I can clearly remember the first time I ever heard the vocalist and songwriter John Gorka.

It was a song called “Houses In The Fields” and I remember the video vividly. Gorka talks of the decline of farming in the United States, how all the farmers had been bought out and replaced by subdivisions with grand magisterial names.

I remember Gorka's voice, sounding like the kind of voice that would come out of a person who is hewing wood from fallen trees, or shoveling great heaps of earth into or out of the whole working with his hands.

But I also remember John Gorka because of my father.