Chapter Five
Nashville Hopes and a Missed Opportunity
After leaving Alamogordo, I started writing and recording more of my country songs. I didn’t have a studio. I didn’t have connections. Just a handful of songs and a belief that maybe—just maybe—somebody out there might hear something in them.
So I started sending out homemade demos to producers in Nashville. Nothing fancy. Just songs from the heart, recorded the best way I knew how. One of those songs was called “They Go Dancing in the Dark.”
Listen: “They Go Dancing in the Dark”
Around that same time, I attended a songwriting seminar at the Louisiana Country Music Museum in Marthaville. Everybody there got a chance to play a song and have it critiqued, and when my turn came, I played “They Go Dancing in the Dark.”
Afterward, a woman named Maggie came up to me. She was a respected songwriter and music publisher, someone who knew her way around the business. She told me mine was her favorite song of the day, and then she said something I didn’t expect. She told me I needed to record a proper version and send it to her.
I did just that, and before long she took my song to Nashville. I heard later that a number of people there liked it, but it didn’t quite fit what they were working on at the time. That’s how it goes sometimes.
Listen: “Too Country For Country”
Still, knowing that something I wrote had made its way into rooms like that meant something to me, more than I probably let on.
Then one day, I got a call from Maggie. She told me she was going to be at the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame in Carthage and that she wanted to introduce me to Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. I remember exactly where I was when I took that call.
But I was on standby at the Air Force base, and I couldn’t leave. I had a choice to make, and at the time it didn’t really feel like a choice at all. I told her I couldn’t come.
After that, I never heard from her again. No returned calls. No letters. Nothing. Just silence.
I’ve thought about that moment more than once over the years—what might have happened if I’d made a different decision, what doors might have opened, what roads I might have gone down. But life doesn’t work that way. You don’t get to live both versions.
What I do know is this: at that point in my life, I made the decision I felt I had to make. Duty came first. That’s just the way I was built.
And even though that door may have closed, the music didn’t. It stayed with me, waiting, like it always had.