Grammy-winning producer and author Tamara Saviano has a knack for telling stories. She slowly creates a world into which she draws her readers; upon entering, readers find many rooms filled with entrancing conversations about the enduring power of music and its continual evolution. Although Saviano follows the founding and development of Americana as one of the threads of her journey, she weaves her own story into this her colorful cinematic new book, Poets and Dreamers: My Life in Americana Music (Texas A&M, June 9).
In her childhood and youth in Wisconsin, music permeated Saviano’s life. She grows up in a musical family, falling in love with folk music—especially Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Beautiful Dreamer”—at her great-grandparents’ house in Cudahy, Wisconsin. As she writes, “[my] grandparents and great-grandparents, all musicians, love the popular music of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s. My mother is into Johnny Mathis, the Platters, Elvis Presley, hits from the 1950s. My stepfather is a soul man. He gravitates to Memphis soul artists of the Stax and Sun record labels; Dad is a fanatical Johnny Cash follower.” In junior high she develops a love of Elton John, but the diverse acts at her first experience at Milwaukee’s Summerfest “blows her thirteen-year-ol mind”: Seals and Crofts, Charlie Pride, Ronnie Milsap, the O’Jays, Gladys Knight and the Pips, among others. After high school her musical education continues when she tends bar at a punk rock club and is a cocktail waitress at a disco club. In her first year of college, she takes an internship at Sundance Broadcasting, which owns the local stations WOKY-AM and WMIL-FM.
