I wrote songs for Johnny Cash. His number one single, “Any Old Wind That Blows,” is one of my creations. I wrote some special tunes for the Burt Reynolds movie, Smokey and the Bandit.
John Denver’s last chart hit, “Some Days Are Diamonds” was mine, also. Recording under my own name I had hits with “The Credit Card Song” and “Makin’ the Best of a Bad Situation”. All of this occurred while I was living in Nashville as a guy named Dick Feller. But, I am not a guy, I am a transgender gal. Since gender reassignment from male to female, I live in another part of the world as a lady named Deena Kaye Rose.
So begins the prologue to my autobiographical book, Some Days Are Diamonds, a chronicle of being a Nashville songwriter and knowing all along that I was transgender. At one time, in the world of Country Music, I was fairly well known by my old “deadname” and if you were to do a Google search now of that male sobriquet you would return a few hundred thousand hits.