Todd Compton on “A Frontier Life: Jacob Hamblin, Explorer and Indian Missionary” (published 2013)

**Brad Westwood** (0:02)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history, produced by the Utah Dept. of Culture and Community Engagement. I'm Brad Westwood, senior public historian. My job in regards to this podcast is to make the very best, the most interesting and the most accurate history of Utah, accessible to the widest audience. If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, I hope this is the place. On today's show, we'll be focusing on Mormon, Western frontiersmen and explorer Jacob Hamblin, who lived from 1819 to 1886
If this is your first time listening to Speak Your Piece, would you be sure to go back and listen to the scores of other prior episodes? Rate us too, would you?
My guest today is Todd Compton. Compton has a PhD from UCLA in Classics, with a concentration in Greek and Indo-European mythology. Beyond this deep interest in Classics, Todd is a respected historian of Mormon history, Western and US history, and American Indian history. We will offer a fuller bio for Todd in the show notes. Hello Todd, so good to have you with us.

**Todd Compton** (1:20)
Yeah, great to be here, thanks.

**Brad Westwood** (1:22)
Specifically, we will be focusing on Todd's 2013 book, A Frontier Life, Jacob Hamblin, Explorer and Indian Missionary, which won the best book award from the Mormon History Association and from the Utah State Historical Society. Regarding this latter award, I was fortunate to be the director of the society at that time. This exceptional book of Western and Mormon history was published by the University of Utah Press.
Beyond history, Compton has other loves, which he has published in, including music. In 2017, he published, Who Wrote the Beatle Songs? A History of Lennon and McCartney.
In the music history book, Todd argues that McCartney and Lennon were first and foremost songwriters and performers second. Todd, would you elaborate a bit on this famous songwriting team and tell us about the thesis of this book?

**Todd Compton** (2:21)
Well, this is kind of a surprise to start off with. I'm not a Lennon and McCartney, but yes, I love music, I play violin. I actually played in a rock group for a while. And I'm very interested in songwriting. Like if I hear a song, you know, it's great to know who's singing it, but hey, who wrote that? And so at The Beatles, I was always fascinated by the fact that all their songs were listed Lennon and McCartney. And so I wondered what part is Lennon, what part is McCartney. And so I started, you know, collecting data on that, interviews and so on. And it eventually ended up with this book. And my final conclusions were that often John and Paul wrote entirely separately.
Some songs, the other guy didn't even have anything to do with them like. Yesterday is entirely McCartney.
And sometimes they wrote together just with each with a guitar and coming up with songs, you know, bit by bit. Sometimes Paul wrote the music and John wrote the lyrics. And as they progressed to songwriters, John got more and more interested in lyrics and Paul just kept exploring music.
And so in one way they were good writing together because John was a very good editor of lyrics and writer of lyrics. And Paul McCartney was a brilliant musician and songwriter.

**Brad Westwood** (4:13)
Well, one of the greatest rock and roll bands of the modern era. And I just like you, I've often wondered how they broke it down, how they pulled that together, how they interacted. So listeners, pick up Todd's book if you're interested in this. You know, all things come together in history.
On your personal website, you have a wonderful section towards the bottom entitled Desert Island Books, Mormon History. In the spirit of this list, as we begin our time together, would you suggest some recent titles, books you've read and carefully studied in both Mormon and Utah history? Do you have any recommendations?

**Todd Compton** (5:01)
You know, I wrote down a list of books and some of them aren't recent, but they're books that really influenced me often toward writing the Jacob Hamblin book, so let me just mention a few. One fairly recent is Will Bagley's The Whites Want Everything, which focuses a lot on Newt history.
In the same series, The Kingdom of the West, Carmen Hardy Doing the Works of Abraham is a history of Mormon polygamy, and that's a great book. As far as Native American stuff, John Alton Peterson's Utah's Blackhawk War, Paul Reeves Making Space on the Western Frontier, Mormons, Miners and Southern Paiutes.

**Brad Westwood** (5:57)
Good company.

**Todd Compton** (5:58)