T H E S TAT E | I N S I D E R
Pitchlynn’s Poems, Reimagined Poems to Songs explores a Tulsa musician’s connection to a Choctaw chief.
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Artist J. Semple-Umstead, a descendant of two Choctaw chiefs (one of whom is Peter Pitchlynn), created this mural at the Choctaw National Museum. The artwork also graces the cover of Poems to Songs. Photo courtesy John Wooley
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he new CD Poems to Songs: Hatchootucknee (Snapping Turtle) can be seen, at least in part, as a family affair – that is, if you don’t have any trouble with the “family” connection skipping past nine or ten generations. The disc’s origins run all the way back to the early 1800s, with an important Choctaw figure named Peter Pitchlynn, and then jumps to the present day, where one of his descendants, Tulsa’s Scott Hutchison, has co-produced and arranged the disc with another noted singer-songwriter, Tanya Maksood. (For a story about an earlier MaksoodHutchison collaboration, see the August 2021 issue of Oklahoma Magazine.) “Peter Pitchlynn had nine brothers and sisters, and I had heard we were related,” says Hutchison. “I researched it and found out it was true. I’m related to him through one of his brothers, William Pitchlynn.” That, of course, makes Hutchison’s daughter Norah a relative of Pitchlynn’s as well. Poems to Songs, on which she and Maksood supply the vocals, marks Norah’s recording debut. So there’s another family link to the record, a connection that stretches back to 1830 and then skips almost a century to the Hutchisons. It was in the early 1830s that Peter Pitchlynn moved West with some 100,000 other Native Americans to Indian Territory, taking the arduous journey that became known as the Trail of Tears. By that time, Pitch-
OKLAHOMA MAGAZINE | JULY 2022
lynn had already shown the qualities that would lead to his ultimately becoming a Choctaw chief. “He was half-Scottish and half-Choctaw, and he became an attorney,” Hutchison notes. “So, after all the treaties went down and they’d moved everyone here, he became the Principal Chief – to make sure the deal was kept.” In addition to being a tribal leader for several decades, Pitchlynn was a poet. And all these years later, his poems are again seeing the light of day, with Hutchison and his collaborators setting three of them to music for the Poems to Songs collection. It’s not the first time that the creations of his Choctaw ancestor have inspired Hutchison. Back in the mid- ’90s, Hutchison was on the West Coast with his fellow Tulsa musician Steve Pryor, who had a majorlabel deal at the time. Hutchison got the idea to use part of Pitchlynn’s poem “Jawbone” as the chorus of a song he and Pryor had begun to compose. “Jawbone,” in fact, became the title of that collaboration, and while they managed to get it recorded, it never got past the demo stage. “It was pretty funky,” he recalls. “We did it with our publishers, but it just didn’t happen.” According to Hutchison, Pitchlynn’s poem “Jawbone” was written in 1831 in “bitter-winter Arkansas,” while Pitchlynn was still on the Trail of Tears. And, indeed, in both the poem and its musical version, frustration, anger and anxiety bubble out. However, in the two other Pitchlynn contributions to Poems to Songs disc, his words are often gentle and pastoral, extolling the virtues of nature and the natural life. “When you read some of that stuff in ‘Jawbone,’ like the term ‘hard times we do know,’ it’s using terminology that the blues or, later, Woody Guthrie used,” Hutchison says. “And then, in some of his other poems, he talks about nature, about the flowers and birds, and so he kind of had this rootsy, hippie vibe,
