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When Eddie Rabbitt’s children were babies, they kept asking him to repeat the little songs he invented beside their beds. Because they wanted the same words the next night, the man who had written hits for Elvis Presley and Ronnie Milsap had to begin memorizing his own nonsense. The songs belonged to a part of Eddie’s life that country radio never heard. He made up stories about ducks, pigs, puppies and a squirrel named Andrew. Some lasted several minutes. Others were little more than a joke, a rhyme or a final instruction to close tired eyes. By 1996, his children were nine and fourteen, but the bedtime material was still in his head. During an interview before a Nevada engagement, Eddie began singing pieces of it aloud. He explained that he wanted to gather the songs into an album for children. If families responded, he imagined performing afternoon concerts at three or four o’clock—early enough for young listeners to attend. The project was already taking shape before illness entered the story. In March 1997, Eddie was diagnosed with lung cancer. He underwent radiation treatment and surgery that removed part of his left lung. He continued recording, releasing Beatin’ the Odds that September. Then, in April 1998, the quieter project finally appeared. Songs from Rabbittland contained seventeen songs, jokes and stories Eddie said he had written while his children were growing up. There was “Andrew the Squirrel,” “Puppy,” “26 Sheep Story” and a fifty-one-second bedtime piece called “Sleepy Deepy Do.” There were no radio singles and no attempt to reshape the material into adult country songs. The arrangements used guitars, keyboards and sound effects, while Eddie addressed children simply as “Mr. Eddie.” Four weeks after the album’s release, Eddie Rabbitt died at 56. The timing can make Rabbittland resemble a deliberate farewell, but the surviving record shows something quieter. Eddie had discussed the project publicly a year before his cancer diagnosis. These were not songs written because his life was ending. They had begun years earlier, when two children asked their father not to leave the room until he sang them one more. His final studio album opens with a nine-second track. Its title is “Hi Kids.”

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.”

THE BEDTIME SONGS EDDIE RABBITT KEPT

Eddie Rabbitt could write with extraordinary economy. He helped turn “Kentucky Rain” into an Elvis Presley record, gave Ronnie Milsap “Pure Love” and filled his own career with songs whose choruses stayed in the mind after a single hearing.

At home, that ability served a smaller audience.

When his children were young, Eddie made up songs at bedtime. They were not demos for Nashville publishers or fragments stored for the next commercial album. They involved animals, invented words and the small logic children accept without asking an adult to explain it.

Years later, the children remembered them well enough to ask for the same pieces again. Their father had to remember them too.

Songs Without a Publishing Meeting

Eddie’s professional songs were constructed for singers, producers and radio. A bedtime song answered to different requirements.

It had to hold a child’s attention. It had to be easy enough to request again. It might need a funny animal, an unlikely rhyme or a gentle way of telling someone that the day was over.

Eddie began making up those songs when his children were babies. He later said they asked him to sing them repeatedly, forcing him to memorize material that had originally arrived casually.

That repetition preserved the songs. Had the children accepted something new each night, many of them might have disappeared before morning.

The Interview in Nevada

In early 1996, Eddie was preparing for an engagement at John Ascuaga’s Nugget in Sparks, Nevada. His regular show drew from a career containing more than two dozen No. 1 country records.

During an interview for Show People, however, the project that animated him was not a greatest-hits package. It was an album for children.

Eddie began demonstrating the material. One song imagined young animals behaving like children at bedtime. He explained a child’s mispronunciation inside another rhyme. He mentioned the stories he had developed around Andrew the Squirrel.

The reporter compared the effect to a country version of Dr. Seuss. Eddie dismissed the grand comparison. To him, they were simply silly little things he had made up for his family.

Yet he had carried them for years.

An Afternoon Show

Eddie’s idea extended beyond making a record. If the children’s album found an audience, he imagined staging special performances in the afternoon.

The proposed hour mattered. Three or four o’clock was not designed around nightclub traffic, evening television or adult ticket buyers arranging dinner. It was a time chosen for children.

He pictured singing the small songs in front of them, turning material created in private rooms into a public show that families could attend together.

At the time, his career was not inactive. The Nevada engagement advertised the long list of hits behind him, and several PBS projects were reportedly ahead. The children’s record was not described as a desperate attempt to recover an audience.

It was a different use for the same craft.

Before the Diagnosis

The 1996 interview fixes one important point in the story: Songs from Rabbittland was conceived before Eddie knew he had lung cancer.

That distinction keeps the album from being forced into a more dramatic shape than the evidence allows. The songs were not introduced as final messages. They had grown out of ordinary nights with his children, and Eddie was already planning to record them while discussing future performances.

