In classrooms across the country, elementary students wade through the unenviable task of learning the American presidents in order. Middle schoolers study the presidential line of succession. High school juniors learn the historical significance of Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase and William McKinley’s assassination.

They learn names. They learn dates.

But they won’t likely learn that Jefferson was an avid billiards player. Teachers will rarely tell them that Truman’s only real ambition in life was to climb out of debt and sell men’s clothes.

That’s where Of Great and Mortal Men: 43 Songs for 43 Presidencies comes in, a three-CD box set written and recorded by relative newcomers Christian Kiefer, Jefferson Pitcher and J. Matthew Gerken to be released Sept. 9 by Indianapolis-based Standard Recording Company. As the title would suggest, the collection devotes one song to each president, in a series first composed during February of 2006 for fawm.org, a Web site that provides a medium for artists to write and record an entire album in a month. On the polished versions worked up since then, the three songwriters are joined by a supporting cast of established musicians, including Alan Sparhawk (Low), Bill Callahan (Smog), Mark Kozelek and Marla Hansen.

Speed writing

“I don’t recall the exact moment that I landed upon the idea of writing about American presidential history,” says Pitcher. “But it came from the impetus of seeking material that I thought would be complex enough to embody some very grave issues as well as the absurdity and humor of public life. I also felt this would be an interesting way to examine a long period of time in a somewhat concise fashion.”

When the three songwriters went to work writing the material, they divided the material in order by threes — starting with Kiefer and ending with Pitcher. The songs were posted on the FAWM Web site immediately upon completion, lending the project an almost voyeuristic feel. Both the songwriters and listeners then discussed the work online — ofgreatandmortalmen.wordpress.com/ — in a running commentary archived at the project Web site.

While all were tempted to fiddle with arrangements, lyrics and melodies when they re-recorded the demos, they made a point of staying true to the original material. There were exceptions, though. Kiefer struggled mightily with his song about Herbert Hoover, and Pitcher wasn’t happy with his demo for President Taylor.

“We made a point of being pretty careful to not change them too much,” Kiefer said. “Part of the magic of the process is the concept that these were all songs we wrote in 28 days.”

Civic-minded songwriters

The fundamental notion that history can be — and needs to be — taught from different perspectives and texts has become the crux of the project.

“I think this particular project has a rather unique ability to work in a sort of academic environment,” Kiefer said. “I know that when I was in high school, I would have loved to have had something other than the textbook.”

That civic-minded approach attracted Standard Recording’s Kevin Phillips and Mark Latta.

“Ultimately it was what sold us to the project,” Latta said. “We think of presidents as these iconic figures. But they had good days, bad days and heartburn.”

Phillips and Latta signed a deal with the songwriters in the replica oval office at Austin, Texas’ Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum. The songwriters were adamant that the project be released with deluxe packaging — complete with a book — and for relatively cheap.

“You’re asking a label to do a lot: Put out a deluxe project that’s going to be 10 times more expensive than the average CD, by three artists that they’ve, frankly, probably never heard of before, and we want them to barely make a profit on it because the price is low,” Kiefer said. “And you have to get it all done in the next few months.”

The 107-page book includes illustrations of each song by 43 different artists, including a color-by-number profile of James K. Polk and a photograph of a man wearing a cardboard suit and yarn beard modeled after Rutherford B. Hayes. An introduction written by former CIA analyst David MacMichael claims that Kiefer, Gerken and Pitcher have “sung our history like no one since Walt Whitman.”

Representing the past

As a songwriter, Kiefer has spent much of his career writing about fictional or historical characters, places and events.

“I’ve always been interested in the way the past has been represented in the art of the present,” Kiefer said. “There’s always been an element of the past that has been incorporated into what I’ve been working on.”

Kiefer just received his Ph.D. from U.C. Davis in English. His dissertation, “Specifically Human Truths: Fiction and History in the American West,” assessed how post-modern Westerns mythologize the West.

It’s heady stuff, but in songs like “Such A Marvelous Dream” — where Kiefer imagines Ronald Reagan late in life, fading in mental agility, mixing his acting career and cowboy mythology with the events of his presidency — thorough knowledge of the subject is supplemented by Kiefer’s insight and humanity.

“I think one of the most interesting aspects of Reagan as a cultural figure has been the way that he was able to very easily utilize the mythology of the cowboy,” Kiefer said. “I think it’s very fascinating to consider how quickly the American public is able to swallow manufactured images and manufactured mythologies of that sort.”

Surreal, reverent, bearded

Each songwriter mined the annals of presidential history for anecdotes and stories to tell. Some are surreal (Kiefer’s “Washington Dreams of Hippopotamus”), some show reverence (Gerken’s FDR song, “Illuminating the Bright Lines”) and others are sadly poignant (Pitcher’s Truman piece, “Suits and Fine Trousers vs. Hiroshima”).

Many of the men Kiefer, Pitcher and Gerken tackle on the project are ripe for confrontation, condemnation and scorn, but it was important for the men involved to humanize and understand their subjects.

“I look at these events in these men’s lives — like with Truman — being someone who OKs the dropping of these bombs, and kills massive amounts of people,” Pitcher said. “And I tried to imagine and wonder what it was like for him when he went to bed at night.”

At times, all three songwriters emphasized that certain nuggets just fell into their laps.

“It’s almost like you can’t research because you might come up with something that might ruin the beautiful, psychological jewel that you’ve accidentally discovered,” Kiefer said.

Gerken echoed that sentiment.

“Some of the personal stories were really interesting,” Gerken said. “It’s just a man dealing with assassination or character assassination … It’s amazing that people can set that aside. It’s very scary.”

Like Kiefer and Pitcher, Gerken’s day job holds sway over his artistic work. As an urban planner based out of California, Gerken spends much of his time writing zoning variances and solving problems for suburban and urban residents.  It sounds tedious, but Gerken maintains it can be remarkably creative.

“Doing urban design and planning can be creative and also analytical,” Gerken said. “Music has a lot of math and structure, as does urban planning.”

In the end, Kiefer, Pitcher and Gerken have attempted to revise, rewrite and, at times, even dismantle history.

“I believe a model is growing for a new way of telling history that is more complete,” Pitcher said. “If we have a history told by the collection of a million voices in some composite form, I think it will inherently be truer than the history told by a handful of wealthy, ‘educated’, powerful folks.  So in some way, these small stories could be arguably just as important to our history as the bigger events that we tend to focus on.”