THE SONG WILLIE NEVER RELEASED — UNTIL SHE WAS GONE 🌅🎶
When June Lockhart passed away, a deep and familiar stillness settled over Luck, Texas — the kind of silence that only comes when the world has lost one of its brightest lights. On that quiet evening, Willie Nelson sat alone on the porch of his ranch, his weathered hands resting on his old guitar, Trigger. The sun was slipping beneath the hills, painting the sky in gold and amber, when neighbors said they heard it: a soft, haunting melody drifting through the dusk, tender and sorrowful — a song no one had ever heard before.
On the worn pages of Willie’s old spiral notebook, the title was scribbled in faded ink:
“For June — the sky’s still home.”
He had written it nearly six decades earlier, in 1967, after meeting June at a charity benefit in Los Angeles. They were two artists from different worlds — she, a Hollywood star of Lassie and Lost in Space; he, a restless songwriter still chasing his own voice. Yet something about her gentleness, her intelligence, and her quiet humor stayed with him. Over the years, they remained friends — exchanging letters, holiday calls, and quiet words of encouragement.
But the song he wrote for her was something he never shared. “It wasn’t meant for the radio,” he once told a friend. “It was meant for the heart.”
For decades, it stayed hidden among the yellowed pages of his lyric journals, alongside fragments of poems, old set lists, and the kind of songs that never found a microphone. The words were simple — heartbreakingly so:
The stars still shine where you used to be,
The sky’s still home, and it waits for me.
It was a song about friendship, time, and the way certain souls leave a light that never fades. Too personal to record. Too sacred to perform.
But on that night — the night June Lockhart left this world — Willie finally let it go. Sitting beneath the fading sky, he began to play. There was no band, no crowd, no spotlight. Only the hum of cicadas, the smell of cedar, and the trembling of strings beneath his fingertips.
Witnesses from nearby ranches said the melody floated across the hills like a prayer. “It sounded like he was talking to the wind,” one neighbor recalled. “It was the kind of song that makes you stop and listen, even if you can’t hear the words.”
When the final note faded into the Texas twilight, Willie wiped his eyes, closed the notebook, and whispered something to himself — a line that those close to him say he’s carried for years:
“Some songs aren’t written for the living.”
In the days that followed, the story spread quietly through Nashville and Los Angeles. Musicians who knew Willie said he had been revisiting his archives, gathering unreleased material for what he calls his “last collection” — a series of private songs written for the people who shaped his life. Among them, “For June — The Sky’s Still Home” has become the most whispered-about of all.
It may never be released to the public. Or perhaps one day, someone will hear it — that fragile melody of friendship and farewell, born on a porch at sunset, meant for a friend who had already gone home.
For now, it lives only in memory — a song of goodbye written in silence, played in grief, and carried on the wind.
And somewhere beyond the fading light, you can almost imagine June Lockhart smiling — her voice from another century echoing softly back through time.
Because even when the stars go quiet,
the sky’s still home. 🌙✨