HUSH LITTE BABY This collection is an accumulation of songs that I wrote to entertain my daughter when she was very young. A lot of laughter and fun came from the melodies and lyrics and I want to now share the opportunity for you to perhaps experience some of that with your children and grandchildren. There is something special about the happiness on a child’s face when something strikes their fancy. I recorded four of these with Katiah. She can soar like Celine Dion, growl like Stevie Nicks, smooth out like Patsy Cline or when ask find one of many different vocal moods such as a child like voice on “Simple Little Symphony” and “Johnny Verbeck”. The next instant she’s mother-like, singing to a baby, on “Jesus Loves Me’ and “Hush Little Baby”. How rough and tumble old friend, Red West and I came to write “Simple Little Symphony” is a mystery. Red was Elvis’s bodyguard at the time and I was just a songwriter having a great time singing gospel songs all night long, every night, with Elvis at his house in Belle Aire. The song came out of there somewhere? I’ve fooled and tinkered with “Johnny Verbeck” off and on for years. The original lyric had old Johnny capturing all the neighborhood cats and dogs and putting them in his machine to grind them into sausages. It ended up with the villain trying to push a cow in his machine but instead fell into it himself and was ground into sausages. Now that wouldn’t do for kids to hear. Finally, when preparing to record it I changed the lyric around to bugs and worms being turned into bubble gum. Now to a child that’s fun. Ask one! “Hush Little Baby” Gosh I like that song! “Jesus Loves Me” What can you say. This song has to be in a children’s album. The “Orange Blue Dog” came from an incident where in my daughter, during her terrible two’s, tossed her stuffed toy dog into the washing machine. Well you know what happened! The dye ran into the clothes, and out came an Orange/Blue Dog. Fred Burch and I wrote, “Nothing Venture, Nothing Gained” for a scene in an Elvis movie. My daughter still believes to this day that it is her song. Written especially for her. Well – OK! When she was four she sang it word for word, note for note three thousand times a day. HELP! “The Riddle”. What a nice lyric and melody. So many years ago I recorded this on Mac Miller with the Anita Kerr Singers. Perhaps the greatest vocal group of all time. I know for sure that Anita Kerr is nicest, prettiest, most talented person ever. Also on this recording are old dear friends: Grady Martin, Floyd Cramer, Bobby Moore, Buddy Harmon, Ray Eddington, Harold Bradley and the Nashville Symphony Strings. “Sleepy Eyes” are two traditional classic melodies, “Lullaby and Goodnight” - “Beautiful Dreamer” woven together with an original melody. Put your child to bed, turn the CD Player down low, and you’ve got sleep. Guaranteed. Fred Burch and I were hanging out in California, luckily writing one hit song after another. I don’t recall how “Billie Blue Shoes” came to be in that mix but the story goes on: A friend, Mark Slade, heard me singing it and wanted to do a cartoon storyboard around the song. OK! We did that and took it to Walt Disney. He liked it and said he would do an animated feature film around the idea. Very soon thereafter Mr. Disney died, and that was the end of that. Well not quite. In addition to being a talented cartoon artist, Mark was also an actor. Perhaps you remember the TV series ”High Chaparral”? Mark was one of the main characters in the series. The name of the character he played in the series? BLUE. Guess where that came from. Later Shelby Singleton recorded the song on Mercury Records by the Wayfarers Trio, and George Richie (Tammy Wynetts’s, husband who sang with my group, The Foggy River Boys, in Los Vegas with Jimmy Wakely) recorded it on Roy Rogers. So the song’s been around. You can’t go wrong with a boy and his devotion to his dog. “Pinocchio the Puppet” and “Military School” are fun songs. So these are for the little ones. I hope you enjoy watching them smile. Gerald Nelson P.S. Look up Katiah’s albums: “Katiah”, “Midnight Madness”, “Sunday Morning in America”, “Twas The Night Before Christmas”, “Purple Heart” and "The Best of Katiah" all on CD Baby. If you have time listen to John Haywood Guthrie’s album “Help Me Daddy” also on CD Baby. You might like “Dream Date” by Gerald Nelson and the G5 Orchestra, “Songs I wrote for Elves”, and “In The Beginning God”. Also on CD Baby check out : "The Magic of Jerry Fagan" and "Echo's Silhouettes and Dreams" by Jerry Fagan