Lindy Boone, daughter of Pat Boone and sister to Debby Boone, Cherry Boone, and Laurey Boone, has been singing all her life.
They attended a church that didn’t use musical instruments, so everyone learned to sing instead. Their mama, singer Shirley Lee Foley, taught her daughters to sing harmony.
Lindy Boone recalled, “We’d be driving, and she’d teach us little kids’ songs and said, ‘Cherry, you sing this part,’ and she’d sing it, and Cherry would memorize it, and then she’d give me mine and give Debby hers. We learned it as just passing the time away, singing for fun because our mother sang with her sisters. And her mother sang with her sisters. So, it was really a family tradition.”
As children, they even sang with the Osmond family in Japan, which led to them regularly going on tour with their father.
But even with her extensive musical career, writing songs never occurred to Lindy Boone.
She got married to Mike Michaelis and had three children, Ryan, Jessica, and Tyler. Her oldest, Ryan, was a handsome, popular, former high school basketball player who was president of his fraternity at Pepperdine University.
However, on June 19, 2001, Ryan fell through a skylight located at the top of his three-story apartment building in Brentwood, California.
Ryan was in a deep coma and was not expected to live. It has taken years of treatment and multiple hospital stays, and still, he will never be like he was before the accident. He still needs round-the-clock care. He has a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).
This horrible accident affected the entire family, but instead of letting the situation destroy them, they opened Ryan’s Reach, a 501(c)(3) whose purpose is to provide aid and support to brain-injured individuals and their families. Part of their service includes two licensed homes for TBI survivors.
Per its website, “We are committed to expanding programs and services to more effectively address the financial, emotional, physical and spiritual needs of Traumatic Brain Injury survivors and their families.”
This experience led Lindy Boone to her first foray into lyric writing.
She said. “Once Ryan was in the hospital, I kind of majored in being intentional with my words while we were going through such a dark time, a time of limbo where the doctors couldn’t tell us what was going to happen, and it went on for a very long time. I really started to pay attention to what I would say. And I would speak not just to other people but speak over Ryan and speak words that I would like to see manifested in his life.”
The singer continued, “I don’t believe that we get everything we want in life, but I am going to put the power of my words along with the power of words that I believe in Scripture. And I just spoke voice over Ryan. I spoke appetite over Ryan and words when he couldn’t even form sentences. I just spoke these things over him. I don’t like to make it sound so easy that all you do is speak and then abracadabra. I don’t believe that. But there was something of me being so intimately tuned in to hearing from God, that I felt that that was what I was supposed to do. And over time, little by little, I saw his mouth move.”
Eventually, Ryan improved enough to speak and feed himself. This process caused Lindy Boone to coin the word “wordlayer” because she focused the energy of her words on the hope and restoration of new life.
For Mother’s Day 2020, her daughter, Jessi, gifted her an Airbnb songwriting experience with Nashville-based songwriter, Anne Buckle. Early on, “Wordlayer” was her X username she made up when she began sharing about Ryan’s accident. As she prepared, she built on the thought of what word layering encompasses and wrote down some lyrics. Little did she know that this would blossom into something so special and beautiful that a song would come out of it.
When Buckle saw her lyrics, she didn’t want to change anything because she just needed to add the melody to go with it. Once completed, Buckle, an accomplished musician, made a demo, with herself singing and playing all the parts.
Lindy Boone played it for her family and friends, who thought she should record it. Once she took the plunge, she had the perfect backup singers, her sisters.
The song “Wordlayer” was released this past March during Brain Injury Awareness. The words she used to heal herself and her family can now be used to heal others.
Lyrics like Your words have superpowers, they can sweeten, they can sour, and you’re blessed to have the choice of what they’ll do prove the song was anointed and meant to be shared to help others heal, too.
One thing I realized quickly was that Lindy Boone has a gift, a gift from God, for writing inspirational songs that heal. She even sang me a breathtakingly beautiful lullaby that she had recently written for her grandson.
Once again, God has proved that he took what the enemy meant for harm and used it for good. It doesn’t matter what your age or ability; he can use you.
Lindy Boone stated, “One of the lessons through my journey was the idea that how you speak really matters to the trajectory of the next phase of your life.”
She wrote a book in 2013, and now, at 68, Boone has a bright future as a songwriter as well.
You can stream “Wordlayer” here. You can follow Lindy Boone on Facebook and Instagram.
Learn more about Ryan’s Reach and TBI here.
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Bethany Bowman is a freelance entertainment writer. You can follow her blog, Instagram, and Twitter.
