| SILENT NIGHT I could tell the funny story of past pass the guitar sessions - Like the time one of our city's well known banjo pickers, it being his turn to pick, asked me what I would like to hear. We were all three sheets to the wind at the time, and as he asked me the above question, a mouth full of saliva went dribbling down his chin. I replied, "How about Drooling Banjos." Or the time we were holed up in a beach front house on the gulf for three days, pickin' and Grinning, and award winning photographer Kal Roberts stood looking out the window towards the ocean and said, " Man, what a beautiful Sunset." At which time Mickey Newburys replied, " I hate to tell you Kal, that's the sunrise." Or I could tell stories of Music City Magic, like when I first signed with Elektra records and Jimmy Bowen asked me if I would like to record a standard Christmas song for a new all Elektra Artists christmas album. He told me that 11 songs were already cut, so there wasn't many choices left as to material. For three months before this, for some unknown reason to me, the song Silent Night kept coming into my head as I sat around the house and played guitar. So I told Jimmy, "How about Silent Night?" He said, "Gee, that's funny, no one has done that yet,..Ya, you can do that one." Then, after searching and asking all over town, to anyone I came in contact with, what the second verse to Silent Night was, and no one knowing, and it being the night before the recording session to do the song, I happened to ask my mother, who was visiting me at the time, if she might know the second verse to Silent Night. "No, how would I know," she said. then about 5 minutes later, she got up, went to her purse, and took out a church bulletin from a past Christmas service, ( this was July ) opened it, and said, " Here are the verses to Silent Night." I was speechless. I said to mother, " mom, how did you happen to have a 7 month old Christmas church bulletin in your pocketbook?" Mom said that the cover looked so nice, she had put it in her purse to show people, and had forgotten it was there. To this day, people still tell me it was one of the best cuts of that song they have ever heard. JOE SUN |