I was sweeping the breakfast crumbs from under the kitchen table early on a recent Thursday, still reeling from a Kris Kristofferson concert in Raleigh the night before.

As I swept, I muttered to myself that Kristofferson's artistic genius was probably never held down by such mundane domestic chores.

Call it Thursday morning coming down.

It was an intimate venue in the heart of the capital city. Most of the 700 or so there were able to suppress the urge to sing along with the 70-year-old national treasure.

With only a guitar and harmonica, he offered up a good portion of his life in two hours of songs.

The room held a collective reverence for where the man ranks among the greatest songwriters of all time. I was wishing my dad were there.

I grew up hearing my father sing along with Kristofferson standards such as "Help Me Make It Through The Night," "For The Good Times" and "Sunday Morning Coming Down."

I'm certain Kristofferson's early material helped inspire my dad's songwriting during the 1970s.

In 1965, Kristofferson decided against teaching literature at West Point so he could move to Nashville and peddle his songs while working odd jobs, including as a janitor.

That invites the possibility that at some point during those early years, Kristofferson might have exercised his creative genius and swept floors at the same time.

My dad was born and raised in Nashville, but he was in his 40s and pastor of a Baptist church in East Tennessee when the songwriting bug bit.

He used some of his days off to push songs in Music City. The royalty checks from those efforts are small and few, but he charmed his way into the lives of some giants of the country music industry.

He tells a story about riding around Nashville for hours in a Jaguar with Loretta Lynn's husband, Mooney. Dad was a regular guest at Lynn's recording complex.

He was there during a daylong recording session when Mooney Lynn went to fetch the fixings for a sandwich buffet and spread them on the hood of someone's brand-new Cadillac.

Dad also found and frequented places where songwriters gathered. He spent the better portion of one morning in a cafe trading songs and ideas with a disheveled member of that fraternity.

"I sang some of my songs for him," as dad tells it, "and he sang me some he was working on."

He was polite about it, but my father was less than impressed by the man's offerings.

"I wanted to pay for the poor fellow's breakfast," he said, "but I was afraid it might embarrass him."

He encouraged the man not to give up and asked if any of his work had been published.

"I wrote a little song a few years back," the man said, "called 'Gentle On My Mind.'"

That particular song of John Hartford's is, of course, one of the biggest hits Glen Campbell ever had.

Dad, of course, wanted badly to slink to the floor and crawl toward the door.

Had the songwriting bug bitten my father a few years earlier, he still wouldn't have known what the author of "Gentle On My Mind" looked like.

But Kris Kristofferson might have held the odd job of sweeping crumbs from under the table where Wiley Rutledge and John Hartford sat talking.

And who knows? I might have grown up hearing my dad sing along to a classic country song that had him in it.