Born in Buford, Georgia, in 1893 the young boy moved with his family to the little farm on The Mountain, at Section, Alabama, a few miles distant from Scottsboro.
, enlisting in the Coast Artillery of the military service, is sent overseas and serves in France during the war as Radio Sergeant. Devastated by the death of his mother due to the influenza epidemic of 1918, he returns after the war and is discharged in March 1919, to his Garden of the South on the Mountain – to the cottage now empty of his life’s treasure, now buried in Mt. Zion Church Yard.


David Kraehenbuehl Drumfire: A Cantata Against War. An incredibly powerful piece of music based on a poem by Goff Owen

The Drumfire cantata was first performed by the Princeton Pro Musica under Frances Slade in 1986. It had been commissioned by a friend and former student, Goff Owen Jr., who sent Kraehenbuehl a volume of poems and other writings that his father, Goff Owen Sr., had composed as an infantryman in France during World War I. From these Kraehenbuehl chose several excerpts for his text. Of the work's nine sections, four are brief descriptive pieces composed for orchestra alone that depict in turn the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse--oppression, destruction, famine, and death--whereby Kraehenbuehl takes the young soldier's reactions to war and situates them under the eye of eternity.