Hillbilly Heart by Billy Ray Cyrus, Todd Gold

on his door looking for a job. He hired me to work on his construction crew even though I didn’t have any experience and couldn’t hammer a nail into a board if you held it for me.
    “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You’ve got good energy. You’re fun to have around.”
    One of my jobs was to represent the company in court when they had problems with renters. They just needed a body from the company present; the lawyer handled everything else. One day I was there for a case against a renter who’d trashed his place, and during lunch I walked across the street to a restaurant. On the way, I passed the Greenup County Library, where I noticed the front page of an old newspaper displayed in the window. I don’t know why I stopped to read it, but I did. The lead story described the death of a eight-year-old girl named Mary Magdalene Pitts. She’d beenhorribly abused—burned with a poker and mutilated—and then killed by her own father, Robert Pitts, and the woman he’d hired to watch his children. Her name was Marie Frazier. They had been on trial in the courthouse where I had just been a few minutes earlier. According to the story, Mary’s little body had been placed in a glass coffin and displayed in front of the library where I now stood.
    But weirdest of all was the description of the house where Mary had died. I realized it was the little shack beyond my dad’s house in Argillite—the one where my friends Calvin and Jimmy had lived until it burned down.
    I hadn’t thought of that place in a long time. Suddenly, the tragic night came back to me: the commotion, the fear in Clyde’s and Jimmy’s eyes, the firemen unable to reach the house as it burned to the ground, and the sound I’d heard, a little girl’s voice saying, “Help me. Help me, Mommy.”
    I knew what I had to do. After court wrapped that afternoon, I got in my truck and drove to the cemetery where Mary had been buried. I wanted to see her headstone. It was as if a force greater than me had propelled me there.
    The place dated back to the 1700s and looked it. The grounds were unkempt and overgrown. I climbed up the side of a large hill, following the description of Mary’s grave location in the old newspaper. I hiked through bushes and briars, my face and arms getting scratched. I stopped to pick some wild daisies, which I planned to put on Mary’s grave.
    I kept climbing and looking around, unsure of what exactly was driving this impassioned mission. Finally, I spotted Mary’s tombstone, an angel with a broken wing. Sweating and bleeding, I scrambled over, knelt down, placed the flowers on her grave, and asked, “Why me? Why me?”
    Honestly, I didn’t expect an answer. But I heard a voice, that same voice I’d heard before.
    “Someday you’ll be able to tell my story.” That’s what I heard. Who or what or where that voice came from—your guess is as good as mine.
    About ten years later, I wrote “Enough Is Enough,” a song about child abuse that was meant to tell Mary’s story, as well as put Mary’s long-suffering soul to rest. But more immediately, I went home that very night and wrote a song called “Sunshine Girl.” It was the third song I ever wrote, though I’m reluctant to claim credit since the words flowed right through me and out of my hand.
Summer comes, summer goes
Leaves will fall and the north wind blows
But your love makes the sun shine every day
Tears for you cloud my mind
Take my hand if you’d be so kind
Show me… that the sun shines anyway…
Sunshine Girl, keep me from cryin’
Sunshine Girl, teach me to smile
Sunshine Girl, when the rain has fallen
Open up your heart and let your sun shine down on me
Life’s a game, I’ve been told
It’s not fair, it can be so cold
But you always… find a way to…
Make me warm…
If everyone could be like you
Soft and gentle… yet so strong, too
Your sunshine, could be the lighthouse… through the storm
    In February, Ken Cravens heard about my band and