While driving south to Miami after spending time at a SYDA Foundation meditation retreat in upstate New York, I found myself somewhere on I-95 on a dank, cloudy September morning in 2000. 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 and words between white noise. This retreat I’d been at was also a favorite of 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 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. Even later, 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 and any of my friends who met him, 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 ten 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 John a month later in 1997, then my father in 1999, had tested me in ways known only to people who experience a tremendous loss, which probably includes everyone walking around on planet Earth, but being at the retreat had reminded me of fond memories about John, and the love for all things seen and unseen that we shared. Abruptly, I stopped the scanning radio when I heard John’s very familiar, very clear, tenor voice singing, “Sunshine, on my shoulder makes me happy. Sunshine, in my eyes can make me cry.”* Synchronicity?

Through streaming tears I sang lyrics with this forever-disembodied voice on the radio—a song I’d sung hundreds of times with this voice 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. Synchronicity.

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’s complexities, about the singular simplicity of love and John, who knew his audience well—the audience I was singing to at that moment—me.

Trickster John. “Sunshine almost always makes me high,” and it did at that moment, and it still does…almost always.

*Sunshine On My Shoulders - written by John Denver, Mike Taylor & Dick Kniss

"Trees" Photo by Roger Nichols
Pine Hill Road, Nashville TN