It all began when I was about 3 1/2 years old. I'd stand around the living room, hangin' out with the family, sharin' a stogie and listening to hillbilly music.

My grandfather was a master craftsman, and made hand-carved, rosewood fiddles of his own. I remember his playing and how the rest of the family would sing. My grandfather was a singer, my aunt was a singer, my cousins were singers.....why we even had a sewing machine that was a SINGER!

It was inevitable, music was in my blood. I took an interest in stringed instruments, and picked up the guitar at a young age. My first guitar was also "hand-crafted," built from a long strip of wood, several nails, and some rubber bands. I was hooked. From there, I moved quickly to toy guitars, and by age of 5, I had my first "real" guitar, a gigantic, hollow-bodied, f-hole Kay that's been passed back and forth in the family.

Soon I began to make up my own songs, playing for anybody in the neighborhood who would listen, and always trying to make them laugh. My most memorable gig was for a bunch of construction workers building a new house nearby. I was their lunch break entertainment, singing silly songs, telling jokes, and generally cracking them up.

In grade school, I became interested in performing on stage and in musicals, which continued into the 70's and  my senior high years. By now, I was writing serious songs, with actual music and lyrics, and by now had been a member of several garage bands. I played both acoustic and electric guitars, having graduated from the stick-and-rubber band variety.

Along the way, I developed my early recording studio techniques by experimenting with home tape recorders. One of my dreams was to become a recording artist, and a singer/songwriter. In the "olden days" my idea of multi-track recording was to use a monaural reel-to-reel tape recorder, along with a portable cassette player, and sometimes (just for variety) I threw in an 8-track tape deck. The fun of adding the different guitar parts and vocals was trying to get them all to sync on to one tape deck, you know, trying to push all the play buttons at the exact same time with all my fingers and toes...but on to more important things.

I remember the night that I wrote "Dave's Song." It was September 8th, 1975, and it was after 9:30pm. I was sitting at the kitchen table in our trailer (See the lovely paneling pictured above). My parents had gone to bed, and I was alone with my guitar. This melody line within the D chord came to me, and I started playing it over and over. I quickly grabbed paper and a pencil, and wrote down the chord progression, and the words to the chorus came.

From there, I thought I would write what I was feeling, never intending anyone else to ever hear my thoughts. It was getting late now, and this was the first time in my life that my Dad didn't come into the room and tell me to "get those lights turned out and get to bed." Something definitely was different about this night.

I played and wrote until past midnight, and that probably explains why there are five verses to the song, which my wife, Daena says are entirely too many. At this point, I only had the song down on paper, not on a tape recorder. Sometime around 1:00 or 1:30am I finally called it quits and went to bed.

Several weeks later, I had my guitar at school, as I usually did. It wasn't uncommon for me to whip my guitar out and play even during an English class or Biology class to entertain the teacher and the students. I was known as the "John Denver" of Littlestown High School, and I knew all of his guitar capo songs, too. Being so involved with guitars and music, I was asked to become a teacher's aide in the middle and elementary schools. That day I went to help my mentor and buddy, Thomas W. Kittinger, teach the 7th & 8th grade chorus.

It was the beginning of the period, and the kids were noisy. While the "chief" as I called him, tried to get them to settle down between songs, I started to play the chord progression from "Dave's Song." Just then, Mr. Kittinger turned to me and said, "What is that?" I said, "Oh, it's nothing." He asked again, and I told him it was a little something I was fooling around with. He said, "play some more."

So he sat down at the piano, and started to play along with me, totally forgetting about the classroom full of kids. He added the piano melody that you hear throughout the song, as we played together that day. He suddenly stopped, stood up at the studio piano, and directed his attention to the students.

"Alright, Sopranos, I want you to sing OOH on this note, and I want you altos, to sing OOH on this note. Baritones, this is your note." I was shocked at what he was doing with my personal song, never meant to be heard by anyone, much less a bunch of middle school kids. We played the song through again, and he added more of the fancy stuff on the piano as we went. I was fascinated with the parts I was hearing, and all that was happening.

As the song ended, Mr. Kittinger turned to me and said, "You know what we're gonna do? We're gonna arrange this in four parts for the Swing Choir and do it for the Spring Concert." I was speechless.

We spent Thanksgiving and Christmas vacation together at his house banging out the notes on the piano, using up lots of manuscript paper, writing it out the hard way. Before long, we were rehearsing the song with the Senior High School's Swing Choir, a group of the best singers in the school. The Swing Choir went on tour in the county, and "Dave's Song" became a feature in their program.

The grand finale was the Spring 76 Concert in my senior year. After touring the song around the area, it was wonderful to play it for my friends and neighbors at home. You can hear the crowd cheering, and someone even yells "John Denver," too! After graduation, Mr. Kittinger and I got together the paperwork to copyright the song, and believe me, that's a big deal for a small town kid like me.

The last public performance of "Dave's Song" came in our community Bicentennial Celebration, where I was asked to include my song within the "I Love America" program, as part of "Patriotism for America" I never quite understood what my song had to do with patriotism, or anything like that, but I guess I knew the right people.

Even more amazing was the fact that "Dave's Song" made the headlines, at least locally. Someone wrote a piece about my song being featured without even interviewing me. I didn't even know the article was in the paper until Scott Music sent me the clipping in a card that said, You're in the News! I'll never forget that day, because my Mom handed me the envelope while I was underneath the back porch doing some painting. I opened it up and I was so excited when I read it, that I sat straight up and banged my head on the bottom of the porch!

TIME TRAVEL: TWENTY YEARS INTO THE FUTURE: 1996

A lot of water passed under the bridge since 1976, and by now, I was involved in lots of musical productions and traveling full time on the road with my wife, Daena. After spending eight years as evangelists and gospel singers, and recording six albums in a "real multi-track studio", we'd begun "Farmer Dave and His Barnyard Friends" in 1990 to reach kids and their families with humor and music, and puppets, too.

We were in the process of writing music for our second kids album, when Daena suggested that we dig "Dave's Song" out of mothballs. We needed another song to balance out side one, and she had always liked the melody, although as I said earlier, she had a problem with the numerous verses. She used to kid me that Mr. Kittinger told her that we should get together because I needed a good lyricist, and she'd been waiting for this chance for a long time.

After a lot of coaxing, I agreed to let her play with "my song." We kept the first verse and the chorus completely intact, but now that we were in ministry, the song needed a different focus. The original words are actually a little depressing, and the melody lends itself to more uplifting words. We trimmed it to three verses, and you can see its final version on the lyrics page. Only one line beyond the first chorus made it past the final cut!

Although it was never intended for other's ears, my "song in the night" is now playing in cassette players all over the world. Well, maybe not just this second, but there are copies of it all over the world!

Who woulda thunk that this little hillbilly boy would ever climb the mountains or fly so high, and do all the things that I couldn't do before? Not me.

Enjoy your journey into my song.