About 11 years ago, Jesse Olsen Bay found pieces of white and blue typewriter paper covered in hand-written notes and patchworks of poetry and prose written by his grandmother, the award-winning American author and activist Tillie Olsen, while he was helping her move to Oakland. She called them her “blueys.” Tillie, who is known for her depictions of women and the working class, was a perfectionist in her published work, Mr. Bay said. Her prose is often described as compressed. But the physical remains of her writing process entranced him: words scrawled all over the page, phrases crossed out and rewritten or made illegible by time. “She wasn’t planning on publishing them, but there was something masterful in her choosing of words, and so evocative and so descriptive,” he said. With her permission, Mr. Bay, a musician from Sebastopol, started to read them, intrigued by the idea of integrating them into his music. When his grandmother passed away in 2007, he found even more, and last year he finished a 25-track album inspired by the writings. Mr. Bay will play excerpts from the album on Jan. 31 at the Dance Palace Community and Cultural Center, accompanied by dances choreographed by Virginia Matthews. In the album, Mr. Bay picked up on recurrent ideas in the blueys: the night, children, death. Some lyrics, like in “The Dead Bell,” are lifted straight from his grandmother’s old pages, interpreted by his gentle piano work and tenor voice; he repeats the penultimate line twice, as if to recall the ringing of a bell. (“I do not stir/The frost makes a flower, the dew makes a star/The dead bell/Somebody’s done for.”) In others, like “Fog,” he drew from jottings on unrelated pages. When Mr. Bay sings “Fog,” he breaks up a capella lyrics with airy, fuzzy tones made from blowing on the lips of glass bottles. At times, he sings the words one by one, as if inventing the lyrics as he goes along. The offbeat instrumentation is, in part, inspired by Tillie. She wrote about subjects like motherhood and working; like her, he is inspired by objects from “the texture and fabric of day to day life:” bottles, toys, a typewriter. “Songs of Dark Radiance: A Music and Dance Performance” will show at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 31, at the Dance Palace, in Point Reyes Station. Tickets are $15, or $10 for students and seniors.