Audrey Beard had already recorded two albums with her church choir before she graduated from her Cleveland high school in 1965. Under the stage name Penny North, she made the shift to secular music, singing at a neighborhood lounge and some talent shows. Although she caught the attention of a Motown scout, who offered her an audition in Detroit, her mother made her turn it down. Penny settled for recording two tracks for a Cleveland studio and briefly became a minor local celebrity. But eventually members of her church pressured her to give up her career as a secular singer, and that was the last the music world heard of Penny North.

"I had this thought a while ago," wrote W. B. Yeats.

'My darling cannot understand
What I have done, or what would do
In this blind bitter land.'

Or as landscape painter J. M. W. Turner once said, "We can take only what we see, no matter what is there."