My Music and Songs Page 2
Music and Lyrics by Alex Richard Commins. (c) 2011 Richard Commins ASCAP. This is my song to JoAnna, or rather, youth, who was very timid and afraid to take advantage of moving across the country to go to college. The first verse is the timid JoAnna speaking, and the remainder is age (me) responding and telling her no to let opportunities in life pass you by, but rather to take hold of them: "you don't want to say, in your life, that I wish I had done that too." Thus, this is a "conversation poem," a phrase which I have borrowed from Samuel Taylor Coleridge which he used on his poem The Nightingale.
This is my arrangement of the wonderful 1959 hit sung by Johnny Horton. The lyrics to this song were written by an Ozark folk singer and history teacher name Jimmy Driftwood. The battle of New Orleans was fought on January 8, 1815 and the Americans were led by Andrew Jackson, known as "Old Hickory" (third verse). the fiddle tune, the Eighth of January, was written to commemorate the battle. It has a particular catchy tune. Jimmy Driftwood took the tune and wrote the lyrics in 1936.
Music and Lyrics by Alex Richard Commins. (c) 2005 Richard Commins ASCAP. Like many of us, I was in a quite unpleasant position (actually a job that was run by a quite unpleasant and somewhat illegal person. When that happens, we often wonder how at this point in our lives we have maybe come a long way, but things we've wanted to accomplish have passed us by "like so m any grains of sand."
An instrumental composed by me - Alex Richard Commins. (c) 2011 Alex Richard Commins ASCPA