In these days of flattening the curve, we’re producing the Apple Seed from a couple of home studios – like you, we’ve been self-isolating, and, like you, looking for ways to reach out to our fellow humans. During this time, Sam took to posting to social media a little song every day – something filled with a little hope and a little encouragement to hang on. We thought we’d bring you some of those pieces here, as Apple Seed Extras. These aren’t studio recordings, and you’ll be able to tell – they’re made with a little Canon SLR camera, aimed at Sam while he sits on the piano bench in his office. But we do hope that you enjoy them.

 

On today’s extra, the quintessential song of hope: “Keep on the Sunny Side.” The words to the song were written way back in 1899 by Ada Blenkhorn. The story goes that she had a wheelchair-bound nephew who always asked to be pushed along on the sunny side of the street.

 

The song was recorded in the summer of 1928 in a now-immortal recording by the Carter family, positioned just so that it could be in the heart of every American just a year or so later, when the stock market crashed in the fall of 1929.

 

The song, of course, became not only the calling card of the Carter family, but a song sung in determined hope in living rooms and social halls and around kitchen tables when the country needed it the very most.

 

Keep on the Sunny Side

 

Well, there's a dark and a troubled side of lifeThere's a bright and a sunny side tooBut if you meet with the darkness and strifeThe sunny side we also may view

 

Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny sideKeep on the sunny side of lifeIt will help us every day, it will brighten all the wayIf we keep on the sunny side of life

 

Oh, the storm and its fury broke todayCrushing hopes that we cherish so dearClouds and storms will in time pass awayThe sun again will shine bright and clear

 

Let us greet with a song of hope each dayThough the moments be cloudy or fairLet us trust in our Savior alwaysTo keep us, every one, in His care