DAVID HANNERS is probably one of the few former oilfield roughnecks you’ll ever meet who also has a Pulitzer Prize. His songs feature vibrant storytelling, and he brings his vivid characters to life in a way reminiscent of John Prine, Bill Morrissey and Steve Earle.

“Truth is stranger than fiction, and that’s particularly true when it comes to songwriting,” David said. “If you just shut up and watch people -- observe their mannerisms, follow their eyes, listen to the specific words they use -- you can usually have enough for a good song right there.”

That storytelling was one of the reasons his first CD, Nothingtown, was named a Critic's Year-end Top Ten selection by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. And his craft has only gotten better with his 2009 release, The Traveler's Burden.

The Traveler’s Burden has raked up a number of good reviews, but few sum up the CD as well as noted music critic and author Jim Walsh, who wrote for MinnPost.com that the record is “like Townes Van Zandt doing Nebraska.”

“I’d never be so presumptuous to say that myself, but I’m glad he said it,” David mused. “He got what I was going for with the record.”

David grew up in Casey, a town of 2,900 in East Central Illinois. It is a farming community -- it used to be the Timothy-grass capital of the world -- and while an outsider may see it as little more than corn and soybean fields, it is an area with a history of literature and music. A few miles to the east, James Jones wrote From Here to Eternity, and a few miles to the south is the hometown of folk legend Burl Ives. Most of David’s songs take place in his native Midwest, but he also draws on Texas, where he lived for 17 years.

And, yes, David has a Pulitzer Prize (1989, Explanatory Journalism) and he has spent most of his life working as a newspaper reporter. It is a job where he gets to see the best and worst of people; some of them (or parts of them) wind up in his songs. But he’s also worked a variety of other jobs. He’s been a roughneck (“I thought the money was good until I realized my dad and I were among the few who still had all our fingers,” he said), a short-order cook (“I did a mean steak and eggs”) and he also cleaned dead animals off the highway for the Illinois Department of Transportation.

David has earned a number of songwriting honors. He’s a winner of the Minnesota Folk Festival's "New Folk" songwriting competition. Other artists have recognized his work; in 2010, famed photographer Wing Young Huie selected David’s “The Ballad of Mohamed Saleh” for the soundtrack of his groundbreaking University Avenue Project. David’s songs have also been featured at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as part of Laura Lundgren-Smith's play Digging Up the Boys, a work about three trapped coal miners set in the 1930s South.

David has opened for national touring acts such as Tom Paxton, Bill Staines, Ellis Paul, Garnet Rogers and others.