There is no way I would have planned this.  I just wouldn’t.

I have said it many times on these pages, if you want to make God laugh tell him what your plans are.

Today I am taking my guitar to school.  This is always a good thing.  Yesterday my 9th grade English class collectively worked on a song.  We were studying poetry.  Add music and you have a song.  So we worked out two verses and a chorus.  The consensus was to write a Christmas themed song.  Why not? This is a great way to teach stanza form and rhyme scheme I can tell you.

There we were on my wedding day.  My dear friend, Malcolm Todd “Corner King” Lincoln, Sr and me.  Looking toward Hancock Chapel United Methodist Church where my dear wife, Carrie, and I would be married on February 10, 1996 on a sixty degree day.   It was wonderful.   I look at this picture every single day.  It is front of me on the wall as I type these words.

Corner King Lincoln has been gone twenty-five years today.  Without that happening, I don’t think kids write a song in my class.  I could be wrong.  But I doubt it.

August 26, 1997 changed me.  I went downhill in a hurry.  Corner King and I enjoyed listening to The Moody Blues on humongous JVC speakers pointed out of windows toward a long side yard where we would hit baseballs to each other and play burn-out in hopes of hitting each other where the “leather is the least” as we used to say.

When Todd died I lost the music, one of the most important facets of my life for as long as I can remember.  With apologies to Mannfred Mann, I heard a Roaring Silence for a while.

My dear Carrie knew it.  She bought me a guitar.  A month and a half after Todd died, I was playing it.  In less than ten months, I was playing and singing songs in church that I had written.  In the years since, I have made three CDs of original tunes.  I have been fotunate enough to play with guys who enjoyed my music and got it.  Tim Krekel, Jim Baugher, Rod Wurtele, Jeff Guernsey, John Burgard, Gene Wickliffe, Barry King, Jason Sturgill, John Hayes, Dan Trisko, Millard Dunn, Robbie Bartlett, Lynn Benson, Dan Goins, Laura Goins, Mike Alger, Janis Pruitt, and of course my partner in music, engineer, boardmaster, and great friend Jeff Carpenter.  That is some kind of talent to spend time in a room with.

This wonderful musical journey has taken me many places to play and share.  I was on a TV show singing once and have heard my tunes on two different radio stations.   I didn’t ask for it.  It was given, albeit late in life, as a wonderful and much needed gift.  And there are days I feel guilty for the price that got me here.

I tell kids today that had I found out at age 14, instead of age 30, that I can take a guitar and piece of paper into a room and come out a half an hour later with something that will be with me for the rest of my life I never would have looked at a football.  There would not have been time.  But that’s okay.  Had that happened, the Corner King and I would not have played pitch in the yard with The Moody Blues cranked up.  We would not have attended The Moodies concerts we went to, which, ironically, was the last thing we did together.

I still think of this music as something that just got here for me.  Still fresh.  Still waiting to be discovered again.  Still painful at times.  But when you can go into a classroom with the energy that I can find just opening up a guitar case you know something good is going to happen.  The ninth graders are excited.  Let it be.  Let it be.  Words of wisdom that I cherish.

Speaking the rights.

Danny Johnson