A Bird On The Wing In Iowa
I was inspired to write this song in 1988 while driving along the ridge of the Des Moines River valley just north of the apple orchard near Fort Dodge. When I saw an eagle circling above on the thermal updrafts I heard the melody in my head. When I got back to Badger I grabbed my guitar and hammered out the lyrics. It’s all about our beautiful birds in Iowa and is one of the few compositions I’ve written that have landed in the key of Bb.
CHORUS
Look to the eagle in flight, it’s such a beautiful sight
Oh what a thing, a bird on the wing, in Iowa
VERSE 1:
A hawk on the pole in the wind, tells me the message to send
To the world, ‘bout the birds on the wing, in Iowa
REPEAT CHORUS
VERSE 2:
A bluebird, an owl, a wood duck,
A cardinal can bring you good luck
The meadowlark sings in the ditches, of Iowa
BRIDGE
And now I must go to the sky,
To see what the clouds say on high
Look down on my home, I’m never alone, in Iowa
Instrumental CHORUS / REPEAT CHORUS 2X
© 1988 Shadric Smith All Rights Reserved Supposed To Be Music
In the fall of that year I got an idea to produce a children’s “album” of bird related songs and was able to convince my sister Terri Schmitz to help fund it. She was the owner of the Children’s Bookshop in Brookline, Massachusetts and had a loyal customer base….before Amazon and the internet changed everything. On a cold, snowy night in November I was joined by three of my favorite musicians and studio owner Kirk Kaufman out at Junior’s Motel studio in Otho and we recorded twelve tunes related to birds….six originals, four old time fiddle tunes, plus the standard Bye Bye Blackbird ( Ray Henderson/Mort Dixon ) and Paul McCartney’s Blackbird song. Brian Nelson played electric bass, Dave Hearn played piano & accordion, and Kris Karr played drums, acoustic guitar, harmonica & sang some harmony vocals. All the tracks were cut live to 2-track tape with no overdubs. A Bird On The Wing In Iowa became the title track and the project was released by Out Of The Blue Music on cassette tape.
The Billy Buffalo Band in Badger, Iowa. 1988. L to R Kris Karr, Dave Hearn, SS, & Brian Nelson. Photo by Debbie Smith.
In February of 1989 I traveled to Boston for a kid’s concert at The Children’s Bookshop and we had a nice turnout of parents and kids, some live music, and cowboy cupcakes! We even had a cowboy cutout I made where kids could get their picture taken as the fiddling Yankee Cowboy!
Terri Schmitz behind the cowboy cutout….showing off her fiddle skills.
In 2002 I went back out to Junior’s Motel studio in Otho and Kirk Kaufman helped me remaster all the tracks that were on the cassette album and put them on CD. The first CD cover looked like this:
In 2019 I used DistroKid to share the album on all the streaming platforms, but I later had to pull it down due to licensing issues with the Blackbird tunes. For anyone who is interested, please reach out to me if you would like to purchase a CD copy. Thanks for listening and reading this far, please feel free to like and share this post with all your cyber pals. This is my fiftieth Substack song story!