Rich Shapero (SHAP-er-oh) was born in 1948 in Los Angeles. In grammar school, he read Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human. “It attempted to envision a higher human state,” Rich says, “which captivated me at the time, and still captivates me.”

When he was nine, his third grade teacher introduced him to Leadbelly. Rich loved the “heart and muscle” of the music, and badgered his aunt and uncle into buying him a guitar. By the time he was fifteen, Rich was crafting music in earnest. His passion for American roots music broadened and deepened. He discovered Blind Willie Johnson, Son House, and a slug of other pre-war greats.

In 1965, Rich started college at Berkeley. He majored in English lit, finding heroes both within his coursework and outside—William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Machen, Walter Pater and Henri Bergson. “All of those writers were important to me because they saw our everyday world as a veil, behind which a world more profound, more alive, and more real, was waiting to be discovered.” And music played a role. For all of these writers, the rhythm and melody of language gave it “the power to transport us into the emotional domain of an unseen world.”

In the late 60s, Rich was struck by the efforts of artists like Jim Morrison and Don Van Vliet. “There were attempts to merge serious writing with popular music. I dreamed of the search for deeper truths, using words and music married in new ways.” In high school and college, he encountered the classical stories told in song—The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s works, and the medieval romances. He began to experiment with the long-story form, using music in a modern setting. Then he came across Blind Willie McTell’s “The Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues” and an idea took shape:

“Blind Willie’s song gives you the story of a man in his last hours. You’re at his bedside, and beside the wagon taking him to the graveyard, and you experience a panorama of emotion—pathos, futility, wry humor—as the story unfolds. Instead of using a repeated melody with a fixed meter and tempo, Willie took a variety of melodies, each with its own meter and tempo, and stitched them together. The ‘logic’ for the changes came from the story itself. The clashes were jarring, but each moment was accessible, and the violence of the construction gave it a special power. I wondered if it might be possible to bring the Bardic tradition into the modern era by using a similar approach.” Rich fell in love with the idea. “I thought it might be a way to experience a story more fully, more deeply.”