The Mantel Song

Description

The Mantel Song

When my Grandma Ella passed in 2004, she had so many scrapbooks that each grandchild got 2 or 3. We spent the weekend of her memorial service looking through all of these books, with their photos and newspaper articles, noticing resemblances to living family members, but mainly just wondering who all these people were and what relation we were to them – there were no names or dates written in the books. Those books are now treasured possessions, but it strikes me as peculiar that I have such pride and sentimentality about these collections without really having any knowledge about my ancestors.

At a summer songwriting camp in 2006, one of my teachers, Johnsmith, gave me a prompt on a Post-it note that simply read “photo on mantel.” Before I knew it, all my feelings of love, pride, and bewilderment about my family history coalesced into this song. It pretty much wrote itself while I was at camp. The song was nominated for a Posi Award from EmPower Music & Arts in 2010 in the Story Song category. In that same year it received an Honorable Mention from the International Indie Awards in the Contemporary Folk Category.