Psalms 37:4 says; "Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart."

" Son you should write songs."  I could hear my father speaking to me through time as I sat there listening to the last notes of the music tracks for our latest project fade slowly away.  Legendary producer and artist Eddie Crook strode into the sound room and turned his billed cap around backwards, a sign he was through.  He'd played the keyboard and the grand piano for us on our recording.
"That'd bring a tear to a glass eye!"  He jokingly referred to the last song on the project, "What More Can They Do To Him Now?"  The tracks were all finished and all we had to do now was record our vocals!  I breathed a sigh of relief and let my mind trace the twists and turns the journey to this moment had taken. 
 My Father had been a musician and had taught me to sing when I was five years old.  He would play the guitar and our cousin would play the five string Banjo and I would dance and sing, "The Ballad Of The Beverly Hillbillys, "  People though it was so cute.  It's embarrassing to think about it now when I'm Forty-Seven.  But that's how it started.  By the time I was nine I was singing Conway Twitty songs in nightclubs around middle and western Kentucky every weekend with my fathers band.  There I was singing, "Linda On My Mind" without a clue as to what I was singing about.  I was just glad to see the look on my Dad's face.  He seemed so proud of me when I sang.  He always tried to get me to write songs too.  But at that age I hadn't lived long enough or experienced enough of life to write about anything with any truth or authority.
 But his encouragement gave me the desire and the dream to be a singer and a songwriter some day.  That dream almost ended when I was Seventeen.  My Father who was very ill from complications of Diabetes died November 16th, 1978.  With no one to play the music for me anymore I quit singing. 
Then I met my wife Jareta. She had grown up with a similar dream.  Her parents, especially her father encouraged her to sing and play the piano.  She along with her older sister Denise would play piano and organ in their home church.  She would sing Patsy Cline songs with the radio in her room or in the car and let her imagination run wild too.  We married in November of 1986 but it wasn't until May of 1991 that the desire would come alive again for both of us.
The words,"Son you should write songs!" still kept ringing in my ears.  I started writing again during the summer of '91.  I even attended a songwiters camp in Nashville.  After several false starts, I wrote a song that several local musicians in western Kentucky thought was pretty good and so I sent it to a promoter in Nashville, with the hope that it would get recorded by some big name star and I could finally realize my dream of becoming a professional singer and songwriter.  But that didn't happen of course.  Then I got thrown a real curve ball in May of 1994. I was diagnosed with a terminal form of cancer.  With what seemed no hope of a future I decided why bother to write anymore.  So I set my aspirations aside.  But God had other plans.  After two reocurrances of the cancer, several months of extensive treatments with Radiation and Chemo Therapy and a miracle from God, I was healed!  God saved my soul and started me on a new path.  He led Jareta and I to relocate to the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee where we began to sing for Him!  Then we began to pray for the Lord to give us original songs.  And  you know what the Bible says, "Ask and Ye shall receive.  Seek and Ye shall find.  Knock and It will be opened unto you!"  As if a flood gate had been opened the songs began to pour out.  I wrote with Jareta's help some 50 songs in about two years.  We recorded several of them  locally.  God put us in touch with a man who owned an internet radio station and he started playing some of our music.  Then The Eddie Crook Company of Nashville heard us and contacted us.  They wanted to publish our songs and record our music!  I couldn't believe it.  So here it is November 29, 2008, a little over thirty years since my father passed and I'm seated in the sound engineers booth of the Trinity Broadcasting Network's Recording Studio in Nashville Tn. listening to the tracks of our latest project entitled, "One Heart, One Mind and One Accord!  We have a contract, a record label and are recording in what used to be "Twitty City"  Conway Twitty's tourist attraction.   I smile and say in my heart, "Well Dad it's taken me thirty years but with God's help I did it!"  I think he and God smiled too.