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Shadow on the Wall (Bob Nolan)
I’d been walking through the darkness,
One of Bob Nolan's later songs, "Shadow on the Wall" was not registered for copyright until September 24 1985, five years after his death, when Bob's daughter discovered his home demo acetate. Bob Nolan sang and whistled, accompanied only by his little Gibson guitar. He had an old home recording machine and he made his own wax demo 78s on it. Many years later, his grandson rented a record player and transferred the old demos to tape with indifferent success. The words above were transcribed from this tape. We were unable to find sheet music or even lead sheets and the song was never commercially recorded. Unfortunately, perhaps ninety per cent of Bob Nolan's song lyrics were destroyed in a garage fire. For years, Bob had kept letters, photos, scraps of paper on which he had written lyrics and mementos of his career, etc, in what he called his "treasure chest". He told his friends, "I'm keeping everything for my grandson." After both Bob and his wife died, his daughter confessed to Elizabeth that she had "cleaned house" and threw out much of what her father had collected. "If I'd known that anybody at all would have been interested, I'd have saved it. Western music was a thing of the past and I had no idea that anyone would remember him." Well, they do, Bobbie. They do.
"Often there were a lot of people around the house
and P-Nuts would cook for everybody. Bob would sit there and think and,
apparently, if he thought about something he wanted to work on, he'd take a
chair, go out into the yard and sit in the corner, facing the corner of the
yard. It was a silent admonition, "Don't disturb me right now." He'd do that
when the house was full of people!"
(Bob Nolan's daughter, Roberta Nolan
Mileusnich)
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