John Prine and me with the Rev. Will Campbell, other dead guys I liked; as well as the Kristoffersons and Peter Cooper

Someplace in a column I’ve never published, I’m sitting by the deathbed of a Country Music Hall of Famer, pioneer and a man I considered one of my best friends.

He was “sharp as a tack,” as they might say and I can’t think of a more-apt description, even during his dying days, when I visited him often. He always was present and filled with smiles and love even though I'm sure he knew he was dying.

 No need to go any farther there or to reveal who I’m speaking about, because, unfortunately, I’ve sat aside too many deathbeds, mostly regular folks, but sometimes a musician or someone else of popular note. Or my Mom’s or Dad’s. I loved them the most.

On this day I'm speaking of, the bleary-eyed fellow in the bed awakened from his medical drifting, looked at me, and smiled. “Hi John,” or words to that effect, he said. 

He later corrected himself after the medical blear cleared up, and he called me by my own name – generally I’m known as “Tim” – and we talked some as I watched him continue toward death. Still sharp as a tack, I should add.

But I had taken no offense that when he had awakened he mistook me for John Prine – that was the “Hi John” of his greeting – because I really liked John and knew of his love for this fellow, a mutual good friend and confessor.

This was one of the  incidents I thought about last night, April 7, 2020, when the expected news broke that John Prine, a great American songwriter and grit-observer of life, had died.

I really have no great John Prine stories.

 I never wrote about him, other than an occasional blurb.  At Christmastime, when I was writing about a homeless-helping-semi-organization’s efforts to come up with goods for the homeless, his wife, Fiona, and John became involved in this effort.

They wanted me to call, so they could endorse this drive. When I did, Fiona told me to call back and John would talk to me about it.  But when I did that, he was not around. I actually think he was, but he didn’t want to talk about personal generosity. He was a humble man.

So Fiona, a kind woman, spoke for them both, quoting the great wordsmith, and "they" sort of issued a challenge to others that they should help my friend Stacie Huckeba’s homeless mission. Don’t need to go on more about this, but I enjoyed talking to Fiona and hearing her quote her rather humble husband with the incredible mind for words.

This morning, as I listened to a bit of Prine on You Tube, I rescued a blog post from a couple of weeks ago, that I’ll more or less regurgitate here, with additions and deletions, because it was about one of my favorite Nashville nights.

Here goes:

OK, so I'm standing outside the Belcourt Theatre on a sticky Nashville night.

It's about midnight and Hillsboro Village is quiet.

"Sam Stone" plays in my head for a moment.

It's just me, the Rev. Will Campbell and John and Fiona Prine.

 I had met John before, but this was the first time we really "talked" as people.  I wasn’t taking notes, was trying for no story. I was just talking with him as a guy. Or guys. One guy who worked for a newspaper and another guy who wrote some of American’s best life-observing songs. They both were rather cynical by nature.

The Rev. Will was a long-time close friend, who would call me frequently both at home and at the newspaper. He viewed me as "the last one left" who really loved the so-called "Outlaws," for whom he was the preacher and absolver and eulogist.  He had started calling me when I worked for the old Nashville Banner and stayed with me when I worked at The Tennessean (Nashville’s morning newspaper.)

Our friendship blossomed because for years, so much of what was covered in the newspapers involved the commercial country acts. And I was stuck, in my heart, with the guys Will had nurtured. Years later, he told me that one day he’d share the details of the lonesome funeral he emceed or whatever you call it, for Waylon Jennings out in the desert.  He got too sick to tell me that story though. Then he died.

Another friend, Billy Ray Reynolds, eventually described that sparse funeral for me. He’s dead too.

Anyway, back to that night in Hillsboro Village, which was Nashville’s hipster district before the conquest of East Nashville by white people.   

John Prine and I talked about the concert we'd just seen.

Our mutual friend -- all of ours -- Kris Kristofferson had just finished a two-plus hour show.

