One of Those Times in a Life - Songs by the Campfire

By the time you read this, we will have celebrated lighting the 49th and final campfire of this particular journey, this Pilgrimage, with a concert and the release of an album of fifteen new songs. I am filled with gratitude, thankful to discover I had the grit, and thankful for the grace given and received. I look forward to the next adventure(s), but not before taking some time to truly appreciate this one.Thank you to all those who have shared the journey and have helped make it possible.

As I reach this moment in the journey I am reminded again how long life takes and the fact that it is over in an instant. I am surprised that the last three stages of life turned out to each be ten year long. It was certainly not planned that way. While I’m too close to it to judge the quality of it, telling my story around forty-nine campfires has certainly been the most important and satisfying work that I have ever done.

There were a lot of significant benchmarks in the summer and fall of 2015. There was my 50th high school reunion and 50 years of friendship and musical partnership with Mike McCoy. My older brother celebrated his 70th birthday and my younger brother retired. Those moments combined with others involving lifelong connections or friendships made me realize that, in my own way, I was arriving where I started and able to see things with new eyes and as if for the first time. 

As the pace of lighting these campfires increases—and the goal of lighting the “last campfire” on May 13th approaches--I realize what a luxury it has been to meander slowly through the memories and discoveries of a lifetime.At this campfire I talk about becoming part of a Civil Rights Pilgrimage in the fall of 2014. Preparing for those nine days on the bus awakened countless memories and connected me in new ways to who I had been and what I had thought and believed in 1968 and 1969. Looking back I realized how much faith I had in March of 1968. When I turned twenty-one that first day of spring I believed that Robert Kennedy would become the President, that Martin Luther King, Jr. would live long and eloquently. The recently released Kerner Report, looking at the Detroit riots of a year earlier, offered a road map to racial reconciliation. I also believed that the Viet Nam War would soon be over. I mean, even Presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, tapped his coat pocket and talked of a secret plan for peace. Twelve months later so much had changed. I also learned during that time that my father had been in a mental institution when I was born and much of what I believed was suddenly in doubt.To be able to see that time from this place is enlightening for me both from a perspective of where I was and we were then as well as shining a different light on where we are now.Understanding what it means to be part of a larger Pilgrimage has also helped transformed my personal journey into a Pilgrimage. That realization fills me with gratitude. 

When I started this journey of Gratitude, Grit, and Grace I thought it would be mostly one of awakening and recording memories. I continue to be surprised—pleasantly for the most part--at how much of it is about discovering and discoveries. By shining light into dark corners I am seeing things differently or for the first time. By opening long doors long shut I am able to make connections and see pathways. All of it has proven harder and more satisfying that I could have ever imagined.

A few things became clear as I got ready to share my songs and stories in a series of virtual campfires. I would need a team of people to help me. It was going to take a lot longer than I first imagined. What I thought was going to be simply a journey of memory quickly became one of discovery as well. I also quickly realized that the exploration allowed for and demanded that I open “doors” long shut and often locked. To do that was more difficult and more satisfying than I could have ever imagined.

In the summer of 2007 I began what became the 7th and final stage of my personal and professional journey, “One of Those Times in a Life.” I realized I had finally faced long hidden fears in a way that I was able to live with them instead of in them. One of the ways the change appeared to show itself was in my songwriting. A process that was often anxiety producing more and more became something that brought feelings of joy and a sense of fulfillment.Due to a combination of choice and chance and circumstance in the fall of 2010 I had new albums that represented all of my professional careers: songwriter, solo artist, member of The Brothers Four, and with Mike McCoy. Looking and listening to those recordings I realized I had arrived at a new appreciation for each of them. I had also spent a season writing about my family’s history. The time had arrived to take a lifetime of stories and try to tell the story of a lifetime.

It has been a while since we lit the 41st campfire. In the interim I have written a number of new songs and recorded a 15 song CD. I am also getting ready for a concert to celebrate the release of the new album and the lighting of the 49th and final Campfire on this amazing journey, One of Those Times in a Life.I had promised myself when I began this journey more than six years ago I would only work to living lines and no longer work to deadlines. Setting the concert date of May 13th months in advance has changed things a bit. The remaining eight Campfires will not have an oral Chronicle but a written one. My plan is to return in time to these Campfires and add a spoken Chronicle to what we are sharing now.

