My Mom, Hazel Daniels has been a widow for six years now, and like me, she misses Dad every single day of her life. As sad as it was losing Dad, they still had 56 years together.

Contrast that with Ronnie Van Zant’s widow, Judy. Judy became a widow in 1977, almost 50 years ago.

To paraphrase the title song from the long-running musical, “Hello, Dolly!”,

“Goodbye, Dolly, well, goodbye, Dolly, it’s so nice to have you back where you belong.”

I have no doubt that Dolly Parton joined her husband, Carl Dean earlier today and that Dad and a lot of others welcomed her as part of the heavenly choir and band this morning.

Obviously today is an exciting day as we released “The Best of the Charlie Daniels Band Volunteer Jam” on all major streaming platforms.

Response has been great, and we’ve heard some great feedback from fans.

But I discovered something else pretty exciting today. I found a service that allows artists/managers/record labels to track lifetime streams on Spotify. You used to be able to do this inside the Spotify for Artists site which gave you more analytics than you could possibly comprehend, but for some reason, about 6 or 7 years ago, they cut it to just the last 12 months.