In January of 2014 I did a house concert in Austin Texas and for the first time I was able to sing “The Moments Choice (Grandpa’s Pocket Watch)” to two of my grandson’s, Greyson Gomez and Joey Stacey. Watching their smiles and share the spotlight for a few minutes was a particular pleasure. Earlier I had written a song that included by oldest grandson, Christopher Talon Green, “Living on the Dark Side”. At the concert I had commented how you could tell the age of a singer/songwriter since we tend to write about things in our own life so when we’re young we write about our first love and then about our wife and then about our kids and at my age then about our grand children.
When I was editing the video of the Brown Wolf Manor show I began to think of the stories my grandfather, Blake Snyder, would tell me about his father. From there my thoughts turned to the nature of continuity and immortality. I recalled how the acorn is the seed that contains the whole oak tree and how that carries the life of the tree through the generations then how the bug in the amber freezes the bug for all time and its own version of immortality. It was a short jump to seeing the songs as the “seeds of the songwriter”and wondering what my grandsons would take from the songs and pass along not in my song but in the creative process. If that isn’t something for a folk song that nothing is.