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When I was younger, and, it seems like so long ago now, I met an angel named Jo Foster.  To say that Jo and I were friends would not do justice to the relationship we shared.  Jo accepted me for who I was and loved me in a way that only a mother could love her child.  She never tried to change anything about me, and, because of that I use to tell her that I felt she loved me more than my mother.  Jo was such a strong person and had such a strong influence on my life.  With Jo time seemed timeless.  Her loss is  something I will never recover from and it is something that is with me every day.

  I did this album, "Little Jo" as a tribute to her and to what she brought into my life.  

YOUNGER DAYS

The album starts with a song called, "Younger Days" and this sets up what I am going to try and relate about my relationship with Jo.  In my younger days I didn't know what lay ahead for me.  I certainly never expected that someone as beautiful as Jo would be taken away at such a young age.  When you are young everyone in your life seems to be separated from you and to have no real influence on your life and you feel as though you have no effect on theirs.  Knowing Jo and living through what happened to her taught me that this is not really the case.  We have effects on the lives of others and they can have profound effects on our lives although at the time, in the present, we so often fail to appreciate this.


IN ANOTHER TIME

In knowing Jo and understanding how special our friendship was, the thought kept recurring to me that if we had only met at some other time in our lives how wonderful life could have been for us both.  The second song on the album, "In Another Time" is about this.  We are all victims of the circumstances of our lives in the present.  If only we could turn back the hands of time and rearrange the sequence of events in our lives what a beautiful world we'd all create and how different would be our individual destinies.  But, this is something that none of us has any real control over.  We have to take life as it unfolds before us.


ONE LITTLE GIRL

The next song, "One Little Girl," is about my love for Jo, but, it is also about my daughter, Lauren, who played a major role in my decision to leave Jo when I decided to move to Nashville.  Jo had two daughters of her own and we decided there were just too many innocent people involved for us to ever have a life together, at least not at the present time.  We thought we would have the next 20-30 years to develop our friendship and participate in each other's lives.  "I'm giving you 20 years, not a day longer," Jo use to say to me.  We both thought that our time apart would only be temporary and that someday in the future we would be reunited.  But, "time will wait for no one, it keeps marching on."

OH, MY LOVE

"Oh, My Love" is another love song to Jo and it is a song about the uncertainty of the future.  Although Jo and I had a relationship that had "stood the test of time," only a few people really knew how we felt about each other.  The mistake we made was in not confronting our situation when we had the opportunity to act on the decision to be together, thinking there would always be tomorrow.  It seems in life that we are given these windows of opportunity and it is up to us to act on them and seize the moment.  Our mistake was in "avoiding conversations in the matters of the heart."  When you are young you think you will live forever and that those so important in your life will always be there.  Jo taught me that this is just not the case in life.


I NEED YOUR LOVE

The next song, "I Need Your Love" is about my decision to leave Jo.  I was torn between my love for Jo and the big picture of what would be the repercussions of our decision to make the changes that would enable us to be together.  I'm not at all sure that I made the right decision in view of what happened to Jo in the end.  But, I did decide to leave Jo in Alabama and move to Nashville.  My feelings about this are expressed in this song when it says, "I sit and wonder what kind of fool am I, what kind of man could let you go, what kind of heart could be so cold?"  I knew we couldn't continue our relationship without making a real commitment to each other that would have had such a negative impact on so many other people involved.


LITTLE JO

It was only a year after I left that Jo started having seizures one day at the hospital where she worked as a nurse.  Later she was found to have a brain tumor, an Astrocytoma.  Jo went to Birmingham to have neurosurgery to remove the tumor and initially everything went fine.  Then, a couple of days after the surgery, she started having seizures again.  She had a series of seizures one afternoon and after the third one she became paralyzed on the right side of her body.  Jo lay in bed the next few days, unable to walk or get out of bed.  Then, she started having chest pain and coughing up blood.  Her surgeon knew about this, but, unfortunately, didn't understand the underlying diagnosis.  I was in Nashville and had no contact with Jo and I never knew this was going on at the time.  Since she was there with her husband, I didn't call to check on her and only knew what was happening through her friends who she worked with at the hospital in Tuscaloosa.  Three days after she became paralyzed Jo died of a massive pulmonary embolism, resulting from blood clots that had developed in her paralyzed leg.  I knew that as a pulmonologist I would have made the diagnosis had I been there with Jo when she began developing symptoms and would have been able to save her life.  She would be alive today.  This is what I mean about how we have effects on the lives of others that we never realize.

