At OVFF-18, on Sunday morning about 4:00AM, I was wandering the halls between the various filk rooms with a few other people (Melissa, Jesse, and others) and noodling on the guitar. After playing "Gentle on My Mind" for someone or another, Jesse said "Don't play us a lullaby or half of us will fall asleep".
So I concocted a lullaby that wouldn't put anyone to sleep.
It worked.
Starting with the riff I'd been noodling with (the intro to Dave Carter's "Kate and the Ghost of Lost Love"), I made the words up as I sang them. I sang many verses, most of which are lost. As new people came by, the song grew and grew, and eventually, Rene Alper suggested that I should enter the song into the song writing competition later that morning. The topic for the competition was "For Our Children's Sake". I didn't really take this seriously until Bill Sutton said that he'd lose all respect for me if I didn't.
Although I figured he was joking, I went ahead and did it. I had Melissa transcribe a few verses, I added the chords that I was playing for it, and she re-copied it into a form the judges could read. I named it "Close Your Eyes" so as not to telegraph the joke through the song title.
Mine was the 8th entry out of 9 in the competition. I got up on stage, sleep deprived (I'd had less than 1.5 hrs sleep between writing the song and performing it) and more nervous than I should have been. When I started singing, I started in the wrong register, and kept with it. When I got to the bridge, I sang the wrong melody. I was squeaky and mumbled. I didn't expect the song to win anything, I just hoped that it would get a laugh.
This is what the judges heard. (4 MB MP3 file)
It won 2nd place.
A recent version of the words can be found here, and another version with the chords (in a PDF file) can be found here. Also, the 'chord' file (source for the chord and ChordPro programs) used to produce the PDF file can be found here.
A recording made in my office a week later. (2.5 MB MP3 file) This one has the correct melody. It's played capo-2 from what's on the lyrics sheets.
Dandelion Wine performing the song -- this is a much better recording than either of the two above, and it's got most of the verses!
Warning: This is an evil mind-worm. Listen to it and / or read the lyrics at your own peril.