Back Home

“Back Home” (John D. Anderson, Jimmy Stevens)

A powerful, stirring look at mortality and validation that there’s more in play than meets the eye, delivered in the inimitable Anderson classic country style.

“I love this song. I wrote it with a boy named Jimmy Stevens, we were working on this first verse, the way writers do, and just about the time we ironed that first verse out, the whole bridge came to me, the melody and the words, without ever stopping. I couldn’t hardly write it down fast enough. It’s usually a little tougher than that.

My sister Karen is a late night nurse, and the more we wrote this song I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I told her I wrote it with her in mind, and evidently when she heard it, it broke her up. But, it’s very true, you’d be surprised. Doctors and people in this line of work that actually deal with life and death, laying right there on a table or bed, you should hear the stories they tell.

A wonderful friend of mine is a heart doctor who saved my life up in Charleston, West Virginia, named Dr. James Stanton. He’s one of the brightest men I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. I remember him saying, ‘John, stories like that happen all the time in the heart attack business.’

‘Back Home’ is some of that old style country, but a lot of that music really impacted me coming along. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t become an all out rock ‘n roller, because I loved those types of ballads, the ‘Green, Green Grass of Home,’ to the point I didn’t want to get away from it. Otherwise, I’d have probably been a hard-core rock ‘n roller."