Michael Smith writes about his connection with Steve Goodman; and a little about his songwriter life!

December 2008:
Minnette Goodman, Steve's mom, asked me if I'd contribute to a term paper a high school freshman was writing about Steve. This is what I e-mailed to the young lady:
My name is Michael Smith. I am a singer/songwriter and at the moment I am performing in a musical which I adapted from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen", which is now playing at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago. I am 67 years old, and have made my living as a musician pretty much all my life, with little timeouts where I have had to get a non-musical job (we call them "straight" jobs) to keep body and soul together. However my last straight job was more than twenty years ago and things seem to go along well enough for me these days. I am not and have never been famous nor do I live a life of luxury but everyday I am grateful to have been allowed to live the life of a musician. I can't imagine wanting to do anything else, other than lying about on a South Sea island somewhere. When it comes to music I can be quite industrious, intense, and opinionated, but I've never been that way about anything else. I have been fired a lot.
I met Steve Goodman in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1969, when I was twenty-seven years old, and traveling with my wife Barbara in a rock and roll band called Juarez. (We called ourselves Juarez not because any of us were Latin but because we loved the first line of Bob Dylan's song "Tom Thumb's Blues" that goes: "When you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Eastertime too...") Barbara and I had met in Miami where we had worked at one club called The Flick (they showed movies sometimes). I had started writing songs at the Flick and when Steve worked there later he learned some of my songs and by the time we met he had been singing my songs, along with his own, for some time with much success. He was a personable young man with a tremendous amount of vitality, a kind of speedy quality, easily bored and quick to catch the drift of things and move on. He was also immediately likeable and you could tell he was going places, so I was happy that he was singing my songs to big crowds.
Steve started doing my songs in Chicago and I can't tell you how helpful that was to our careers, because suddenly folks in Chicago were familiar with my songs. Barbara and I moved to Chicago because we had essentially been presented to Chicago audiences by Steve, who had become very prominent and influential in the Chicago (and national) music scene, and we were getting so much work here. In the course of time Steve recorded about ten of my songs, the most prominent being "The Dutchman" and "Spoon River". (I had written "Spoon River" as a kind of theme song for the Edgar Lee Masters book called "Spoon River Anthology", a beautiful book if you don't mind crying a lot while you read it.) Steve and I later wrote some songs together, one of which was recorded by Jimmy Buffett and bought me a new car.
Though Steve has been gone for almost twenty-five years I still receive yearly royalty checks in the mail from songs we wrote together, or songs of mine that he recorded, or suggested that others record. In my more fanciful moments I think of these as "letters from Steve". He has taken care of me awfully well thoughout my life and I feel grateful to him and to his spirit. He had the kind of personality that to this day I can see and feel in my mind's eye. He was so alive, and in some big ways for me he continues to be. I still talk to him sometimes...and continue to thank him for his benevolent effect on my life.