Sunshine On My Shoulder
Conrad Reeder
© 2002-2007
While driving south to Miami after dropping my teenaged daughter off at a retreat in upstate New York, I found myself somewhere on I-95 on a dank, cloudy September morning. About half-way through the Carolinas I’d played out all the CD’s brought along for the trip, and let the radio scan through the local stations, spitting out music between white noise. My thoughts swirled around five seconds of a country song, then a top ten hit, and on to a preacher making his point about hell, but always back to my daughter, and our private nightmare.A few months earlier a voice in the middle of the night called to say my daughter, struggling with addiction and missing for several days, had overdosed and was dead. This proved to be false, but hours passed before I knew she was alive, and by then my heart had nearly pounded through my chest - death is hard on the living. For now she was safe, but the fear of losing her was ever present. This retreat I’d dropped her off at was a favorite of mine, and my friend, John Denver, whom I sang and traveled with for over seventeen years.
John and his music were not on my radar growing up. Rock and roll mixed in with The Beatles was what I droned into my head. My Ohio click of goofy teenagers made fun of Take Me Home Country Roads, associating West Virginia with rednecks carousing in rusty pick-up trucks. John’s image had always conjured up a dorky guy with simpleton songs for a simpleton audience. I reluctantly told my friends, especially jazz musicians, about my gig with John, just to avoid the snickers. But John, tall, handsome, and not dorky, soon won me over, not necessarily for his music, but for his truth, his sincerity, and for his genuine affection for people and nature.
Before John’s tour the largest audience I’d performed in front of topped maybe five thousand. Millions filled John Denver concerts for decades. Sometimes from the stage I’d look out over a sea of people. His ‘simple’ songs struck a chord for millions of fans that still cherish him years after his death. They were way ahead of me. Losing my mom and then John four weeks later, tested me in ways known only to people who experience a tremendous loss, which probably includes anyone breathing and walking around on planet Earth, but years later another test: my beautiful daughter - my baby’s life hung by a thread.
Being at the retreat had reminded me of John, and the love for all things seen and unseen that we shared. Maybe that’s why I stopped the scanning radio when I heard John’s very familiar, very clear, tenor voice singing, “Sunshine, on my shoulders makes me happy. Sunshine, in my eyes can make me cry.”
Through streaming tears I started singing lyrics with this forever-disembodied voice on the radio. I instinctively sang a song I’d sung hundreds of times at hundreds of venues in front of millions of people. “Sunshine on the water looks so lovely.” Then it happened - a narrow beam of light pierced through the lugubrious wall of clouds, and tapped my left shoulder.
On this lonely stretch of southbound I-95, a narrow strip of sunlight seemingly dissolved my sorrow, my bitter angst, and several destructive thoughts. In the space of three chords I intuited volumes about myself, about music, about life, about the singular simplicity of love and John, who knew his audience well - the audience I was singing to – me. “Sunshine almost always makes me high,” and it did at that moment, and it still does…almost always.
Postscript: I started this piece several years ago. Knock on wood, or whatever scares away the boogieman, and “one day at a time” - my daughter has been clean since her stay at this retreat eight years ago.
*********************