Samuel A. Johnson

Hey! Diddly Dee! A Pirate’s Life for Me

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The Epic Ballad of Hoylet and Loodine

A Morality Tale in Pentametric Couplets

Thrush Song

Two versions of this verse about a thrush at the Spring above the Ranch, circa 2007.

THRUSH SONG lyrics

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Still more original music

Ivy League Alma Mater.

Garage Band does pretty good trombones. All we need is words… Anybody?

Traditional, but pretty, I think.

Three New Poems

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Good Heavens! Imagine my surprise in finding in a disused attic this partial manuscript of Third Chronicles, a previously unknown book of the Bible. This should follow Second Chronicles, but is anachronistic, being written, obviously, by some sort of scribe in later times. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have an ending. But check it out.

I’ll keep looking for the end of this book, maybe in another dusty pile in the attic.

Musical Compositions

This one is for chasing butterflies. I thought this must have been what I looked like at age four or five, trying to catch butterflies with my hands.

This is the first instrumental composition I ever wrote, in 1962, with the help of Bruce Markkula, who studied guitar with Johnny Smith.

This one is the first composition I ever wrote on GarageBand, in about 2008. I refer to it as “My Adagio,” since it has no other name.

Well, many years ago, before computers and the internet, I wrote a short story about a man who carried an enormous length of garden hose up a mountain with the goal of starting a siphon to run water from a lake to his cabin below. His only friend, a water attorney (?!?!), warned him that stealing water could get him in a lot of trouble. But, undeterred by this cautionary advice, he proceeded to climb to the lake and start the siphon. Meanwhile, his friend cooked breakfast in the cabin below. By the time the hose was hooked up, his friend had set fire to the kitchen and lost control of his wits. Just when it looked like the cabin would be burned to ashes, the hose began blasting water, and he was able to save the house. This was the first of several short-short stories in a series that I called Mountain Breakfast, in which each tale involved cooking or eating breakfast in the wild. It was all about humans, all about nature, and all about human nature. I’m still at it, still hiking and thinking and writing tales, although they’re longer now, and not about eating breakfast.