15 with the Kentucky Great Writers Series.

Each year, the Kentucky Great Writers series features 12 authors who either live or have lived in Kentucky and have a book of “high literary value” published within the past two years.

This year, Mattox said, the night will feature Lexington-based Kentucky Poets Laureate doing readings – Silas House, Frank X Walker, George Ella Lyon, and Jeff Worley. That event is also free and open to the public, she said.

“It’s going to be a really fun night, I think, because some of them have read together for the Kentucky Arts Council but not together all at once for anything in Lexington. I think it will be a really great night of diverse voices with different stories, from different areas of Kentucky.”

Mattox said the Carnegie has several programs every month that celebrate the written word.

Other free events from the Carnegie in April include their Burn the Mic event featuring Monet Proctor and Renee Rigdon, two emerging writers in Lexington, on April 17, and the Multifarious reading – an evening of multilingual poetry with Ruth González Jiménez, director of L.A.C.E. at BCTC, and Katerina Stoykova, editor of Accents Publishing.

Most people would be surprised to know how many great writers have come from Lexington, Mattox said.

“I think most people probably would not realize that we have a Pulitzer Prize finalist who lives here now, Margaret Verbal. She’s still a practicing writer here in Kentucky and lives in Lexington,” she said.

“Kim Edwards lives here and she spent 122 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list for her book, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. I think a lot of people too forget that Robert Penn Warren is a Kentucky author.

“He is the only person, to my knowledge, to ever receive two Pulitzer Prizes in two different categories, one of those was in fiction and one in poetry. He was from southwestern Kentucky, but he was a professor at the University of Kentucky in the 80s.”

Of course, Lexington was also home to novelist Walter Tevis who wrote The Hustler, The Color of Money, The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Queen’s Gambit, and so many others, Mattox said.

“There have been many writers who have ties to Lexington who have had an impact not just on Kentucky writing, but on American writing,” she said.

For more information on events throughout April and beyond, check out www.250Lex.com.