48 Years—This Old Guitar No. 11

1975—The Way Up is the Way Down

1977—It’s So Easy to Worship the Lord

Please read below before you listen to these songs!

As I noted in my very first This Old Guitar post (March 29, 2013), I received my first guitar on my 14th birthday in 1965. Within a couple of years I began writing songs. I also noted in that same post that I have catalogued 138 songs born of my own creativity or developed in collaboration with friends and family members.

I am posting only a selection of these 138 songs, in part because some of them are not really worthy of public display, and perhaps more importantly, because many of my tunes have not yet been recorded. Going through my song file folder I just now counted 42 recorded songs. That leaves 96 songs of mine, still unrecorded. A number of these unrecorded tunes are, in my humble opinion, among my best works.

In today’s installment, I am providing two short songs. The first song is a mere sixty-four seconds in length, the second just a bit longer at eighty-eight seconds. Neither song is among my best, and for that I apologize. However, I have posted them both because they emerge from an era of my life that might be counted among some of my best years.

Although I began playing guitar in the fall of 1965, it was not until the spring of 1968 that I began my walk with Christ. I was thus wed to music for 2-1/2 years before I became betrothed to my Savior. And it did not take long for my music to become focused on my Lord. In the summer of 1969 I first began to sing publicly in praise of my Savior, and to play some of my own works. By the early 1970’s I was regularly leading worship in small groups. By the mid-1970’s I was a church worship leader. And by 1984, one of my songs was published by Integrity Music. That song will soon be published in This Old Guitar No. 14. During that stretch I wrote or co-wrote a number of worship songs. Unfortunately, just a handful of them will be posted on This Old Guitar because only a few have been recorded. The two posted today, unquestionably among the weakest, are published only because they are recorded. I wish I had a some better examples from that period to share with you.

The Way Up is the Way Down, crafted in 1975, is actually song no. 40 on my list of 138. And It’s So Easy to Worship the Lord falls in at number 43. So, number 11 (and 12) are really numbers 40 and 43. These two, sadly, are the poorest representation of my song-writing capabilities that I will be publishing on This Old Guitar. But I share them here because, as I noted above, they are among the few recordings I have from that significant stage of my song-writing life.

Don’t judge me!