In the summer of 2004 I released a solo CD called “The Missing Peace.” At the same time my lifelong friend, Mike McCoy, joined me in The Brothers Four and during the 2004-2005 concert season The Brothers Four did a series of performances in the US with The Kingston Trio and Glenn Yarbrough and his group. In 2006 McCoy and I released a 25th anniversary edition of “Between Friends.” The 41st Campfire talks about how those events put me on The Road To Going Home. 

The 40th campfire talks about the spring of 2004. That season I successfully completed the vocals for my most ambitious solo album, there were significant personnel changes within The Brothers Four, and I had a life altering moment with my older brother. Together those experiences propelled me on “The Road That Leads Us Home.”

In the 38th Campfire the long held and deep-seated fears that resided so long in my unconscious were found and freed and soon running wild. In this, the 39th Campfire, those fears begin to be given names and faces and in the naming and facing them I am able to begin claiming them. 

It has been a while since we have lit a campfire…this 38th campfire talks about events in 2001. In the spring of that year I shared a book I created with a few family and friends. The manuscript contained my journey for “authenticity, belonging, and confidence” or, put another way, “a search for truth, home, and to find myself.” Somehow putting that quest into words freed a number of fears that were unconsciously lodged inside of me. This campfire ends with The Brothers Four in Japan the week after 9/11 with both the country and me wondering what all may await.

Between September of 1998 and October of 2000 The Brothers Four performed more than 150 times in the US and in Japan. It was the only time the group ever traveled around America by tour bus. It still amazes me the group is going strong after 55 years. Some years the phone rings more often than others. Those years were one of those times.A correction: The performance at NHK Hall was attended by 3000 people not 300.  

My father died on May 28, 1997, the day before my mother’s 75th birthday. It was heartbreakingly unexpected. A month or so after he died I made a decision to make him the focus of my work for one year. At the end of the year I had created a musical memoir entitled Season of the Heart that explored the spring of 1997. A year to the day after he died I performed the 40 new songs for the first time in my mother’s living room in front of a lifetime of friends. The next week I performed the memoir four different days in Seattle at the Richard Hugo House. When it was over I knew it was time to move on. It was what my father would have wanted.

At a concert in Seattle on March 22, 1997 every singing group I had ever been a part of beginning with one in high school appeared on stage together. A week later in a concert in Spokane I was the opening act as well as one of The Brothers Four. Looking back those two events felt like one concert with a week long intermission. It has been something to remember them and write about them and to realize again how important they were.

In September of 1995 McCoy and I celebrated 30 years of friendship. For his birthday that month I gave him a songbook containing 52 original songs that we had sung through the years. At the time I saw that book and those songs as a culmination. Little did I know that our journey together was only beginning.

1995 was a year of writing songs for friends and family as well as for sale. I wrote songs for Pat’s and my wedding, Lindsey’s graduation, and for a concert celebrating 30 years of music and friendship with Mike McCoy. Of all the songs I wrote that year Let Love Go Forward, a song written for my wedding, is likely the most significant. It ends most campfire concerts.

Beginning in March of 1994 there were a dozen moments or events that continued to remind me how close life is to death and how near love is to loss. While those experiences gave me pause and stopped me in my tracks they did not stop me from embracing life and celebrating love.

My cousin Jane died twenty years ago a few months before her 41st birthday. This Campfire describes the time from her diagnosis-November of 1992-until her death in March of 1994. As I re-remembered that time there was much I had forgotten while some of it remained as clear and close as yesterday. Making that time a part of One of Those Times in a Life gives it added perspective.

The early 90’s brought significant changes in my life and career. I became an instant family man. The Brothers Four committed to performing more including frequent tours of Japan and regular tours around the US. It also was a time when I worked as a freelance verse writer for American Greetings as well as continuing my quest to “make it” as a songwriter.