I've seen Kris a score or more times over the years in concert. I also ran into him decades ago at the Tally-Ho Tavern. And his music mattered to my maturation. Still matters as I past maturation and ride too quickly the decline. Anyway, Kris and I long ago became friends and I cherish my relationship with him – and he’s not all that well anymore – and his wife, Lisa, and their children.

The night John, the Rev. Will and I spoke beneath the marquee had been after the best show I’d ever seen by Kris. Another old Pilgrim, Chris Gantry, had done the intermission. I’ve since learned to love him as well. He’s one of a kind and so was his heavily-Christed performance. I can say this now, this Christ stuff, because on the day I’m writing this, the Wednesday before Easter, Christ held his final feast and went to the garden. The rest is history, of course.

The Rev. Will was, I should note, the best Baptist preacher I ever met, and he could talk Jesus with anyone, without judgment. He liked Christ a lot.

Back to that marquee.  John and Fiona and the Rev. Will and I all were waiting for Donnie Fritts, Billy Swan, Chris Gantry, Buzz Cason, Billy Ray and the rest of the "inner-circle" to finish paying their respects to Kris before we would go into the theater to visit with him.

Will told us about the long-ago demolished apartment house across from the long-deceasedTally-Ho, where Kris lived above him and the floor was so thin, he could fall right through.  Maybe he did. That was a long time ago and details blur at times.

John talked about an album he was working on, and after I told him I’d like to write about it, he suggested that maybe I could come and meet up with him sometime to do a story or a column.

 I knew his label's partner/boss, Al Bunetta, pretty well, since my wife, Suzanne, and I had "talked" Al and his wife, Dawn, through the process of adopting a child from Eastern Europe.

I had written about our experiences adopting Emily in Romania for the old Nashville Banner newspaper, and my tale inspired them. That's just an aside.  I probably should note here that we also adopted Joe in Romania, but by then I was at the morning newspaper, for which I was working as a copy editor at that point, and they didn’t encourage me to write a story about it.

 Al was John’s partner and more in Oh Boy Records. Suzanne and I had talked him and Dawn through the back-in-the-1990s rare adoption process of an Eastern European. Tragically, Juri, their son, died in a car accident at 19, but he had all sorts of love to absorb from the Bunettas that he’d never have gotten in the orphanage back in the Soviet colonies.  Al’s dead, too, but he was a helluva character and I was fortunate enough to be at a celebration of adoptees out at the house he and Dawn and Juri shared.

Back to that warm night beneath the marquee in Hillsboro Village. ... 

I was the entertainment editor for the morning newspaper by then, and I had gone to that concert with my friend, Peter Cooper, who was on my staff after I helped him escape Spartanburg, S.C., where I think the revenooers were after him. Or maybe the Marshall Tucker Band. 

We enjoyed a scotch before the show at a nearby (since deceased) tavern. At show’s end, he had to rush back to the paper to write his review.

I lagged behind at the theater while he toiled in the fluorescent light 1100 Broadway, where there used to be a newspaper of some note, at least for a long time. 

After spending the better part of an hour with Prine and Will outside the Belcourt and quickly ducking into the theater to talk to Kris, his wife Lisa and their kids -- then pretty young -- I went back to the newspaper office to see if Peter needed an editor.

Or a friend. Or company. We'd already had a drink. Nothing special. Twelve-year-old Dewar’s maybe. I don’t drink much anymore, but I’d savored that drink with Peter and with his wife, Charlotte, who didn’t go to the concert. She probably had a dry white wine.

But let me jump ahead to after I left the theater, where I’d spent an hour with Prine and hugged Kris and Lisa and as many of their kids as I could find.

From the Belcourt, I went back to the paper to see if I could help Peter with his review, edit his copy or just enjoy his company.

When I told him about Prine's offer for in-person album talking, Peter said he really wanted to do that instead of me.

