Business Executive Feels a Song Coming On : Music: Del Henry has struck an emotional chord in radio listeners with his songs about his mother and ‘Just an Old Toy.’

It’s just an old toy

For such a little boy,

But it brings the joy of Christmas.

It’s not an old toy for this little boy

For it brings the joy of Christmas.

Written by a 47-year-old semi-retired cable TV executive who recorded it in a Yorba Linda motel room, “It’s Just an Old Toy” has struck an emotional chord with radio listeners throughout the country.

Del Henry wrote the song last year as a follow-up to one about his mother that some stations have been playing each Mother’s Day since its release in 1988. According to publicists, about a third of the nation’s 9,527 commercial stations are playing “Toy” this holiday season--more than twice the number that played it when it premiered a year ago.

The record--which features backup vocals by the Rainbow Singers, a boys’ choir based in Irvine--has been picked up mainly by country and soft-ballad stations but also has been incorporated into other radio formats, even mainstream rock, and is being heard in all 50 states, the publicists say.

Henry says he got the idea for the song during a conversation with his father that stirred memories of a childhood experience he hadn’t thought about for decades.

Henry had grown up poor in Dimmitt, Tex., a rural town southwest of Amarillo. Christmases were never lavish celebrations for the Henrys. One year, when he was 4 or 5, the local church distributed used toys to kids whose families couldn’t afford them.

Henry says he can’t remember exactly what kind of toy he received “but I remember the feeling, as clearly as if it was yesterday. I can still see that church door opening and the women coming through the church with those toys.”

That feeling is what he hoped to convey when he wrote “It’s Just an Old Toy.”

“There are events in people’s lives when they experience something, and they remain etched in their memories forever,” Henry notes. “I’m interested in how the mind has etched these things, these vivid pictures that are with you, stored permanently. Just like those women coming through the church doors.”

His first song, the one about his mother, started out as a eulogy he’d written for her funeral in 1985. His father had encouraged him to write something, and he came up with a verse that seemed to touch his relatives and friends. Some of them urged him to put the words to music.

Though he’d never written a song before, Henry had played baritone sax and trombone as a youngster, and in high school he’d played guitar for a rock band called the Tokays. The group wound up being signed by a small record label in San Francisco, but two of the Tokays were drafted to serve in Vietnam, and that was the end of that. Henry got into business and eventually became president of a cable TV company in Arizona. When he retired from management in 1986 to concentrate on his investments, he found himself drawn to music again. After the response to his “Mother’s Song,” he felt he was onto something.

“ ‘Mother’s Song’ opened up a new part of my brain--about me, my life and my family,” he says. “Writing those lyrics really opened something up. They opened me up.”

He concluded that the major record companies “wouldn’t pick this kind of thing up,” so he founded his own label, Delwin Records. He has written about 50 songs so far, many of which are available on two Delwin CDs, “Sampler One” and “Mother’s Song.”

Henry lives in Lake Tahoe but records nearly all his songs in Yorba Linda, in a hotel near the homes of Peggy Duquesnel and Dave Murdy, musicians who helped arrange and who played on most of his tracks.

Businessman that he is, Henry thinks that if his success continues, he may have to hand over distribution of his records to a larger record company. “But I hope to avoid that as long as possible,” he says. “I don’t want to get lost in the shuffle.”