Here are links to a few original songs; only in the past few years have I actually written any songs that I'm willing to perform in public. Many of these were inspired, in one way or another, by sermons at the First Baptist Church in Ithaca, and all have been performed, at one time or another at First Baptist.

This first song grew out of the support that First Baptist has shown for the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. This campaign to combat systemic poverty, institutionalized racism, the military economy, and ecological devastation has been organized by the Rev. William Barber II and the Rev. Liz Theoharis on the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's original Poor People's Campaign. The song was written to be used on First Baptist's entry to the Ithaca Festival Parade in 2018, but has also been used in services at First Baptist. Clicking on the image at the right will take you to my YouTube version of Where One is Poor.

This next song grew out of the deep sadness surrounding the tragic event in December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Since the Fall of 2012 I had been working a couple hours each week, helping students in a fourth-grade class at a local elementary school with their math. This, in combination with having two grandchildren in the same school, made the events in Newtown feel a bit too close to my heart. I had been thinking of writing about the Newtown event and our national madness regarding gun violence, and possibly also making a connection to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 in which four girls attending Sunday School were killed by a racially-motivated bombing. The basic theme and the tune came to me during a sermon some weeks later in which Pastor Rich quoted Dr. King's paraphrase of the well known quotation by Charles A. Beard that it is "... only in the darkness that one can see the stars." Clicking on the image at the right will take you to my YouTube version of Only in the Darkness.

This final song is based (loosely) on the themes of a sermon by the Rev. Samuel "Billy" Kyles, a colleague of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, delivered at Sage Chapel on the Cornell campus in February 2000. In the sermon, Rev. Kyles told the story of how Robert Louis Stevenson, as a young child seeing a lamplighter going from one gas lamp to another to light them in the darkening evening, described the scene as " ... a man knocking holes in the darkness!" Rev. Kyles went on to describe the fight against racial and other forms of injustice in the same terms. I had heard a recording of the sermon on the radio the week after it had been delivered, and thought it had the basis for a good song, but didn't get around to writing it until the summer of 2011:

All vocals, guitar, and keyboard parts are performed by the artist.