Song of Ron

It can be said that all songs are love songs… At least that was what I thought when listening to the radio going through what was once known as a ‘break-up’. And in those songs were tales of found love and lost love as an ever present theme across cultures and genres.

It was then that I turned off the radio and began to learn to play the guitar and write my own songs. So when I look at this collection of my songs I can see that trend. In the beginning it was about love lost, love celebrated, and love sought. And as my mind expanded beyond the world of feelings I began to write on issues, and ideas, and eventually humor, with humanity at heart, in the process of being human.

Songs are poems set to music…

This book is an artifact of songs written between the years of 1976-1983 commemorated as a book of the lyrics presented as poetry, entitled Song of Ron. The epilogue and poem Life is But a Dream were written in 2019. The photos are from 1982, 1981, and 2016 respectively.

45 years have passed since then, and although I have forgotten how to play the guitar after setting it down since that time so long ago, to focus on what was in front of me; of building a business, a family, and a life with my wife Cheri. I did come back to music eventually to sing once again, which became a saving grace for the next 25 years from 1994-2020 albeit as a Jazz Singer interpreting the repertoire of the Jazz Standards of the Great American Songbook. I am so glad I lived in a musical world to express myself and bask in its sea of emotions, feelings, sensations, vibrations, imagery, and co-creations. I knew right from the start that music and I were meant to be companions, resonating together throughout time.

In my mind, singers are born, and I was born to sing among other species of our world in the Animal Kingdom. It is what comes most naturally to me. There are memories and anecdotal reports of me singing at the very young age of 2 or 3.
Even my name Ron is diminutive of the male given name Ronald, of Hebrew origin, meaning ‘Song of Joy’. So then, Song of Ron is aptly titled, for these are the lyrics from the songs that I wrote and sang with my guitar, a valued friend and trusty companion throughout those years.

In a popular tune ‘Without a Song’ composed and published in 1929 by Vincent Youmans, with lyrics later added by Billy Rose and Edward Eliscu, sums up what many of my fellow singers think and feel about their relationship to music as a singer: Without a song the day would never end. Without a song the road would never bend. When things go wrong, a man ain’t got a friend, without a song…

Ronald Steven Kaplan