“I never saw Elvis perform, but frequently after junior high school as I waited for the bus to ride home, Elvis would drive his lavender colored 58 Lincoln Continental past our school on his way back to Graceland which was a few miles from the school. I’d always wave to him, and he’d wave back and smile. After that happened many times, it felt like he and I were friends waving at each other. While it was very surreal, it was also very run-of-the-mill. It was my life, and Elvis just happened to be part of those many afternoons when I stood at the bus stop. I would go home, get my tennis racquet and pretend it was a guitar and I was Elvis. Later, during summers between college years, I worked for a fund raising organization in Memphis. Elvis always donated a check for $50,000.00 to the organization, and I’d go out with the executive director to pick up the check. He wasn’t home the several times I was there, but I met his Dad and Pricilla when she had just come to Memphis about age 16 or 17. One time when I was there, I needed to use the toilet. I remember walking across the tall, white shag carpet to the bathroom. Some years later, Elvis was considering recording a song of mine when he died on the toilet. When I play the song “I Saw The King”, I make the connection of my having used the toilet at Elvis’ house and him having died on the toilet and how my song didn’t get recorded due to his untimely death. Invariably, that little story gets a wide variety of responses. Elvis had a profound impact on me. His musical talent, charisma and personality flooded the Memphis hometown folks especially most of us boys and girls.”Bob Cheevers (1258)

“My first Civil War song was written from a dream I had in 1969. It had about 8 versus and lots of historical references. When I awakened in the night, I wrote it all down then went to the library the next day to find only two things were wrong…a general’s name and the location of a battle. That song is called “Civil Liberties” and will be on my next studio CD which will probably be titled Southern Heart.”Bob Cheevers (1258)

“An American named Ken Burns did an 8-episode series of The Civil War. It was mostly a photo-pictorial interspersed with interviews of historians such as Shelby Foote and others. There was a series of photos of tombstones one of which had the name Caleb Leedy on it. I loved the name and wrote the song “The Ballad Of Caleb Leedy” about a Southern boy who was killed by a Yankee soldier. Later, when my wife and I visited the National Burial Ground at Shilo in the hills of Tennessee, we had somewhat of a supernatural sense that Caleb’s grave was there. She went one way thru the cemetery, and I went the other. A period of time passed, and I was looking at the name on a tombstone when I realized she had found Caleb’s grave. I turned and at that very moment saw her with her hands raised as she shouted, “I found him”. We took photos of me at Caleb’s gravesite. It turned out that Caleb was a Northern soldier not a Southern boy as he appears in my song. The grace of time and its forgiveness have made up for my literary mistake.”Bob Cheevers (1258)

“My recent CD, We Are All Naked, is a 14-song collection written about a wonderful Kentucky woman with whom I had a 4-year love affair. The songs are about the up and down sides of love. As the years of being together and splitting up passed, the songs continued to come. It began to be obvious that a tribute to her was in the making. Considering the majority of my previous work was focused on characters of my own imagination, it became obvious that I was putting together a CD of songs whose object was a single person. While the songs were born naturally over a 4-year period, the decision to put them altogether was very conscious. Listening to it after time has passed, I can say it’s my most honest and vulnerable work. Whereas in other CDs, the characters were assigned emotions that I may have felt, the emotions in each of the songs on We Are All Naked are true and relate to a real person. For that reason alone, the CD stands apart from anything I’ve ever done.”Bob Cheevers (1258)

“That song was written in reaction to an article in Rolling Stone where someone listed a bunch of things, which were supposed to be cool if they happened to you. Being called an old soul was one of them. I wanted to respond to that in some cosmic, outlandish way, and it took me a long time to get the courage to have the character singing the song (me) say the things he said about being an old soul.”Bob Cheevers (1258)