The song, "Little Jo" is about Jo's death.  The first few lines really say it all: "Little Jo, why did I leave you?  Just when you needed me I was not there.  I always thought there would be enough time and we'd be together with a life to share."  T he fact that I had left Jo a year before and was not there at the most critical time of her life made her death so much harder for me to accept.  I think the strings on this song, all played by the great fiddler, Randy Howard, are so beautiful.  Randy really understood what this song was all about as he battled metastatic renal cell carcinoma at the time of this recording.  Unfortunately, Randy has also left us now.


THE HANDS OF THE CLOCK

"The Hands of the Clock" is, of course, a song about time.  It's a song about how we are all the victims of time.  It was written by me and my daughter, Lauren, when she was only four years old and all the really good lines are hers.  The real message here is to understand that we are all just pawns in the game of time and ultimately we all pass through life and are powerless to change the  ultimate destiny that lays before us all.  If I had only realized this when I was with Jo, maybe our few short years together would have been even more meaningful, knowing what the future held.  But, we never know in life what is around the next bend in the road.  In the end, time robs us of our youth and our dreams, but, without time we would have nothing to judge the events of our lives by.  Lauren really said it best when she wrote, "The days of our lives are lost and found in the hands of the clock."

MANY YEARS AGO

The album now moves into a mood of reflection, beginning with, "Many Years Ago" which is a song about my remembrance of Jo and how wonderful and complete life was with her.  People and events move through our lives constantly and while we experience them in the present we are never fully aware of the impermanence of life.  We are lulled into thinking that things will always be as they are today.  As it says in this song, "Life goes on, another sun will rise, keep looking as it moves so slow.  Like all the people passing me by I knew her many years ago."  So it is in life.  It's like looking up at the sun thinking it is stationary in the sky, only to realize that just a few hours later another day has ended.  So it is with the relationships in our lives.  Again, Randy Howard played such beautiful fiddle on this song.


GUARDIAN ANGEL

"Many Years Ago" is followed by "Guardian Angel" which is a song about how Jo remains in my life as my guardian angel even today.  So often I think of her and about how she would approach the issues facing her.  Jo had this incredible ability of understanding interpersonal relationships.  She was always able to be the mediator in stressful situations, interjecting her unique sense of humor and a lighthearted attitude in the most difficult of times.  I will always remember her for this.


IT WON'T LAST FOREVER

"It Won't Last Forever" talks about how short our lives are and that it's not just Jo who was destined to leave this Earth.  We are all destined to reach a higher ground.  "The big picture is clear if you've got eyes to see."  But, few people see the big picture until very near the end.  This is something I observe over and over in my medical practice.  The most wealthy and prominent in our society are reduced by the common denominator of time to stand alongside the whining rogues and discarded misfits of society as they all prepare to meet their maker.  We seem to spend so much of our lives in the meaningless pursuit of power, wealth, and position in life, all of which ultimately become only footnotes or footprints, one might say, in the sands of time to be swept away by tomorrow's unexpected wind.  What to me and to Jo seemed truly important in life were our friendships and loving relationships that we develop with others.  Just like the friendship Jo and I shared.  This is something that will endure through time at least through the remainder of my life, long after Little Jo's life was taken away.  And this makes our lives so much more meaningful if only in the context of our short lifespans.


HEAVENLY HOME

Attention now turns in the song , "Heavenly Home," to my own mortality and the fact that I, too, will someday "travel that road alone."  Pat Bergeson did such a great job on this song playing lead guitar, getting the Stevie Ray Vaughn tone on the quote of Handel's Messiah during the instrumental.  Again, my daughter, Lauren, had a hand in writing the lyrics to this song.  It's her line where it says, "I'll see all my old friends in a land where there's no time. And, no one has to worry about being old and alone.  There will be no more deadlines, up in my Heavenly Home."  What a profound concept for a four year old or for anyone for that matter to realize that it is only after death that you are set free from the constraints of time and the processing of life's events though time.


GOSPEL TRAIN

The last song on the album is "Gospel Train" which is really directed back to the listener.  This song simply says that we had better be ready for the end which faces us all, inevitably.  "You never know when the day has come, you're next in line, on a trip to Gloryland, you've served your time."  So, the message here is to live your life every day as if it were your last.  Don't take for granted that you've got another year or month or even one day before the Gospel Train comes to pick you up.  It can happen to anyone at any time.  Who would have thought that Jo would be taken at the tender age of 31, leaving her two beautiful daughters to grow up without the love and support of their mother?

Well, that's the story of "Little Jo."  It took a lot out of me to do this record, but, it also gave so much to me and helped me gain closure on this tragic event in my life.  I will never forget Jo and her spirit will always be with me.  I face life now with a different attitude and now more than ever I live by the motto, "Stress is your friend" because only though facing up to the tragic events of your life along with enjoying the happiest of times can you hope to evolve into a more complete human being with a more highly developed sense of what this life is all about.

Jim Coleman