Search - Leo Connellan :: Crossing America

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.