JACKET COPY

Country musicians have always told great stories with their songs. Take the line “I shot a man in Reno / just to watch him die” -- Johnny Cash sings it and keeps on moving in “Folsom Prison Blues.” Who could do that? Why did he want to watch a man die? Imagine what dimensions that story might take in something longer than a radio-friendly three-minute song.

In “Amplified: Fiction From Leading Alt-Country, Indie Rock, Blues and Folk Musicians,” a new anthology from Melville House Publishing, editors Julie Schaper and Steven Horwitz invited alt-country musicians to take an alternative route: writing short stories.

Some, like Jon Langford of the Mekons and Damon Krukowski of Damon & Naomi, have been published before.

Others are brand-new to the form. Maria McKee, who has had a successful solo and songwriting career since the demise of the band Lone Justice, populates her story, “Charcoal,” with quick, charming L.A. characters a la “The Player” and explores the source of creative inspiration, opening with the line, “I had a mystical experience with Johnny Cash’s pants.”

Though many of the stories include music and musicians -- which is only natural -- Robbie Fulks’ “Crawl” focuses on a middle-aged writer on a book tour who visits his old stamping grounds at Columbia. “David felt young, residually,” he writes, with a wry narrative voice that could be accompanied by a twangy guitar.

Three very different love stories are among the standouts: “Feed the Wife” by Zak Sally of the band Low is the book’s sole graphic novel excerpt, a gorgeously simple and darkly unsettling story of a couple that’s a surprisingly good match. “The Thicket,” written by Rennie Sparks of the Handsome Family for her husband (and bandmate) on their 20th anniversary, is a little long and a bit disturbing but has some of the collection’s lushest language. And at the other end of the emotional spectrum, “Tender ‘Til the Day I Die” by Rhett Miller of the Old 97s focuses on two loners who may just find salvation in each other.

“Writing poetry generally takes a couple more beers than prose,” says Texas songwriter Cam King, whose story “Roadkill” is a lesson in avoiding armadillos. How many beers it takes to get from a song to a story, however, remains a mystery.

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