MP3 Marcus Hummon - Surrender Road

Rock opera

10 MP3 Songs
EASY LISTENING: Musicals/Broadway, ROCK: Americana



Details:
Selections from the World Premiere of Marcus's first opera, Surrender Road, featuring Shakespeare like you've never heard it before! Vintage Marcus melodies and harmonies make this a must have!!

Marcus Hummon has a dual career as a writer of theatrical works and as a chart-topping, award-winning song composer.

To date, he has created six musical productions that have been staged at various venues in his home city of Nashville and beyond. American Duet is about race relations and musical identity. It has been performed in 1998, 1999 and 2004 in Music City and is currently awaiting itâs off-Broadway debut. Francis of Guernica blends the themes of Pablo Picasso painting his masterpiece with the Spanish civil war, the issue of insanity and the rise of Fascism. Its initial run in 2000 led to a full-scale production by the Tennessee Repertory Theater in 2002.

Hummonâs Warrior is the story of the tragic Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe. Its 2001 premiere was in the Country Music Hall of Fameâs Ford Theater. As a result of its box-office success and educational consciousness raising, the Native American Association of Tennessee gave him its Outstanding Achievement award later that year. Celtic music and suicide are the foundations for The Piper. This work premiered in 2004 at the Hartford Conservatory in Connecticut. Atlanta is a Civil War musical. It premiered in Nashville in early 2005 and is now being readied for a staging in Los Angeles.

Surrender Road is Hummonâs first opera. It is sung via Shakespeareâs soliloquies accompanied by piano and string quartet. Surrender Road is about a day in the life of a boxer. It was staged by Nashville Opera in late 2005 and was chosen as a featured new work at Opera Americaâs national conference in Detroit.

Alongside this theatrical work is one of the most successful songwriting careers in Americaâs capital of songwriting. Hummon moved to Nashville in 1986. Two years later, Michael Martin Murphey became the first to record one of his songs, âPilgrims on the Way.â In 1993, Wynonna scored a major hit with his âOnly Love.â Alabama had a hit with his baseball song âThe Cheap Seatsâ the following year.

Hummonâs debut album, All in Good Time, was released in 1995. It contained âOne of These Days,â which Tim McGraw took to the top of the charts in 1998, and âBless the Broken Road.â Rascal Flattsâ version of the later has become the biggest country-music hit of 2005, won the Nashville Songwriterâs Association Internationalâs Song of the Year, and was nominated in several categories, including Song of the Year, at the 2005 CMA awards. It remained at No. 1 on the charts for six weeks. Other songwriting successes include Bryan Whiteâs âLove Is the Right Placeâ (1997), Sara Evansâ âBorn to Flyâ(2000), SHeDAISYâs âGet Over Yourselfâ (2002) and the Dixie Chicksâ âReady to Runâ and âCowboy Take Me Awayâ (both 1999).

The singer-songwriter formed his own label, Velvet Armadillo Records, and has used it to market his CDs The Sound of One Fan Clapping (1997), Looking for the Child (1999), Revolution (2003) and Nowhere to Go But Up (2005), as well as recordings of his theatrical works. He has also written a book of poetry, lyrics for the PBS childrenâs cartoon series Book of Virtues, songs for his 2001 pop/rock band The Raphaels, and recently signed on to write a childrenâs book with Siman and Schuster, preliminarily titled, âIsaacâs Prayer.â