We grew up always hearing our dad had a wrote a song when he was young. Before he shipped out to serve in World War 2. Before he took advantage of the GI Bill to go to college. Our parents would occasionally yell out at the radio, listen kids - it’s your Dad’s song. We never gave it much thought.

We would hear him tell us how he plunked out the melody on the piano and wrote out the lyrics and how when a music magazine ran an ad for a song contest, he sent his in. A few years later, he’s sitting in a movie theatre and is thrilled to hear his song playing in the movie. He runs home, excited to tell his mom, where she explainsthat his song has, in effect, been stolen. Probably not an uncommon practice in the early days of the music industry. There wasn’t much a teenager from Cleveland could do about it. It wasn’t long after that he joined the Navy and went on to earn a Purple Heart. He never wrote music again.

As we got a little older and started writing and performing music, we began to realize that this story we grew up hearing had a lot more to do with our lives than we first thought. We got into music thinking we didn’t really come from a musical family. Our excessive interest in it was kind of unique in our family. Although our Dad would always be quick to point out a strong lyric or melody.

But here’s the thing. This little song our dad wrote turned out to be a bit of a classic. It’s been recorded by some of the greatest singers of our time. There’s around 150 entries for it if you search on itunes. It was played in a major motion picture again last year. Now, it’s not as big as Over the Rainbow but, we realize now as songwriters, it’s done pretty well for a first effort. Now we can appreciate the simple perfection of that song in a way we couldn’t as kids. And we realize we are standing in someone’s musical shadow and following in his musical footsteps.

We’re not sure who stole the song although we do know who took writing credit. Who knows? They surely did a lot of arrangement work on it. Maybe that person never even knew it had originally been written by a kid in Cleveland. But we know who wrote it. Turns out it’s not so weird that we got into music after all.

When we record the full length follow up to our current cd, our Dad’s song will be on it.
Stay tuned. This song’s story isn’t over yet.


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