In December of 1981, I was 27 years old and living in Alabama, a little northwest of Montgomery. I’d been in the south a handful of times in my life, but only in passing.  This time, however, I found myself a full-time southerner and living alone in a pretty little two-bedroom cabin I'd rented on a lake just outside of a sleepy, roll-up-the-streets community called Wetumpka.

Anyway, that December, and while dearly missing so many friends and loved ones back home in Central New York, I found the lead-up to Christmas especially hard – particularly since I love being around those closest to me in the days and weeks before the holidays.

But then, one morning on the drive to work I heard a Christmas song on a local country station, one I’d never heard before. It wasn’t orchestral, or angelic, or even all that emotionally compelling.  It was, in fact, an incredibly simple little ditty – and, like much of the pop music of the day, it was one whose production, looking back, could be construed as a touch cheesy.

But after a few times hearing it going to and from work, I’d fallen in love with it, hook, line, and sinker.  What’s more, its simple melody and infectious chorus would soon burn themselves into my soul, where they'd remain (as it turns out) for over forty years and counting.

Yet, as many times as I heard it that Christmas season, I never once learned the song’s official title, nor did I once ever hear the DJ identify the young lady singing it.  And this not-knowing held true for four full decades, or longer – until, that is, earlier this year when I finally rolled up my sleeves and began to search in earnest.

Long story short, I not only found the song, but discovered an obscure promotional single of it on eBay, one that I subsequently bought.  Within weeks, I’d had my brand new vinyl 45 digitized and, at that point, with the singer’s name in tow, I began to try to learn something about her and her song, which I also learned had been composed by two talented but lesser known lights in the star-studded Nashville music scene, songwriter Ralph Murphy and longtime Memphis sideman Bobby Wood.

Sadly, and in a moment of either bitter irony or spiritual kismet, depending upon your perspective, I soon discovered that just a few weeks earlier Saundra Steele, 72, had died after a valiant battle with ovarian cancer.

It truly felt like someone had punched me in the gut.  But I soldiered on, sat there, and kept on digging.  And having done so, a few scant hours later, among the random tidbits I was able to assemble about Ms. Steele included:

• Born Saundra Joyce Rucker and raised in tiny Cumberland, Maryland, Ms. Steele attended high school there. And, since Oscar-winning actor William H. Macy, who likewise turned 72 this year and who also attended high school in Cumberland, I can only assume there’s a halfway decent chance the two were high school classmates at old Allegany High, and maybe even friends.

• After having performed in and around Pennsylvania, Maryland and West Virginia for many years as a young girl, and after having appeared on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, Ms. Steele ventured to Nashville at the age of 18 to seek whatever the fates had in store for her.  She soon became a respected demo and Printer's Alley singer, and at various times on Music Row provided backup vocals for heavyweights like George Jones, Johnny Rodriguez, Ronnie Milsap and Boots Randolph.

• Among the many influential Nashville producers with whom she worked early on were Roger Cook and Allen Jenkins – both of whom were great songwriters, and both of whom, ironically, (and for reasons evident only to me) I’d interviewed just a few months prior to discovering much of what you’re now reading.

• She’d soon marry local businessman Alex Steele, and though she’d eventually leave the music business entirely to raise her two daughters and support her husband’s growing business concerns, she’d emerge as a philanthropist, if not the grand dame of the whole Nashville arts scene, one who'd spend her days financially and emotionally supporting any number of the city’s most daring, talented, and committed avant garde artists.

All this, of course, is just a backdrop to the real purpose of this post, something I'm writing a few days before Christmas. My real intent is to, at long last, share a song with you.  This song – a melody I've been carrying around in my head and heart for God knows how long, and a gap in my consciousness that I've finally been able to reconcile.

It’s a simple Christmas melody, to be sure.  But it’s a song – and a singer – to which I owe so much that, even now, I can’t really find the words.

Because one Christmas a lifetime ago, both singer and song made this particular young, lonely, and displaced Yankee feel a whole lot less alone and a whole lot more comforted – and did so at a time of year that, let’s be honest, can often be every bit as melancholy as it is joyful.  And for that I will remain forever grateful to her.

Godspeed, Saundra. And Merry Christmas, my fellow traveler.  And though I’m sorry we never got a chance to talk in this life, much less meet, at a time when the two of us were both so much younger and freer, and far more full of tomorrows, we got to share at least one Christmas together.

Our very first one, in fact.