Searching for Harry Chapin's America

Summary

In "Searching for Harry Chapin’s America: Remember When the Music," journalist Pat Fenton describes his road trips to the towns and people that inspired Harry Chapin’s most renowned songs. While Fenton’s account includes exclusive interviews with Chapin’s family and associates, and an excerpt from Chapin’s unpublished writings, the audio adaptation includes actual cuts from Chapin's best-known songs. Composer and multi-instrumentalist David Amram, who narrates Fenton's chronicle, performs his own brief interludes of "incidental music," where he was inspired to do so.
Harry Chapin (1942-1981) was a legendary top-charting American songwriter in the 1970s and ’80s. During his lifetime, Chapin was nominated twice for a Grammy Award: in 1972 for Best New Artist, and in 1974 for Best Pop Male Vocal Performance. In 2011, thirty years after his untimely death, Chapin’s Number One-charting song, “Cat’s In the Cradle,” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
"Searching for Harry Chapin’s America" was published on July 16, 2021, and is a fortieth-year commemoration of this musical icon’s tragic death in a car crash on July 16, 1981. The audio adaptation follows a year later, in July, 2022, and extends the tribute to Chapin's legacy of songs and philanthropy.
"Like 'Don Quixote,' or 'On the Road,' Pat Fenton’s classic book takes you on an unforgettable series of journeys and makes you feel that you are now welcome to be with the people and places that Harry Chapin memorialized in his timeless songs."
—David Amram, composer/multi-instrumentalist/author
“A portrait of an age as well as an artist. Chapin was an American original who combined Walt Whitman’s lyric realism with Woody Guthrie’s passionate truth-telling. Fenton’s blend of sympathy, honesty, and insight gives us the man in full. Fenton’s talents as a master storyteller have never been on better display.”
—Peter Quinn, novelist/political historian