Absolutely. It’s my pleasure.

 

 

I was just a whippersnapper. The first thing that I ever did was for MGM Records. It was a song called “Jesus Is”, and it was recorded on my thirteenth birthday. That was literally the first recording that the Second Chapter of Acts ever did--forty years ago this past February.

 

 

Well, sometimes time flies and sometimes it just doesn’t go fast enough. The old adage is that it always flies when you’re having a great time, which I think is totally true. Sometimes it’s like, Wow. How could that weekend be over? That was so much fun.

 

 

Sure, I can tell you a little bit about it. For those of you who don’t know it, I used to be in a group called The Second Chapter of Acts. My sister, Annie Herring, wrote about ninety-five percent of our music, and the most popular song that she had ever written was a song called “Easter Song”. Of course, we have some other popular ones as well--”Mansion Builder”, “Rejoice”, and so on--but that particular song, “Easter Song”, was really early on in our musical endeavor. It was on our first release that we did, and that song actually ended up in hymnals and all kinds of song books. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who said it’s either in the top ten or top five of the all-time most popular contemporary Christian songs. 
 

So I thought, since my fortieth anniversary is a pretty big deal, I might as well do our biggest deal song. The other side of that, and the intimidating thing about that is--and I tell friends this because it was such a popular song with the group, and it got a lot of radio play back in the day-- that I was a little intimidated doing it because it’s kind of like putting chrome on the Arc of the Covenant. That one’s been done and you’re going to redo it. Okay, that’s interesting.

 

So I decided to take a little different approach with the arrangement, and I think it’s pretty cool. I sent some people WAV files of it just to let them listen to it--different execs that I know and different friends--and they all loved it. I’m excited about that, and it just recently hit iTunes on April 1st. 
 

 

 

 

Well, we never intended to have a group. That kind of came out of nowhere, in a sense. We really got together because of the death of both of our parents. I lost my mom when I was ten years old and my dad when I was twelve. I’m the youngest of nine kids, and there were still four of us siblings living at home that needed a place to live. My older sister, Annie, and her husband, Buck, took Nelly and me in, and my two other brothers went to stay with an older brother in Sacramento, which is where we lived at the time. 

 

So, we moved down to Los Angeles with Buck and Annie. They took us in, and they were basically newlyweds themselves. They had been married less than a year and a half, I think, and all of a sudden they had a twelve-year-old and a fourteen-year-old dumped into their laps. That had to be something; I can’t even imagine it. So, they became our parents. One day, my brother-in-law, Buck, bought my sister [Annie] an upright piano and she started to teach herself how to play.

 

After we settled in there, Nelly and I started school.We’d come home after school, and my sister would be sitting there at her little piano, rocking back and forth playing her little ditties, and the Lord really started to teach her how to play the piano. That’s the only way I can put it because she never had lessons or anything. She just kind of self taught, if you will, and she would say to us, “Hey, I’ve got this little song idea. What do you think?” And she’d start playing it, and we’d pull up chairs and we’d listen. We’d say, “Yeah, that’s pretty cool.” Next thing you know, Nelly and I just started singing with her. It was never, “You do the tenor part and you do the alto part and I will do...” We just started singing, and it came so naturally.

 

So we’d sing together and then, after a while, Annie started getting a few more songs. She got four or five songs that we would sing with her, and a friend of ours heard us and said, “Hey, would you guys come and sing at our coffee house?” Now, this was right in the beginnings of what was called “The Jesus Movement” on the West Coast back in 1971 and 1972. Then somebody asked us if we’d sing at their church and we said, “Okay.” So, we went down in their basement and we sang our four songs and didn’t say a word because we were scared to death, and everyone thought it was kind of cool. I guess they didn’t know what to think. They had never heard anything like it before.

 

After that, one thing led to another. We started going to a church out in Los Angeles that Pat Boone was attending. My brother-in-law, Buck, was a sound engineer and a producer, and he started working with Pat in the studio. Pat heard us sing, and he got us a deal with MGM Records. He helped us with that, but it didn’t work out so great. It’s a long story, but we ended up going to Myrrh Records, which was a division of Word Records in Waco, Texas. We got with Billy Ray Hearn, who is the guy that started Sparrow Records. Kind of an interesting little side note is that Annie was actually the first artist to release an album on Sparrow. Most people don’t realize that. Anyway, that’s kind of how we got started.

 

Back in our early days, we met Barry McGuire, who was known for doing a song called “Eve of Destruction”, which was very big in the late 1960’s. He also sang with New Christy Minstrels and was in the Broadway production of Hair, back in the day. He had been in some movies, as well, so he had some notoriety, and he had become a Christian.  We worked on Barry’s first solo album, and that was really our first tool. We went out with him, and that’s really where we got our start. How was that for a mouthful?

 

 

It’s definitely interesting. I think that we would have been so intimidated if we’d known from the beginning what we were getting involved in. We probably wouldn’t have done it. We’d have been too scared. We were just three insecure, frightened kids, and God decided to use us anyway.

 

 

No, we never had any lessons.

 

 

I think it’s great because God knew I was probably too lazy to do anything else. That’s actually not true, but I like to say that because it’s funny.

 

 

I’ll try to answer both of those parts. First of all, I met Donna through her producer, Michael Omartian, who was a very dear friend of our family and our group. He was very instrumental in our early production. He did all of our strings arrangements and horn arrangements. He’s probably one of the most talented musicians I’ve ever met, and he was producing Donna at the time. He knew that I could sing, and he thought, This would be a kick in the pants to get Matt to do something with her. I think she would be just blown away to hear this kid sing.

So I went to the studio and had a blast with Donna. They were doing some editing, and we weren’t really ready to sing, so she took me out shopping. We went and looked at shoes, and it was so funny. She’s really a lot of fun and a wonderful person. We went all over--all of these hoity-toity shops in LA  I think that the only thing I bought was a pair of shoes because they were something I could actually afford. It was fun hanging out with her and getting to know her, and then we went back to the studio and sang with her sisters on a couple of songs on the project as well. But doing the duet was cool. It was fun. As a matter of fact, Donna and I were scheduled to do The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I flew out to LA to do it with her, but she came down with laryngitis, so we had to cancel it. That was kind of a drag because I was looking forward to doing that.

 

As far as that song being a stepping stone to get into mainstream or to change what I was doing, I didn’t look at it that way. It was just something fun to do, and I loved her and she was a believer, so I had no qualms doing it. It wasn’t like I was doing a duet with Ozzy Osbourne. It was pretty straight up stuff, and I had a blast doing it. To me, it was just another thing to do in music. It wasn’t necessarily a sign or an attempt to break into a different market. That’s not how I was looking at it at all.