In March 1997, doctors diagnosed lung cancer. Eddie received radiation treatment and underwent surgery to remove part of his left lung.

His next adult-country album, Beatin’ the Odds, appeared in September. Even its title carried the pressure of the year in which it was made.

The children’s project followed on a separate path.

Seventeen Small Pieces

Songs from Rabbittland arrived in April 1998. Eddie produced the album himself and performed lead and background vocals as well as acoustic guitar. Don Barrett played bass, Lee Garner supplied acoustic and electric guitar, and Gene Sisk handled keyboards and sound effects.

The record contained seventeen tracks, though several lasted less than a minute. Titles included “Why, Why, Why,” “Who’s That Pullin’ on Me?,” “Woodchuck,” “Puppy” and “Can You Tell Me a Story.”

Between the songs were brief exchanges featuring “Mr. Eddie and Miss Angela.” A sheep story occupied fifty-seven seconds. The closing bedtime piece was shorter still.

The scale was part of the design. Children do not measure a record by whether every track can support a radio campaign. A tiny joke can be enough reason to play something again.

No Single Required

No singles were released from Songs from Rabbittland. It did not join the line of Eddie Rabbitt records that moved between country, pop and adult-contemporary radio.

That absence makes sense. The album had begun outside the machinery that made his name. Its first listeners had not been programmers or record executives. They were children postponing sleep.

The same melodic instinct remained, but the job had changed. Eddie was no longer trying to place a chorus inside a three-minute country single. He was preserving the private vocabulary that had developed in his house.

Once recorded, the songs could outlast the ages at which his children first heard them.

Four Weeks

Eddie died in Nashville on May 7, 1998, at the age of 56. Songs from Rabbittland had been released only weeks earlier.

His family kept his final decline private. At their request, news of his death was not announced until after he had been buried. Even people within the country-music business did not understand how seriously ill he had become.

That privacy makes it tempting to read secret intentions into the children’s album. The chronology offers enough weight without invention. Eddie had wanted to make the record before his diagnosis. Cancer narrowed the time around its eventual release, but it did not create the songs.

They came from his children asking for them again.

What Rabbittland Really Leaves Behind

The album Eddie Rabbitt left at the end of his recording life did not sound like a career summation. It contained no grand retelling of the hits, no final duet with another star and no carefully constructed goodbye.

Instead, it preserved material that usually disappears when a household changes. Children stop asking for the same story. Bedtimes become private. The strange words a family once understood are gradually forgotten.

Eddie had spent his career writing songs strong enough for other people to remember. At home, his children had quietly trained him to remember theirs.

The last track on his last studio album lasts fifty-one seconds. When it ends, there is no chart-minded chorus waiting to begin again.

Bedtime has finally arrived.

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In June 1986, Eddie Rabbitt walked into Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital with an acoustic guitar and helped dedicate a playroom to the two-year-old son he had lost the previous summer. Only a few years earlier, Eddie’s life had been moving at the speed of his biggest records. “Drivin’ My Life Away” and “I Love a Rainy Night” had carried him beyond country radio, while “You and I,” his duet with Crystal Gayle, became one of the defining love songs of the early 1980s. Then his son Timothy was born with biliary atresia, a rare disease that prevented his liver from functioning properly. Eddie began removing himself from the road. Against the advice of people managing his career, he reduced his recording and concert schedule and spent as many as four hours a day, six days a week, at Vanderbilt. Timmy underwent four operations while the family waited for the liver transplant that represented his best chance of survival. The transplant finally took place in Minnesota in July 1985. Timmy died less than two days later. He was twenty-three months old. Eddie stayed home with his wife, Janine, and their young daughter, Demelza, who could not understand why her little brother had disappeared. He later remembered the family talking with her about God and heaven while trying to answer questions for which the adults had no easy language. Nearly a year after Timmy’s death, memorial donations were used to furnish and refurbish a playroom at Vanderbilt, where the boy had spent much of his life. Eddie and Janine returned for the dedication. Then Eddie took out his guitar and played for the children inside the hospital. His full return to country music came later. A new son, Tommy, brought laughter back into the house, and in 1988 Eddie reached No. 1 again with “I Wanna Dance with You.” But one of the first rooms to receive his music after the family’s long silence was not a recording studio or concert hall. It was the hospital playroom carrying Timmy’s name, filled with children who needed somewhere to be children between treatments. More from the years Eddie Rabbitt stepped away from the road—and the quiet way he entered public life again—is explored below.