Bruce Piephoff was a street poet with the soul of a fallen angel. Piephoff’s body of work chronicled migrants, the dispossessed, the downtrodden, and rootless wanderers who just chose to roam endlessly. Piephoff, who passed away in April of last year, was honored by his hometown of Greensboro, N.C. which named him “The Father of Songwriting.” The singer/songwriter label stuck to him, but Piephoff’s output contained some country flavorings as well, with songs like “Sawbriar,” and “Twenty Miles To Baghdad.” Now a tribute album, produced and organized by Claire Holley, who sings lead harmony and provides acoustic guitar on many of the tracks, aims to further honor his musical legacy.
Piephoff had gone to Nashville early in his career, but couldn’t make any headway in Music City. After getting married and having a son, Piephoff cut short his rambling troubadour days. “When I got to my forties, I said, ‘Man, I’m just sick of trying to make it, all this stuff, I think I’m just going to try to focus on my work.’ I just want to try to write good songs,” Piephoff told this reviewer in a previous interview for the Greensboro News and Record. He achieved that goal. Piephoff put out 25 albums and two books of poetry and worked in the Visiting Artist programs in North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida.
Fred Chappell, who was Poet Laureate of North Carolina from 1997 to 2002, and professor at UNC-Greensboro for 40 years, had Piephoff as an MFA student in creative writing. As he put it in a previous interview for the Greensboro News and Record, Piephoff was not a folk poet, but a poet of the folk: “using material or the lives of workers and poor people, people all across the spectrum of our society. And gives voice to all their concerns and does it in a way that’s pungent and elegant at the same time.”…