Lynn Ahrens’ Wonderful Career with Musical Words

What would you say about a career that started with a chance encounter in an advertising company’s break room and has since spanned over 50 years? I’d call it remarkable, and that term certainly applies to Lynn Ahrens, who was 22 years old and bored silly with her secretarial job in 1970. So she started bringing her guitar to work with her to break up the monotony by singing and playing over her lunch hour. One of the company’s executives walked by and heard her. He had gotten involved with an educational project called “Schoolhouse Rock” and thought she might be able to write a song for it. She ended up writing several songs for the series, with the first being “The Preamble.” (These three-minute animated shorts originally ran from 1973-1984, but the pilot was produced in 1971, about the time that Ahrens got her big break.) As she says in an interview, “It was dumb luck—being in the right place at the right time with the right person passing by.” (“’Schoolhouse Rock’ interview: songwriter/singer Lynn Ahrens”) The songs she wrote and sang for that project got her out of the secretarial pool and into creative work. (If you’re reading this and you don’t know what a secretarial pool is, well, you’re just too young.) She went on to a career as a copywriter, as a freelance TV writer, a jingle writer, a television producer of many network shows for young people (including a stint at “Captain Kangaroo,” one of my childhood faves), and ultimately a musical theater writer. But, as she says, “It all started there.”

Since my interest in Ahrens has arisen out of my choir’s performance of “Make Them Hear You” from the 1996 musical Ragtime, I’m going to concentrate on that work and on her role in it. As I’ve mentioned before in these posts, the work of writing musical theater is usually divided up into three parts: the composer, the lyricist, and the writer of the “book,” which comprises the spoken dialogue and the non-choreographed stage directions. There are many other roles, of course, but they can’t work without the material from those three. And before any of them can get started at all there has to be the story itself. Where does that come from? All kinds of places, really, but a common source is a pre-existing novel or play. In the case of Ragtime the source was the 1975 novel by E. L. Doctorow. A Canadian producer, Garth Drabinsky, saw potential in it and bought the music rights to it. (Projects can often crash and burn on the whole issue of obtaining rights.) He must have been acquainted with the work of Ahrens and her long-time collaborator Stephen Flaherty and offered them the roles of lyricist and composer.

The novel is one of those sprawling sagas typical of Doctorow, set in the 1920’s and involving a mixture of historical and fictional characters. Henry Ford shows up, as does Harry Houdini and the activist Emma Goldman. There are three main strands of the plot, though, that involve Doctorow’s creations: a white, upper-middle-class family, an African-American couple, and a Jewish immigrant father and daughter. These sets of characters intertwine and interact with each other in ways that are perhaps not always believable. The production “received mixed reviews, with critics noting that the dazzling physical production (with a $10 million budget, including fireworks and a working Model T automobile) overshadowed problems in the script.” (Wikipedia) Ahrens can’t be faulted on the script problems, as she was in charge only of song lyrics. And the actual book writer, Terrence McNally, probably can’t be blamed either, as he had to work with very difficult source material. (He also won a Tony for “Best Book of a Musical” with Ragtime, thus perhaps proving the critics wrong.)

“Make Them Hear You” comes at the end of the main plot and is sung by the character Coalhouse Walker Jr., an African-American ragtime piano player turned vigilante, right before he walks out of a hostage situation and is shot dead by police. His song tells his fellow rebels to use their words and not violence to accomplish their goals of justice and equality. He’s been using violence in the service of his aims, to be clear, but in the end he decides that he won’t pursue that path any longer. It’s a very moving scene, and Ahrens’ words are well suited to it. The musical then ends with a long, complicated epilogue which we won’t go into because I’m allergic to such elements. Just tell the story!

I’m going to take a little digression here about the plot of Ragtime in which I agree with this whole “problems in the script” criticism mentioned above. Did you notice that the “dazzling physical production” included a “working Model T automobile”? You might have thought that this car was simply a physical prop designed to give a period air to the staging. But no, my friends. That Model T is a big element in the story, as it belongs to Coalhouse Walker and its destruction by “racist firemen” after Coalhouse refuses to pay a ridiculous fake “toll” ignites in him a thirst for revenge. Those firemen don’t set his home on fire and kill family members; they’re not the ones who beat Coalhouse’s girlfriend to death. But it’s the demand that the car be restored and returned to him, and that the fire chief be punished by him, that motivates Coalhouse’s actions throughout much of Act II. It seems very strange that all this thirst for justice and revenge is over a . . . car. So what gives?

Well, now we enter my favorite part of any plot exploration: the origin story. You see, this whole thirst-for-revenge-over-a-means-of-transportation series of events actually happened, only it was in Germany, it was over the theft and mistreatment of a man’s horses by dishonest toll-takers, and it occurred almost 500 years ago. And the man’s name was . . . wait for it . . . Michael Kohlhase. I was just sure that “kohlhase” meant “coalhouse” and that the original Kohlhase was a coal merchant. But no. “Kohl” means “cabbage” and “hase” or “haas” means “rabbit.” And that’s about as far as I’ve been able to go. This isn’t one of those last names that can be traced directly to a region or a trade; I have no idea what “cabbage rabbit” refers to. Some Kohlhase ancestor who raised rabbits that he fed on cabbage? No idea.  Doctorow lifted and anglicized the name into “Coalhouse,” but there’s no way to know whether or not he looked up its literal meaning. He may have thought, as indeed I did at first, that it would be appropriate for a Black character of the time to have worked in some sort of manual job shoveling coal and just used it without much thought. Another interesting sidelight here: Doctorow acknowledged his use of the story as it had been told in the 1811 German novella Michael Kohlhaas, and the main events closely follow that work (which closely follows the historical narrative). In spite of Doctorow’s credit to the novel, though, critics have debated ever since over whether or not the author is guilty of plagiarism. Honestly, it doesn’t seem to me that Doctorow did anything wrong. People re-use and re-purpose stories all the time. You can’t copyright an idea, only creative content. So I don’t see what all the fuss is about!

Ahrens and Flaherty are still very much in the game, with their musical Knoxville scheduled for its premier in April 2022 in Sarasota FL. The opening was delayed because of COVID, but it’ll happen next month as I write this in March. Good for them. And it’s also kind of funny to note that their 2000 musical Seussical was one of the worst financial flops in Broadway history, losing $11 million, and now it’s one of the most frequently-performed musicals in the US, especially in schools and regional theaters. So it ain’t over till it’s over, or some such stirring cliché.

Stephen Flaherty says of his and Ahrens’ work, “We’re dramatists, who just happen to tell stories in music.” I’d invite you to visit their website and see what new and exciting projects they’re undertaking.

And now for the videos. I’m going to start with an absolutely splendid performance of the choral arrangement by a high school choir:

Here’s the scene from the musical, as performed at Ford Theater in Washington DC:

Here are the full lyrics:

And because everything is available on YouTube, here’s Lynn Ahrens’ very first professional song, from Schoolhouse Rock–“The Preamble”–

© Debi Simons