 I was a good boss and knew his affinity for Prine and his music, so I agreed. I was supposed to spend most of my time in stupid meetings playing games with corporate brass, anyway. The general premise was that  I was supposed to learn about back-stabbing and ass-kissing and success. I left a few years later for my basement without ever learning those traits.

Anyway, Peter contacted Prine or maybe Al, and he was the one who ended up doing the interview and writing the feature.  Probably better than mine would have been. Different anyway.

This story isn't going anywhere today. I'm in my office in Da Basement working, keeping the virus at bay, and I just stopped to think about that precious hour with the Rev. Will, long-deceased now but he loved me, and John Prine. And Kris and Peter and Lisa and the kids.

Funky Donnie Fritts had something to do with it, too. I loved him. He sure knew how to get someone else to pick up the tab, too. An adept expert at it. He’s dead, too.

A week or two ago, I wrote in a semblance of this blog that “If there is a prayer left in you during this horrible time, please send one to John, who at last notice was clinging to life because of this fucking virus.”

“Shit, I wouldn't mind a prayer or two myself and I'm doing OK,” I wrote. Still am.

I don’t need to repeat the rest of that column at all.

Other than to say that's all I've got today. Feeling more than melancholy … or is that worse than melancholy?

I wish I could be as happy as I was that night standing beneath the marquee with the Prines and the Rev. Will.

Funky Donnie Fritts had a lot to do with it, too.

And John Prine died Tuesday night of this COVID-19 virus bastard. It wasn’t a surprise. He was hardly the picture of health and cancer already had "killed him" twice.

Still, today, it’s a mighty mean and dreadful sorrow. I borrowed that line.

Me, Marc, Jeff, Eric and Al Kaline; Blood spurts from my leg; Catching worms at Walnut Lake

When I was a kid, spending summer days and nights at Grandpa and Grandma Champ's house in the hollow by the marsh at Walnut Lake, Michigan, Al Kaline and the Detroit Tigers were always on the radio or the old black-and-white TV.

 Sometimes, the family -- my dad, my cousins Marc and Jeff Champ, Grandpa and my brother Eric Anthony Ghianni would load up and go down to Briggs Field (where I cut my left leg on a headlight, but that's another story, though the scar remains).

Kaline, who died Monday at age 85, was my brother's favorite player.

 As I grew older and more independent and my dad took us to live in the Chicago suburb of Deerfield, my team was the Chicago Cubs and Ron Santo forever became my favorite player. Always will be and he had the fighting spirit that kept him battling despite life’s obstacles until long after most of us would have surrendered. A true Boy of Summer.

That’s another story and you can find it on my blog somewhere if you look.

This is a short little note about Al Kaline, because he died yesterday, April 6, 2020, while we all hid in our houses from the virus.

But this isn’t about deadly viruses and these strange days indeed (most peculiar, mama.)

This is about Walnut Lake, also.

Cigar smoke. Or Prince Albert in the can jammed in a pipe as Grandpa presided over the house he built with help from my Uncle Les, Shirley’s husband. They are dead long ago.

Grandpa thought he ruled the house. Unless Grandma decided otherwise. “Now Bea….” “Well George ….”

Maybe Marc, Jeff, Eric and I would sleep out on the back porch, screened in and not really locked. Can you imagine that in 2020? Course this was back in the mid-1950s, when Uncle Joe Champ’s health was failing from the flame-thrower scars in his lungs, further ambushed by smoking. Everyone smoked back then. (I did, too, as soon as I could. That’s another story and tobacco was only a part of it.) Those days at the lake continued well after Joe died. I think in 1957 or 1958. I was just a kid, but I sure loved him. My son’s name, coincidentally???, is Joe.

Back in the late 1950s, Grandpa once went out into the woods, pounding pieces of timber together in the middle of the night. Scared the shit out of us.  There was a killer … or perhaps a monster on the loose in our eager and impressionable minds.

