Bill has one of the sweetest voices in music and a touch with a song that is human and real. Nancy Griffith is a big fan of his, having covered his "Roseville Fair" several years back. She endorses him during that song's intro on her "One Fair Summer Evening" live CD.

One of the most frustrating things about putting together a show like this is when you have too much good material to fit into two hours. One could say it's a good problem to have, but you have to put somebody off until next year, and that's a drag. This is next year for Bill. He submitted this for 1999. So we made sure he was on our 2000 show.

This song was a commission, Bill told Joe this fall, for a Christmas album. An album that went nowhere, Bill said. He added these thoughts about writing it.

"I was discovering the keyboard at the time, and so I sat down at the piano. It was written on a piano. There was just this sense of a lullaby about it. Somebody explaining what Christmas was to a child. I wanted it to have a feeling of all the things that Christmas is all about and how special it is for a lot of kids."