Camden Joy (Tom Adelman) has made an album about presidential coins. (Photo courtesy of Camden Joy.)

Camden Joy was filled with outrage when he read the headline. It said: “Colorado congressman looks to scale back presidential coin program.”

And in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, the singer-songwriter turned his fury about current events to creativity and immediately penned a tune full of incisive lyrics. The song is called: “Colorado Congressman Looks to Scale Back Presidential Coin Program.”

“Who would dare shut down a beautiful program just because it was losing billions and billions of dollars?” Joy said in an interview.

The scaling back of the presidential coin program was a personal blow to Joy, who is better known in Pennington as Farmers Market founder Tom Adelman. He was in the midst of writing an album of songs inspired by the coins when the infamous headline came.

The presidential coin program started in 2005 as a replacement for the unpopular Sacagawea dollar coins, the U.S. treasury’s latest effort to entice consumers away from wasteful paper dollars that wear out quickly, requiring costly reprinting of small denomination bills. Intended to mimic the success of the state quarter program, the coins were minted as tributes to the U.S. Presidents.

But by 2011, there was a backlog of a billion unwanted coins in the vaults, and congress ordered a halt to their mass production. The coins will still be made in small numbers for collectors.

And so, Adelman’s tribute became a protest album, with songs about Taft, Lincoln, and even tangential presidential topics like Jimmy Carter’s relatives and perennial gilded age candidate William Jennings Bryan.

The lyrics are tongue-in-cheek but learned. The Taft song starts like this, with fat jokes:

William howard taft is wide as wide as man can be morning noon and night he likes to eat and eat and eat every time old taft sits down you’ll see the poor chair wince every time he stands you will see a full solar eclipse.

But goes on to satirize the president’s imperialistic foreign policy:

his foreign policy is imperialism except it’s called “dollar diplomacy” you gotta find some gold my friend you gotta find some oil or you will never find a friend who stays steadfast and loyal.

It’s no surprise the lyrics are well written. Adelman wrote six novels between 1998 and 2002 under the Camden Joy penname, which were well reviewed, and most of which dealt with rock bands. Before that, he was a famous underground writer who blanketed New York City with his posters and pamphlets. He also wrote two nonfiction books about baseball, the most recent, Black and Blue: The Golden Arm, the Robinson Boys and the 1966 World Series that Stunned America was published in 2006.

He has lived in Pennington for six years with his wife and daughter, and is a stay-at-home dad. Something about the coins inspired Adelman to bring back his Camden Joy persona.

“This story of the presidential coins caught my imagination that, for whatever reason, I felt compelled to write it in song rather than in story form. What the presidential coin program inspired in me was this realization that there’s a vast amount of different perspectives on history and there’s a lot of different storylines in it.”

Adelman is no historian but he spent a lot of time at the library reading about the more obscure presidents.

If anyone asks why Adelman became interested in writing about such an esoteric topic, he asks why more people aren’t creating presidential coin albums.

“How could any self-respecting American songwriter not see this as a great way to address a wide variety of subjects? Why am I the only one doing this?” he said.

Adelman believes the coins were a good idea that were “badly promoted and doomed.”

And the coins continue to inspire Adelman even after the program’s cancelation. He is currently penning a tune about a security guard who stole $2.5 million worth of coins from the mint over a period of years.

Joy gave two local concerts, one at Veridian Gallery in Pennington and the other at the train station in Hopewell Borough. A Manhattan performance was scheduled for the end of the month.

To hear the album for free, visit http://camdenjoy.bandcamp.com/album/presidential-coins