We didn’t sleep well that night. It wasn’t until the next day, when he showed off the timber pieces over his breakfast of pepper and scrambled eggs (mostly pepper) and kippers (sardines) or fried perch, that we learned the truth.    He had been the monster. Laughed like hell that he’d scared us so.  We laughed, too. We all thought he was the guy who, I think they say “hung the moon.” Whatever. He was a great man.    

Almost everyone is dead now who was there, but those nights and days at Walnut Lake returned to my heart and head after I learned Al Kaline had died.

We had the opportunity to meet most of the ballplayers back then in those gentler times, and he was no exception. We’d always go see games when the Yankees were in town, too. You ever see Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris at bat? How about Whitey Ford on the mound and Yogi Berra trying to throw a pickoff ball to second from behind home? Ahh, wonderful times.

When I think about Kaline, though, it is not so much about baseball, but more with thoughts of playing poker with Grandpa (he didn't let his grandchildren win), while listening to the radio.

Grandma would take us out to the vegetable garden, where we'd dig for night-crawlers and put them in an old cottage cheese carton filled with black soil.

The plan was that we would be ready to get up at 5 the next morning to paddle out onto the lake and catch bluegill, sunfish and perch. Cleaning them later at the stump out back while Grandpa smoked his pipe.  If we caught a bullhead, he’d pound a nail in its head so he could skin it.

Grandpa would bury the innards, hoping that Topsy, the black beaglish hound, would not dig them up, roll in them or eat them. She did frequently. Helluva good dog.

When Topsy died, Grandpa and Grandma got Spuddy, another beaglish dog, who (along with Grandpa) lived with my Mom and Dad in Nashville after Grandma died.  Another story. A dog story. Check out my book about my Mom if you are interested. Somebody ought to make a movie about it, but I haven’t kissed enough ass in life to know how to even approach such a project or who to approach.

Anyway, after the fish were cleaned, the boys would cross on the path through the marsh and then over the black-oiled road to the clubhouse at Walnut Lake. Back then it was a blue-collar town and beach. Now, I think rich people, probably mostly millennial assholes and their parents and offspring, live there with their fancy speedboats and lack of sentiment about what that lake meant to us.

 The boys and my cousin Michelle (Marc and Jeff’s sister who now ferries Amish and Mennonites across Kentucky and always wears floppy hats, but that’s another story and I love her) had fun. She was older than us. Still is, by the way. Sorry Michelle…. Or Mitzi, as Grandpa called you.

I guess I should get back to Briggs Field or was it Briggs Stadium? Shit, doesn’t matter. It was a real ballpark. Hot dogs and beer and Coke were sold. Maybe peanuts and Cracker Jack. No raw octopus and sake or whatever the fuck they serve at ballparks today. If Grandpa Ghianni was there, a flask of brown whiskey was there, too. No security at the gate back then. 

It was in the time of double-headers, and about halfway through the second game, Grandpa got tired.  I think he waited by the park, because of his arthritis. But we, Dad, Marc, Jeff, Eric, me, would have to go get the car. My Grandpa Ghianni, who sometimes visited the Champs, may have been there, too, I noted above. Anyway, we were parked bumper to bumper across that part of Detroit. It was before they burned the city down and Roger Smith killed GM.   

Had to walk across the bumpers of the cars to find dad’s white, convertible Oldsmobile.  Unfortunately, one of the cars had a broken headlight and the sharp glass grabbed my left leg when I dragged past it. Blood spurted like in a Peckinpah film. Nah, not really, but it bled like hell.

I think my Dad, the only WWII infantryman who was nauseated by blood… actually, he probably saw too much of it, caused some I’m sure, while in his late teens and early 20s … panicked. I think they wrapped my leg in a T-shirt and we went home where Grandma and Mom tended to it.  When Dad died last September, and after we buried him, we were at Eric’s house, where my Cousin Marc (or Maurice, as the big-city fancies in Detroit call him) and I were drinking 12-year-old seltzer or somesuch, he asked if the scar was still there.

I showed it to him.

