Music to read by: by enlisting musicians to aid the cause of adult literacy, songwriter and activist Deborah Pardes is marching to her own drummer. (music).

When San Francisco-based singer-songwriter Deborah Pardes visited an adult literacy program at her local library in 1999, she bumped head-on into a startling statistic: 44 million American adults read and write at or below the fifth-grade level. "We're in a crisis here," she remembers thinking. "How can we call ourselves the leading industrialized nation when one fifth of our population can't read the Declaration of Independence?"

This revelation motivated Pardes to found the SIBL (Songs Inspired by Literature) Project, which raises awareness and funds for adult literacy programs by connecting musicians to the cause.

Pardes also had a novel idea about how to raise money: She staged an international songwriters' competition seeking original songs based on literature, with the winning entries to be recorded on CD and sold to raise funds for literacy programs. More than 350 songwriters from 38 states and 10 countries entered the first event. The result: SIBL's outstanding debut CD, Chapter One, which became available nationwide at Barnes and Noble and Borders bookstores in September.

Supplementing the winners with contributors like Bruce Springsteen, whose song "The Ghost of Tom Joad" alludes to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Pardes has packed star power into Chapter One. But the CD also offers plenty of contest-winning tunes--and tunesmiths--that will strike listeners as entirely new.

One example is "7th Step," Pardes's own lyrical song about Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. "When people heard the song, they wanted to hear more, and they asked me to repeat the name of the book," remembers Pardes, a 1999 Lilith Fair talent search winner. "It dawned on me that music inspired by books would be a great bridge between those who have read a book and those who haven't."

The 37-year-old Pardes has also used her lesbian identity to strengthen that bridge, as when she took her ideas to a 2001 Southern California literacy conference. "There I was, talking to 150 literacy professionals about my ideas of musicians helping the cause," she says. "The expression on their faces told me that they thought I didn't quite understand" the pain of the closet faced by adult illiterates. So Pardes came out to the audience then and there. She got the support she wanted.

Small victories aside, Pardes remains hopeful that perking up ears and eyes to the connection between a good tune and a good read will aid in shifting legions of America's illiterates out of closets and into easily accessible programs. SIBL's Chapter Two is already in the works; its songwriting contest winners will be announced later this year, and the CD will be available in spring 2003. While Chapter One called for entries to be songs inspired by general books, poems, and plays, this year's competition spans the categories of Latin-American, African-American, women's, and children's literature. It's all music to Pardes's ears.

"When I get out of focus and weary, I listen to one of the many entries we get from all over the globe," she says. "That brings me back to the magic of this--the universality of this cause and the innovative cure for it that is SIBL's mission."

Cannon has written for the San Francisco Chronicle.