"Ted Sweatt" - Tim Carroll
As a disclaimer, I want to begin this entry with two notes:
As someone who has spent his life learning to tell a story in twelve to sixteen lines, the thought of writing a book, no matter how rich the source material, is a bit daunting. So, my plan for the moment is to write short pieces for the blog that can be extended into short essays and later published as a collection.
I decided, although I have written a few of these short pieces already, to first publish this one because I’m in the middle of recording a handful of cover songs by artists who inspired my forthcoming Indiana record and “Ted Sweatt” is one of the songs I’m recording.
I haven’t asked Tim Carroll if he meant “Ted Sweatt” as an anti-war song, but it absolutely meets my high standards of a protest song. As a songwriter myself, I’d prefer not to know what he meant because everything you need is in the song and you, the listener, can decide whether this is just a tribute to a man from the same Indiana county as Tim, or whether there’s something more. Personally, I think this ranks up there with “Copperhead Road” on the list of great songs with social messages.
Released July 12, 2018 (Bandcamp), “Ted Sweatt” is the sixth track on Tim Carroll’s excellent Keeping Time record. It tells the story of Ted Sweatt, a twenty-one-year-old man from Vigo County, Indiana, who was killed in Vietnam on November 27, 1968 along with his service dog, Britta. He was the Indiana state high school champion in the high jump in 1964 and was posthumously inducted in the Indiana Track & Field Hall of Fame in 2014. He was the 13th person from Vigo County and the 813th Hoosier to lose his life in Vietnam (Brave).
I once heard the quote, “I’m sorry, if I’d had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter.” This is perhaps the greatest challenge in songwriting. While it takes a certain type of poet to write a long poem, like Homer or Edgar Allan Poe, it takes another type to tell a man’s life story in three minutes and thirteen seconds. A songwriter has to have an economy of words. No matter how flowery the language you come up with, if it doesn’t push the story forward, it’s fat, and fat has to be trimmed. The challenge is to push the story forward while avoiding telling the story. You have to verbally and musically show the listener what’s going on and let them use their knowledge and imagination to see it. Speaking to the Tennessean in 2018, Tim said, “Everything is disposable, you hope to write something that sticks around.”
Musically, the song is relatively simple in structure and arrangement. Working off a four note melody underneath a droning note, alternating between a slightly palm muted version of the progression during the verses and a more open version during the instrumental breaks and choruses. There’s no instrumental fluff, keeping everything to guitar, bass, drums and vocals. During the guitar solo in particular, there’s something percussive going on, that even in headphones I can’t quite identify. This is possibly just string noise, the average listener will probably not hear this unless it is pointed out to them.
The lyrics are more spoken than sung, allowing nothing to get in the way of the story. Tim doesn’t just list facts, woven into his accomplishments and details about his family are hints about Ted’s character and, though we don’t know why he didn’t make the grades, his failures as well. We know Ted had hopes of continuing to play basketball but, presumably, he chose to enlist and serve his country first. Like so many men of his generation, he never got the chance to come back and play ball, marry, have a family, maybe coach his kids’ basketball teams or track teams. Ted was probably a man of his time, he was a good soldier, “despite what he knew” he followed his commanding officer’s orders. While I didn’t find any information on the details of Ted’s death beyond the fact he was with his service dog, perhaps Tim’s knowledge of the “young sarge” comes from Vigo County friends and family. Perhaps it is artistic license, either way, we all know things like this happen every day when the stakes are high, sometimes nothing happens, sometimes people lose their jobs, and sometimes people lose their lives.
Hyperbolic statements, especially political statements, fall flat. For half the people who agree with you, they’ll soon forget you because you didn’t give them anything extraordinary. For the other half, they’ll immediately tune you out and not hear what you have to say. However, if you write a story, like “Copperhead Road” or “Ted Sweatt”, you force the listener to confront the situation on their own terms. Sure, some won’t get it, think “Born in the U.S.A.”, but some not getting it is much better than no one getting it. People need to relate and connect to what you’re talking about. I don’t know anyone, especially back home in Indiana, who doesn’t have loved ones who served. In my immediate circle, I’m fortunate they all came home, but none of them came home in the same state they left in.
Lastly, Tim once said of “Ted Sweatt” and “Viking”, the other excellent story on Keeping Time based on Vigo County, “I’d wanted to write about things from my past for a long time. “Ted” and “Viking” bugged me for two days until I wrote them” (Tennessean). There are certain things that we experience in some way or another that deeply impact us. For a lot of people, they uncover and work through these things in therapy. For artists, it’s about liberating David from the chunk of marble. One of my pet peeves is when an artist, especially a musician, will say they lack inspiration. Tim proves here that our lives are nothing if not a daily collection of inspiration for the artist. If an artist feels they have nothing to write about, perhaps they’d be served by looking outside themselves and telling someone else’s story. If you can’t relate to one other person enough to write about them, how are you going to relate to the masses of people out there who you want to listen to you?
Listen to “Ted Sweatt” on Bandcamp or any other place you listen to music. YouTube clip below.
On a broader note, I’m still working on transcribing the hours of conversations I’ve had on this project, including a couple of hours I spent with Tim at his home in Nashville in 2024. Assuming he might read this, I hate to sound like too much of a fan boy, but this project is not a journalistic one, but one of a fan. I want to shed light on these great Hoosier musicians who I think don’t get the recognition they deserve. So, with that being said, as someone who is, in the words of my wife, “absolutely obsessed” with my craft, Tim is the only other person who I’ve met who speaks about his art in a way that matches his work ethic. Not to say others don’t exist, they do, but he’s the only guy who in a moment I realized we were on a bit of the same wavelength. Artists like to talk about themselves and their art, but often don’t have the work ethic to match. I remember not long into our conversation, there was a moment where I said something about how I could see Dale Lawrence’s (Tim’s bandmate in the Gizmos) influence in his songwriting, and there was this recognition in Tim that seemed to free him to talk more about the things he was passionate about and not just answer some guy’s questions about The Gizmos and his career. This in turn freed me to talk more freely about music as well and we both ended up enjoying the conversation. I could have talked to him about our craft all night, but at 1 am I had to leave and drive to Indiana because I was headed into the studio in Bloomington the day after and I needed to get to the AirBnB, get groceries and get settled so I could get some rest before. It’s this passion to achieve the unachievable and the willingness to put in the work to get as close as he can that allows Tim to write songs like “Ted Sweatt”, “Viking” and many, many more. The more I explore the lives and careers of these Hoosier musicians, the more I grow in love and admiration of them and Tim is certainly no exception to that.