Anyway, I could go on. Maybe I should someday. Walnut Lake was heaven for little boys.  I loved rowing the boat across the lake with Grandma at dawn. Grandpa’s hips were too arthritic for boat rides, though he could sleep while floating on his back across the lake. Sometimes with a grandson aboard.

And then, at night, fried perch, bluegill and potatoes. Corn on the cob, if a neighbor brought some. Strawberry shortcake, perhaps. Or watermelon, but we'd have to go outside to spit the seeds. Before poker.

And Al Kaline on the radio hit another home run for the Tigers.



     

John Prine, me, the Rev. Will and Kristofferson and Dylan and Funky Donnie Fritts

OK, so I'm standing outside the Belcourt Theatre on a sticky Nashville night.

It's about midnight and Hillsboro Village is quiet. "Sam Stone" plays in my head for a moment.

It's just me, the Rev. Will Campbell and John and Fiona Prine. I had met John before, but this was the first time we really "talked" as people.

Will was a close friend, who would call me frequently both at home and at the newspaper. He viewed me as "the last one left" who really loved the so-called "Outlaws," for whom he was the preacher and absolver and eulogist.

John and I talked about the concert we'd just seen. Our mutual friend -- all of ours -- Kris Kristofferson had just finished a 2-plus hour show.

I've seen Kris a score or more times over the years as well as had the chance to become the friend of him and his wife Lisa and their children. This was the very best show.

We all were waiting for Donnie Fritts, Billy Swan, Chris Gantry and the rest of the "inner-circle" to finish paying their respects before we would go into the theater to visit with him.

Will talked about the apartment house across from the Tally-Ho, where Kris lived above him and the floor was so thin, he could fall right through.

John talked about an album he was working on and suggested that maybe I could come and meet up with him sometime to do a story or a column about it. I knew his label's boss, Al Bunetta, pretty well, since my wife and I had "talked" al and his wife, Dawn, through the process of adopting a child from Eastern Europe. I had written about our experiences for the old Nashville Banner newspaper, and my tale inspired them. That's just an aside.

On that warm Nashville night, my friend Peter Cooper, who was on my staff after I helped him escape Spartanburg, S.C., was already back at 1100 Broadway, where there used to be a newspaper.  He was writing a review of Kris' show.

After spending the better part of an hour with Prine and Will outside the Belcourt and quickly ducking into the theater to talk to Kris' wife Lisa and their kids -- then pretty young -- I went back to the newspaper office to see if Peter needed an editor. Or a friend. Or company. We'd already had a drink.

When I told him about Prine's offer for in-person album talking, Peter said he really wanted to do that instead of me. I was a good boss and knew his affinity for Prine music, so I agreed.

Which he did, by the way. Probably better than mine would have been.

Anyway, this story isn't going anywhere today. I'm in my office working, keeping the virus at bay, and I just stopped to think about that precious hour with the Rev. Will, long-deceased now but he loved me, and John Prine. And Kris and Peter and Lisa and the kids.

Funky Donnie Fritts had something to do with it, too.

If there is a prayer left in you during this horrible time, please send one to John, who at last notice was clinging to life because of this fucking virus.

Shit, I wouldn't mind a prayer or two myself and I'm doing OK..

And I more than hope that Prine makes it.

Oh yeah, I forgot. There is more to this tale.  Prine and I had a very close mutual friend in Mac Wiseman, the Hall of Fame bluegrass and country legend, among Lester and Earl's first tier of genius sidemen long ago.

Both of us spent time with Mac and attended his birthday parties, although the last one was about two years ago now. Mac died more than a year ago. Or two. Hell, time flies when you are burying friends.

When I befriend people, I do it all the way. So when they are gone, it breaks my heart and shreds my soul.

I miss Will. And Mac. And pray for Prine. I'm saddened that another singer, Joe Diffie, who I did not know well, fell to this virus. And I worry about all the rest of us, even those who can't sing a song.

