Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Thank you so much to everyone who submitted pictures for this video! I'm sorry that I couldn't include every photo that I received. Although the song has a lot of words, it's also very fast, so it only lasts a little over 3 minutes. If I had known how many great photos folks would send, I might have performed the song slower, so that more photos could be shown. To fit the last ones in, I repeated/faded the chorus back in and out. The audio heard in this video is from a Zoom video camera, not a studio recording. I stood in my living room and videoed myself singing/picking the song. My thought was that I would cut back and forth between the pictures and the video of me playing, but in order to get in as many photos as possible, I only used the audio.
Although this was never one of my favorite songs that I wrote, I've come to appreciate it more of late. I think it crossed my mind because of the statistics I've heard lately about how young people aren't getting married anymore, for various reasons. Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I believe that propaganda has played a role in convincing people not to get married. Trends on social media, both overt and subtle, tell young people that having a pet is just as meaningful as having children. TikTok, among other things, has convinced young women that they should only date/marry men who are 6ft tall and earn six figures, even though only 2% of American males meet that criteria. Marriage, as intended by God, is one of the biggest, if not the most primary, building blocks of our society and civilization, so it's no surprise that dark forces want to irradicate it, but I digress. :-)
I thought enough of this song to include it on a demo tape that I gave to the Late Charlie Louvin back in 1998. Charlie was kind enough to give the demo to the manager of Valerie Smith, who was a rising, young star in acoustic music at the time. However, I never heard from anyone regarding any interest in the song.
I wrote this song somewhere around age 16. Not long before I wrote it, I borrowed an old Mac Wiseman record from my Uncle Ray. It had a sad song on it called "What's Gonna Happen to Me?" In that song, Mac sang a line that said, "When years tell their story, and gray streaks my hair, you'll still be a sweet memory." I loved that line, especially the part about the speaker's hair turning gray. I wanted to use that idea but for a happy song/relationship. When I sang the finished song for Pap, his favorite line by far was, "I've said it all; we've come this far; we will never be apart." He was most impressed by "I've said it all." I guess that part does capture or portray a moment that might occur at the end of a long, sincere conversation, in which someone thoroughly states his/her true love. I'm not sure if I was thinking about that when I wrote it, or if I might have simply been thinking about how to wrap the song up, and about how each line and verse in this song essentially promises the same thing over and over, just with different words.
The notes that are sung right before each chorus are the only ones in the song that make me struggle as a singer. They're a little too low for me, even though I moved the song up to C. There are some tricks that can make singing those parts easier. Those vocal tricks are easy to execute in isolation (when you sing just those notes), but they're hard to execute on the fly within the context of the entire song. You can hear the difficulty in my voice when I sang the main phrase of the song, "You're in my heart." If I ever make a studio recording of the song, I will be able to improve greatly on that part of the song (I hope).
I made a cassette recording of this song as a teenager, back when I first wrote it. It wasn't very good, but I liked it at the time because it was the first time I had ever sung/dubbed a harmony part to back my own lead vocal. That recording featured the Dove twice (the same guitar used in this video). I played it the first time in the G position, and the second time (which was dubbed in), I played it way down the neck, in the D position, using a capo. I panned one guitar to the left and one to the right. The two guitars seemed to harmonize with each other a little. To get an idea of what that sounds like, check out the video of me and Pap singing "Burry Me Beneath the Weeping Willow Tree" here on the channel.
A few times in the video, a couple is featured in a past photo, followed by a current photo. To indicate those transitions of time, I used brief "fade" transitions, rather than just having a clean cut from one picture to the next.
I'll pin a comment below the video to list the names of the couples who appear in the video. In case anyone was wondering, Granny crocheted the heart seen at the beginning and end of the video. I found it beside her recliner after she passed, and I think it may have been the last thing she crocheted.
Thank you so much to everyone who submitted pictures for this video! I'm sorry that I couldn't include every photo that I received. Although the song has a lot of words, it's also very fast, so it only lasts a little over 3 minutes. If I had known how many great photos folks would send, I might have performed the song slower, so that more photos could be shown. To fit the last ones in, I repeated/faded the chorus back in and out. The audio heard in this video is from a Zoom video camera, not a studio recording. I stood in my living room and videoed myself singing/picking the song. My thought was that I would cut back and forth between the pictures and the video of me playing, but in order to get in as many photos as possible, I only used the audio.
Although this was never one of my favorite songs that I wrote, I've come to appreciate it more of late. I think it crossed my mind because of the statistics I've heard lately about how young people aren't getting married anymore, for various reasons. Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I believe that propaganda has played a role in convincing people not to get married. Trends on social media, both overt and subtle, tell young people that having a pet is just as meaningful as having children. TikTok, among other things, has convinced young women that they should only date/marry men who are 6ft tall and earn six figures, even though only 2% of American males meet that criteria. Marriage, as intended by God, is one of the biggest, if not the most primary, building blocks of our society and civilization, so it's no surprise that dark forces want to irradicate it, but I digress. :-)
I thought enough of this song to include it on a demo tape that I gave to the Late Charlie Louvin back in 1998. Charlie was kind enough to give the demo to the manager of Valerie Smith, who was a rising, young star in acoustic music at the time. However, I never heard from anyone regarding any interest in the song.
I wrote this song somewhere around age 16. Not long before I wrote it, I borrowed an old Mac Wiseman record from my Uncle Ray. It had a sad song on it called "What's Gonna Happen to Me?" In that song, Mac sang a line that said, "When years tell their story, and gray streaks my hair, you'll still be a sweet memory." I loved that line, especially the part about the speaker's hair turning gray. I wanted to use that idea but for a happy song/relationship. When I sang the finished song for Pap, his favorite line by far was, "I've said it all; we've come this far; we will never be apart." He was most impressed by "I've said it all." I guess that part does capture or portray a moment that might occur at the end of a long, sincere conversation, in which someone thoroughly states his/her true love. I'm not sure if I was thinking about that when I wrote it, or if I might have simply been thinking about how to wrap the song up, and about how each line and verse in this song essentially promises the same thing over and over, just with different words.
The notes that are sung right before each chorus are the only ones in the song that make me struggle as a singer. They're a little too low for me, even though I moved the song up to C. There are some tricks that can make singing those parts easier. Those vocal tricks are easy to execute in isolation (when you sing just those notes), but they're hard to execute on the fly within the context of the entire song. You can hear the difficulty in my voice when I sang the main phrase of the song, "You're in my heart." If I ever make a studio recording of the song, I will be able to improve greatly on that part of the song (I hope).
I made a cassette recording of this song as a teenager, back when I first wrote it. It wasn't very good, but I liked it at the time because it was the first time I had ever sung/dubbed a harmony part to back my own lead vocal. That recording featured the Dove twice (the same guitar used in this video). I played it the first time in the G position, and the second time (which was dubbed in), I played it way down the neck, in the D position, using a capo. I panned one guitar to the left and one to the right. The two guitars seemed to harmonize with each other a little. To get an idea of what that sounds like, check out the video of me and Pap singing "Burry Me Beneath the Weeping Willow Tree" here on the channel.
A few times in the video, a couple is featured in a past photo, followed by a current photo. To indicate those transitions of time, I used brief "fade" transitions, rather than just having a clean cut from one picture to the next.
I'll pin a comment below the video to list the names of the couples who appear in the video. In case anyone was wondering, Granny crocheted the heart seen at the beginning and end of the video. I found it beside her recliner after she passed, and I think it may have been the last thing she crocheted.
