Soundtrack of social change
Yuma native uses songwriting to shed light on social justice issues
If storytelling is a cloth, Mary Lou Fulton was cut from it.
Straddling the worlds of music and journalism, the Yuma native’s very nature is rooted in telling stories – a niche first curated by her upbringing here.
As the daughter of local country musician Bill Fulton, her childhood was braided with stanzas by musical storytellers Johnny Cash, Hank Williams and Kris Kristofferson, who greatly inspired her father and contributed to the soundtrack of his bands’ performances and “bordertown life” in the 1970s.
However, at the time, the beauty of such classic influences was lost on her.
“The music our parents listen to is automatically the music we can’t stand,” Fulton said with a laugh. “As a kid I thought, ‘Oh, this is awful,’ but as I’ve grown older I’ve come to love country music and appreciate the stories it tells.”
In addition to singing with her dad’s bands, Fulton also sang in the Choralairs at Yuma High School, which she likened to the television show “Glee” with its upbeat, choreographed songs from popular culture. The troupe sang and danced its way to places like Hawaii and Washington D.C., giving Fulton experiences of a lifetime.
“For me, it opened a whole new world of places music can take you,” Fulton said.
“Looking back, I can see that it’s shaped my life in a lot of different ways.”
Fulton moved on tell stories in newsprint, but even in the 20-year pursuit of her journalism career, she was “always involved in music somehow,” singing in choirs and garage bands until dipping her toe into the songwriting pool.
“I found that I had an aptitude for it,” she said, though she’d never envisioned herself as a songwriter. “I started learning about songwriting as a way to challenge myself. At the start of every year I sit down and create a sort of roadmap for personal growth – places I’d like to travel, things I’d like to learn.”
Fulton’s roadmap that year led her to the Songwriting School of Los Angeles, where songwriting classes tied together her writing background with her musical history, including those classic influences that are now considered icons of Americana.
According to Fulton, Americana is a fusion of country, folk, blues and roots – all “traditional American music” that she loves and imbues into her own songwriting.
“If you think of music as neighborhoods, my house is in the Americana neighborhood,” Fulton said. “And that neighborhood is large, diverse and growing.”
Leading listeners to the heart of that neighborhood is her very first song, which was chosen as the winning single for the Renaissance Artists and Writers Association’s 2019 Songs for Social Change con
test. Entitled “Not Going Back (I Don’t Think So),” the single was born on a desert drive after visiting her hometown.
“I had the radio on and there was yet another story with an argument about what makes America great,” Fulton recalled. “They kept saying that we needed to go back to some unnamed time in the past when things seemed better and more certain and I thought – What would that mean for me as a woman? What would that mean for my mother, who was an immigrant, or people of color? Because the ‘good old days’ weren’t so good for many Americans.”
With the support of her classmates at the Songwriting School, Fulton released the song as a “do-it-yourself” project, collaborating with one of her professors to compose the music and with a friend to create a music video – which can be viewed at notgoingback. org – with footage from past and present social justice movements to give the lyrics a visual weight.
With lyrics like “Do we really want to go back to the past, back to the kitchen, back to the closet, back to the end of the line?,” Fulton describes the song as an anthem for social justice, which she hopes will lead to thoughtful conversations about “where we’ve come from as a nation and where we want to go.”
“America’s greatness has always lied in pushing forward,” she said. “America is prosperous because it’s ever-striving to be better and living up to its ideals, and we need to hold onto those gains. People fought for our rights in the past and we can’t take that for granted. We need to continue to defend them and push forward.”