That's all I've got today. Feeling more than melancholy … or is that worse than melancholy?

I wish I could be as happy as I was that night standing beneath the marquee with the Prines and the Rev. Will.

Funky Donnie Fritts had a lot to do with it, too. Hey, I think I'll listen to Dylan's "Murder Most Foul." Sprawling obituary to my generation, perhaps? Not sure, but he's America's greatest writer and lyricist. But he never wrote about that hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes. But then he did remind us of a Murder Most Foul.

 

 

 

Dreams, cigarettes, Top 40, whiskey and kindness from the radio booth.... "Jimmy in the Morning" signs off as death silences the deejay

Jimmy in the Morning is no more. 

Nah, it's not that James Baird ever changed his on-air moniker. It's just that he's dead, the switch on the base of his microphone turned to black. Gone. No more.

Hell, I should not say he's no more. Probably the soundwaves are traveling out into some Godforsaken galaxy.

But Jimmy's dead. That's what I said.

I've known a lot of radio broadcasters, some TV folks, too, in my half-century of minding other people's business to perform my journalistic wonders and not-so-wonderfuls.

But Jimmy in the Morning was as talented as any. And he was a helluva guy. He did not deserve to die in virtual anonymity as an old air-conditioner repairman fading away in some nursing home or long-term health-care facility, as the assholes who control our politically correct world now call them.

I hadn't seen Jimmy in decades. Oh, I guess he was at Scott "Badger" Shelton's funeral a few years ago. I can't remember because I was too busy crying. And dying in my heart.

The end, literally, of Jimmy in the Morning, was marked by a simple obituary a few days ago. No cause of death was listed. His age was basically my own.

Of course, we were both very young guys with mighty aspirations when I'd drop in on him and his broadcasts, fire up a smoke and laugh about life, love and ambition.

Forty-some years ago, it was not quite light outside when I walked down Madison Street from The Leaf-Chronicle parking lot at Second and Madison streets and climbed the stairs above, I think, an old furniture or insurance office. 

Doesn't really matter.  Been more handy if it had been a bar, but if you stepped out the front door, you could look 100 yards or so across some parking lots and see The Camelot, a sort of paradise for me and my friends, many of whom are dead.

Anyway, back to the story. I was going to see my friend Jimmy in the Morning and his ever-faithful news sidekick Scott Shelton at WJZM-AM radio, the hometown voice of Clarksville, Tennessee. This was sometime in the mid-to-late 1970s. Or something like that.

This was long before The News Brothers days, and I usually went to work by 5:15 every morning at 200 Commerce Street. If I got there early, I would walk past Mr. Broome's photo shop (Maurice Broom was a damn nice guy and gave me free film and dating advice sometimes). If I'd accepted his advice, I could have spared myself from my life's long-past most-horrible mistake. I eventually figured that out on my own, but this isn't a story about me. It's about dead Jimmy in the Morning. 

 Anyway, back then I'd struck up a friendship with Jimmy in the Morning Baird simply by dropping in at the radio station. Hell, I'd been listening to him every day. Scott … who was the news director … also was a friend and recently graduated Tennessee Volunteers fanatic and obsessive Democrat (another story) who yelled at kids who crossed his lawn (another story, but I loved him). 

I'd knock on the window of the DJ booth. Sometimes give him a simple, one-finger salute or blow cigarette smoke against the glass. 

Sometimes Jimmy would summon me into the booth. One day, he let me do three hours of Beatles songs, but I threw him and Scott off when I did "Helter Skelter" … they'd never heard it before. 

Scott, later “Badger” News Brother, didn't like the White Album by the Beatles. I loved it and that song in particular. Do you don't you want me to make you, comin' down fast, so I'll try not to break you.

Jimmy's bloodshot brown eyes were on the big time. 

And he was good. Every bit as good as Dr. Johnny Fever and Venus Flytrap. 

