EXTRA **** "Keep on the Sunny Side" with Sam Payne

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 life There's a bright and a sunny side too But if you meet with the darkness and strife The sunny side we also may view Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side Keep on the sunny side of life It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way If we keep on the sunny side of life Oh, the storm and its fury broke today Crushing hopes that we cherish so dear Clouds and storms will in time pass away The sun again will shine bright and clear Let us greet with a song of hope each day Though the moments be cloudy or fair Let us trust in our Savior always To keep us, every one, in His care