In December 1999, while I was working for a CD Internet seller on a freelance writing assignment, I was assigned to research musicians whose last names began with the letters “Sch.” I wrote up something about jazz singer Diane Schur and then tried searching for another name I was assigned: Stephen Schwartz.
I located stephenschwartz.com. At the time, the site hosted a discussion forum on which the songwriter answered questions from fans. I read some of the answers, including a fan’s questions about the lyric from his and Alan Menken’s Academy-Award winning song “Colors of the Wind,” from Pocahontas.
The lyric in question was: “Have you ever heard a wolf cry to the blue corn moon?” Schwartz answered that he always does research for his musicals and had been reading Native American poetry. In a love poem, he came across the phrase, “I will come to you in the moon of green corn.” He commented, “The phrase stuck in my head, but I didn’t think the lyric ‘have you ever heard the wolf cry to the green corn moon’ really worked, because of the association of the moon and green cheese, plus the ‘ee’ sound in it, etc. So I changed it to blue corn moon, which I thought had a nice resonance, because of the phrase “blue moon” and the fact that there are things like blue corn tortillas, etc. Even though it’s not authentic, and actually implies Southwestern tribes rather than the Northeastern Algonquians of Pocahontas, I used it in the lyric and it obviously served me very well.”
That story stirred my inner storyteller. I thought, if he can tell a story like that one, he may have plenty of others to tell about his body of work. This is one of the reasons I decided to write a Stephen Schwartz biography. Read the Revised and Updated Second Edition of Defying Gravity.
