In advance of Veteran’s Day, the Chicago-based bluegrass band Henhouse Prowlers released their single “Line the Avenues,” an intensely personal song for banjo player Ben Wright. The idea for the song, as reflected in the final verse, originated years ago when Wright was visiting his paternal grandparents in West Bend, Wisconsin, a small town outside of Milwaukee.
One night during the visit, his grandfather told Ben, “Tomorrow we’re going to get up early, and we’re going to talk.” The next morning, he woke Ben at six and the two sat at the breakfast table looking at his grandfather’s albums of photographs he had taken during WWII.
“I was probably ten,” said Wright, “too young to truly understand, but there were things that I did understand. I’ve always thought I needed to write something about that experience.” The album, now passed on to Wright from his father, not only has photographs but his grandfather’s hand-written notes as well. An official Air Force photo dated April 30, 1945, shows the smiling young first lieutenant enjoying “Christmas in April.” As the caption reveals, before him is a pile of packages from home awaiting him when he landed after participating in the history-making aerial battle of Sicily Straits during which Yank flyers knocked 74 Axis war planes out of the sky.
With an early Argus 35mm camera, he shot photos of British “Tommies” capturing a tank crew. He also took pictures of graves. Ben Wright said, “It’s as if he’s saying, ‘These were my friends.’ The whole thing is an emotional rollercoaster that tells a story better than my memory of what he said. What a forward-thinking human being to take those photos and put them together like that.”
Making the photos more valuable are the comments added. One he captioned, “My crew, as usual, resting.” Wright found it remarkable to consider his grandfather, a young man from a small town in Indiana, finding himself in North African experiencing all he did.
Wright said he found what his grandfather thought and did was shocking. Those album images he shared led to the verses of the song. The pictures certainly influenced the writing of the first verse, he said. “I imagined what he went through on a daily basis there. To have the imagery like that helped inspired the song.”
Wright explained, “I imagined what it was like for him to wake up in the morning in the middle of the desert and know that he had to get in this rickety airplane—because they were—and go on a bombing run. [I realized] how scared he must’ve been and how, at that time, men didn’t share their emotions. They just did their thing.”
Once he wrote the first verse, though, he said he hit a wall and wondered, “What am I writing about here? That’s when I realized the connection to the Gulf War. I did some research and saw an opportunity to talk about talk about women here too. It was shocking to look at all those photos. I have hundreds of his photos, and there aren’t any women in them.”
That was his impetus, he says, for writing the second verse. “I imagined her a helicopter pilot in the Gulf War.” He came up with the line that refers to “the way the wind whips up a sand storm reminds her of a hurricane” by imagining her as coming from Florida, with her only reference to that kind of weather as a hurricane rather than a sandstorm.
The song came together, Wright says, when he worked with Stephen “Mojo” Mougin, on the chorus, recognizing the universal elements of war, particularly the soldiers who are promised glory but aren’t told about losing their friends.
“I’m not sure this is an anti-war song,” he said, acknowledging instead the ambivalence and the recognition that soldiers are doing what is expected of them. “It’s not hard to celebrate WWII– the Greatest Generation and all that stuff–but nobody’s celebrating Gulf War vets. They went through it too. If you think back to the Gulf War, it felt pretty righteous when we were literally watching the invasion of Iraq on TV. It was only in retrospect that people realized that those weapons of mass destruction weren’t real.”
After a recent show when Henhouse Prowlers played the song, someone from the audience came up and asked, “Did I hear you say ’91 in that song?” When Wright told him yes, the second verse is about the Gulf War, the man got tears in his eyes, grabbled Wright’s hand, and said, “Thank you.”
Wright says the idea of “bearing witness” has become important to him over the last decade.
“Often,” he says, “there’s so little you can do about things. If you just bear witness to them, you’re taking it in, absorbing it, and trying to understand it. Sometimes that all you can do; sometimes that’s all people want you to do: acknowledge ‘This happened and I was there.’ That’s the spirit of the song. Let’s look at the realities of war and acknowledge the people who were doing what was right at the time–and there are consequences.”