You know, people sometimes ask me if there’s a song that truly changed me. Not just as a country singer, but as a man, a friend, a son. The answer is yes—and funny enough, it wasn’t one of those chart-busters, one of those way-too-polished Nashville singles that everyone knows and forgets. No, it’s a special song, an underdog, a tale that slipped under the radar, but never left my heart.
Back in 1979, I was a young buck wrestling with heartache in a small Heeze apartment above a bakery. Long days, longer nights, and a battered Martin guitar missing its pickguard. The radio was my lifeline then, a lifeboat on cold sausage-and-jenever evenings. That’s when I first heard Mickey Newbury’s “Heaven Help the Child.”
Now, Mickey Newbury wasn’t exactly a household name in North Brabant—maybe not even on the big stations in Amsterdam. Sure, he wrote hits for others, but this song, released on his 1973 album of the same name, passed through most folks like a gentle wind. But for some, it lingered. Me, I never let it go.
The lyrics found me when I needed a reckoning:
*Heaven help the child who never had a home,
Heaven help the girl who walks the street alone,
Heaven help the roses, if the bombs begin to fall,
Heaven help us all…