“I experienced a love of music at full-moon parties where musicians and pickers went to a great old antebellum house and played music. It was almost otherworldly.”
—Marcus Hummon ’84, on finding a creative home in Nashville

Singer-songwriter Marcus Hummon ’84 has spent much of his life, as he puts it, “finding a range of musical solutions to telling a story.”

Based in Nashville, Hummon spent a decade writing and performing before he got his first break. After hearing his song “Only Love,” Wynonna Judd, then at the pinnacle of her career, called to say she wanted to record it. The song reached number three on Billboard’s country songs list in 1993.

He had a slew of hits and classics covered by other performers, including Rascal Flatts, whose recording of Hummon’s song “Bless the Broken Road” spent five weeks at the top of Billboard’s country charts and won him a 2005 Grammy for Best Country Song.

Hummon also has written his share of theater pieces. Tut, an oratorio-dance hybrid about Howard Carter’s discovery of Tut’s tomb, spent four days at the New York Musical Theatre Festival. Surrender Road, a play about a boxer, blends passages from Shakespeare with contemporary lyrics. His musical drama Warrior recounts the story of Jim Thorpe, one of the most versatile athletes in modern sports. And his Celtic-inflected The Piper takes place in immigrant Boston in the mid-19th century.

“The place of the songwriter is one part prophet, one part village idiot,” Hummon says. “It really began to happen for me when I began to follow this path. No one ever went wrong by becoming too much themselves.”

And to think it all began at the Log, where, as a Williams student, he says, he played “incessantly.”

Read more about Marcus Hummon ’84 in the January 2012 Williams Alumni Review. (To read the text-only version, click here.)

You can also watch a video of Hummon performing one of his latest songs, “Rosanna,” live in Manchester, England, here.