North Texas Songwriter Festival, Celina Record

Lisa Ferguson, lferguson@starlocalmedia.com May 13, 2016 Writing a song is no easy feat. Just ask Jay Melugin. “It’s a matter of dedication. You have to work at it. It doesn’t just fall into place,” he said. Melugin, who eight years ago founded the North Texas Songwriter Festival, would know. The longtime guitar, harmonica and keyboard player began writing songs in his late 50s as a hobby and has penned more than two dozen folk tunes over the past decade. As he has since its inception Melugin, who is now in his 70s, organized and will oversee this year’s festival scheduled Saturday and Sunday at the Pilot Point Opera House, 110 S. Washington St. Original music of various genres will be played onstage by 50 songwriters, who will travel from throughout North Texas and as far away as Montana and Nashville to perform. Melugin said he had to solicit a dozen songwriters to perform during the inaugural festival. This year, he began accepting applications in March and filled each of the available 15-minute performance slots within a matter of days. “I’m signing up people … who I’ve never met before or I’ve never heard them play,” he said. Melugin estimated that last year’s festival drew a crowd of about 700 people. He expects an audience of around 1,000 to attend this weekend’s pair of seven-hour shows. “It’s raw, written music,” he said, and performers are barred from taking the stage with backing bands. “I tell the songwriters … `I want you to perform the song the way you wrote it, and you didn’t write it with the band. You wrote it sitting in your living room or on the back porch with your guitar. That’s the way I want to hear it,’” he said. “It’s all about the songwriting. It has nothing to do with how good of a guitar player you are or how good a singer you are. It’s all about the songs.” Luckily, Theresa Arnold has plenty of them to share. The Collinsville resident and ukulele player has performed at the festival each year since it began. She figures she’s written more than 500 songs throughout her life. Her goal is to pen at least 1,000 tunes, just as her late grandmother did. “I started writing songs before she died, but I really started (in earnest) after, so I feel like she’s kind of spiritually handing me songs,” said Arnold, who describes her blend of rock, folk and blue grass music as “ukulele funkgrass.” Melugin calls Arnold a “prolific” songwriter. “She writes all the time. She has two or three songs going at the same time,” he said. Arnold took the festival’s stage many times with her banjo-playing father, Joe Hood, prior to his death over a year ago. “Every time I [wrote] a song, I would run to him and bounce it off of him and he’d get his banjo and we’d jam,” she said, explaining that she took a hiatus from writing after he died. Arnold said she still looks forward to the annual festival. “I just love watching all of the other songwriters. Some of them just blow me away with how talented there are.” As songwriter herself, she said, “I’m watching other people that do the same thing I do, so I know where they’re coming from.”