Women's diaries provide subject matter

Facing a room of 100 Ashland High School students right after lunch, Candace Corrigan says the song they've just written together is an experiment.

"It's an unwritten rule in Nashville that you never perform a song you just wrote," says Corrigan, a songwriter who toils in the country music mecca.

That said, she launches into a song about a 15-year-old girl who came West in the middle of the 19th century in a covered wagon on the Oregon trail:

"My name is Rachel Taylor/I'm 15 years of age ... "

With the help of the students, Corrigan took her interpretation of Taylor's story and others like it from actual diaries and journals kept by women between the years of 1779 and 1959.

"It's really their story," she tells the class.

Wearing an 1862 ball gown and playing guitar, Irish banjo, mountain dulcimer and cane flute, Corrigan presents women's voices from the American Revolution, the Civil War, the early frontier, the Trail of Tears, labor history and the civil rights struggle.

In connection with Women's History Month, other events with Corrigan are planned at a Medford school and an Ashland church, the latter a benefit for Peace House.

"She was very eloquent," Corrigan says of young Rachel Taylor. "When they came into this valley, they were just amazed."

Corrigan had access to Taylor's diary among materials provided to her and the schools by the Southern Oregon Historical Society.

Corrigan's idea is to re-create the experiences of women out of American history for a unique perspective. Some of the women are famous. Many more are unknown.

"There aren't exactly a plethora of famous women to choose from," she says.

The project's roots go back to a time in the middle 1980s when she'd returned to her native Michigan after living for a time in Nashville, Tenn. There she'd been an actress and worked for an outfit that charged people money to set their poems to music.

After reading a newspaper story about a woman's diary that had been recovered, she wrote a song about it.

"You ought to write a song about my grandmother," one listener said.

"A little light bulb went on," Corrigan remembers.

She got a grant, and the project was born. Corrigan's songs focus on Irish, Scottish, Cherokee, African-American and other women.