How I Became Interested in Writing Music

I have posted one of my songs titled The Christians’ Prayer. I thought you might like to know how I got started writing songs. I grew up around music. My dad was a church music director and my mother played the piano for churches. As a young boy in small churches when they needed a kid to sing, they drafted me because my dad led the music.

During the fifties, I listened to the radio and enjoyed the rock music. There weren’t any religious music radio stations back then. Most stations had times in the week when they played gospel music along with preaching.

It was in the early sixties when the Beatles came out that my song writing interests began to grow. I heard they wrote most of their own songs and thought maybe I could write songs too. So my song writing began as a hobby just for fun. I did not play a music instrument at the time so I had no way of performing what I had written.

I joined the Marine Corps in 1965 a year after I graduated from High School. It was while I was stationed in Vietnam that I got around some guys who could teach me how to play the guitar. Most of what they played was country and rock so that was what I learned to play as well as some of the folk songs of the time. Peter, Paul, and Mary, the Kingston Trio, Joan Biaz, Bob Dylan, James Taylor and others were popular at the time.

While in the military for four years I wrote over 300 songs. Most of my songs were love songs, war protest songs, and philosophical coffee-house songs. One of the songs was titled Long Way From Eden that was a cold war song that I later rewrote as an inspirational song in the seventies when Christian Contemporary music began to become popular.

When I met my wife I was planning to become a Country Western singer and song writer ( I really liked George Jones and Johnny Cash). But, we got involved in a church that was experiencing a mighty movement of the Lord as a part of the Jesus Movement and we joined a ministry to street kids that allowed me to use my music in helping them worship.

I was later called to preach and my music became a hobby again. I continued to write songs but mainly for sermon illustrations and Christian comedy routines in the churches I pastored. One of the reasons why I started this blog is so I could give others the opportunity to enjoy some of my music.

Actually, it was my son’s idea, but that is another story.