Original Songs

╠═ Home ═╬═ Original Songs ═╬═ Fiddle Tunes ═╬═ Old Songs ═╬═ Videos ═╬═ Everything Else ═╬═ Contact & Schedule ═╣

I started writing songs in 2007. The first few were very difficult to compose, but I soon figured out the basics of engineering lyrics. By the end of that year I had written about 45 songs, and I kept going, writing about the same number of songs in 2008. I thought they were all gems at the time, but now only a few of those early songs pass muster for the purposes of public entertainment or even my private singing. In recent years the pace of my output has slowed, mainly because I've said much of what I wanted to say when I started.

The examples below are relatively early efforts. I will gradually add some of the more recent songs to this page when I am satisfied with them and they are all registered and processed. Thanks for listening.

This first example is an early song inspired by a music session I attended in a small town in the mountains:

And, in a similar spirit, here is a song in memory of the great old-time fiddler and magnificent person Ralph Blizzard. It explains the circumstances when I first met him:

The next one got a general start from the opening lines of the late-Heian era classic Hōjōki 方丈記 (Account of my hut). Otherwise, it is all located in the southeastern United States:

In the next case, the title popped into my head one day. It kept banging around in there until finally I sat down and made up a story to go with it:

I occasionally write message songs, but sparingly. Here is one that doesn't sound too preachy:

Here is a song about the joys of youthful encounters and the bittersweet remembrance of them. What ever became of the two folks in the song?

One evening a local songwriter grandiosely declared during a performance that s/he wrote songs "to remember important truths." Hearing these words, I realized that I, too, write songs to remember important truths. Here's one of them:

And there are many more where these came from. Please inquire further if interested.