My singer/songwriter career began, as I remember it, in eighth grade (1966) when I wrote a song that I called “My Mary” in which I informed listeners that “My Mary’s face is like a pearl” setting up the rhyme that “she is my kind of girl.” I, of course, thought it drew incredibly favorable comparisons to Lennon and McCartney. After “My Mary” failed to rise on the Billboard charts and after writing only a handful more songs in high school and college, I didn’t consider composing again until 1991. As my wife Martha and I were gearing up to move from Connecticut in the spring of '91, I wrote a wistful song called "Part Of You, Part Of Me", performed as a surprise for her by an ensemble I'd formed call Now & Then. With one exception, the bulk of my writing as an adult has come in the thirty-plus years that I've lived in Washington, D.C.
Some songs were available on CDs. In 1997 Now & Then put together an album called Eyes Full of Innocence , which included four of my songs; one of those, "Comets And Stars", is posted here on The Prime Cutts. I released eleven songs in 2000 on an album called All Alone … But Hardly On My Own. (The album includes a twelfth song, Debi Smith’s “My Father Was A Quiet Man”, and it is still available for sale on iTunes and Amazon.) Many of my original material from that album can also be downloaded from this site. In 2004 I put four songs on a self-manufactured album called ONE/THIRD. A single recording of a song called “Mrs. Eldredge’s Arm” featuring Tom Paxton has been available on iTunes since 2007. (See the "Life In Progress" folder for my own version.)
In 2013 this website became the sole mechanism for sharing my songs.
After a fifteen year hiatus from assembling a collection of songs, I posted eight recordings as an online album here at The Prime Cutts under the title “Going Down The Road Feeling Glad.” Five of those were written in 2019 in a productive spurt after I retired from teaching.
With any luck, more songs will occur to me as time goes along.