But he seemed scared to take his shot. He did get shot down once... I think it was by WKDA in Nashville, where Coyote was king, or something like that …

But I also think Jimmy in the Morning was the big fish in the Little Pond and enjoyed that role. 

I also don't think he gave himself enough credit. He also drank too much, probably, to succeed. I'm sure the scotch bottle wasn't far behind him when he left for work in the morning.

 But I can't judge him on that, as I was a pretty good practicing drunk myself for many, many years. Practice makes perfect, you know. Just didn't go to work that way, except for the morning after The News Brothers premiere. That's another story and chemical aid was necessary. 

 Anyway, I wrote a column about Jimmy for the front page of The Leaf-Chronicle. 

Gave him a few copies of the paper. He framed one and had it on his wall in Russellville, Kentucky, where he was living with a wife/girlfriend/whatever. She had kids. Don't think they were Jimmy's. 

The house burned down and he called me. He lost everything. The one thing he missed the most was the column I wrote about him. So, I got him one.

 I could go on and talk about Jimmy some more. Maybe I will. Who knows where this is heading?

 But I've been dealing a lot with death lately. I will tell you that Jimmy was a fine DJ, a really warm human being. He never wore socks and always had a gold chain dangling on his V-neck sweater. 

And I think that sweater always was red or burgundy. He drank day and night and sometimes I joined him, along with Rob Dollar, Jerry Manley and Clarksville's finest. 

Scott never was there, as he really wasn't a drinker and he probably was home yelling at kids crossing his yard.  Probably good he wasn't a drinker. his opinions were abrasive enough when he was sober, though I loved old Scott like a brother. Wrote about his death I think almost eight years ago or seven....long fucking time now, anyway.

 Course this little exercise and farewell is about Jimmy in the morning, who died the other day at some sort of extended healthcare facility in Clarksville, I think. 

 Booze play a role? 

Sadness? 

Defeat? 

Hell, probably just life in general.  You remember Jimmy, don't you?

 James, old boy, I have a small bottle of scotch upstairs. I don’t drink much anymore. But I'll have one to you and your memory. You were a damn nice guy. I don’t think you gave yourself enough credit, man. You coulda been a contender.

 Jimmy, if you are in heaven and you are sober, remember I admired you. I was pleased the many times you let me drop in on your show and hijack it. And the times I filled in as unpaid news reader when Scott was gone on vacation.

 You were great at what you did and you shoulda made it to the big time. 

But for 25 years, you lifted hearts and minds and sleepy heads in Clarksville, and you should be proud. Your Top 40 soundtrack and smooth, wisecrack of a voice were welcome dawn comrades in the Queen City of the Cumberland. 

Also, I loved it when you were passed out at the front table at Camelot and would open your eyes up just long enough to order drinks for me and Rob. 

Cheers old friend. You made your mark in the world. 

Like some of the rest of us, you never got rich at it. and I wish you hadn't gone into air-conditioning repair.

 I wish you had continued using your gift. For it was enormous, whether you were drunk or not.

 And you offered a sleepy old guy a place to hang out, either before going to work or between editions. And we enjoyed blowing cigarette rings in the WJZM outer office, much to Scott’s displeasure. Thanks. 

Oh yeah, if you are in heaven and not sober, hoist another one with my old pal, St. Pete, who is just hoping for the day when I come knocking on heaven’s door and tell him "howdy." 

Jimmy, I'll see you in the next world. I'll bring some music. I don’t want to listen to that Neil Diamond and Elton John shit you seemed to favor. 

Glad I knew you. You were unique. 

Although on winter nights, without those socks,  your feet must have frozen. 

Good thing you had antifreeze. 

I think it's about time I go upstairs and have that toast.

Jimmy in the Morning has signed off.... 

(AUTHOR'S NOTE: THIS BLOG HAS A WHITE BACKGROUND BECAUSE I PICKED PART OF IT UP FROM A FACEBOOK POSTING. BUT HELL WITH IT, I'M NOT TYPING IT IN AGAIN.)