The Story Behind “Song for Emma,” the Ballad Joe Walsh Wrote to Help Mourn the Death of His 2-Year-Old Daughter

On April 1, 1974, Joe Walsh‘s wife Stefany Rhodes was driving their daughter Emma Kristen to nursery school for a play date when another driver took a stop sign and veered head-on, colliding with their car. Emma, who was just weeks away from her third birthday, was killed in the accident.

“My wife was taking our daughter to school and some lady ran a stop sign and creamed our car,” remembered Walsh. “And I lost my daughter. And it was gory and all that. To help with closure, I wrote this song for her. And over the process of the next year, my wife and I, we just weren’t strong enough to get through the grief and so we separated and eventually got divorced.”

The song Walsh wrote to help cope with his grief, “Song For Emma,” was set as the closing track on his third solo album So What. The album also featured a rerecording of his Barnstorm track “Turn to Stone,” a song co-written with Eagles bandmate Don Henley, “Falling Down,” and an instrumental cover of “Pavanne of the Sleeping Beauty” from Maurice Ravel’s 1908 composition The Mother Goose Suite.

‘You Were With Us for Awhile’

Walsh’s bare lyrics reveal the questions parents may often have when they’ve lost a child too soon.

There’s a feeling I get when I look to the sky
As if someone is watching
Someone hears every word

We are filled with regrets, it was such a short time
But we told Him we loved you, hoping somehow He heard
We hoped He heard

You were with us for a while and He took you,
And he made your mama cry
I can see it in her eyes, there’s a question as to why

And after all this time still
I find that I’m without an answer
Good Bye. Bye love

[RELATED: 5 Songs Joe Walsh is Proud He Wrote Before Joining the Eagles]

“Help Me Through the Night”

Shortly after his daughter’s death, and before his marriage to Rhodes ended in 1978, he met a woman in Los Angeles, who inspired his song “Help Me Through the Night,” and helped him through the grief. “Because I was a wreck,” he said. “But she was there so that I could grieve Emma.”

On the album title, Walsh said he called it So What because that was the attitude he had at the time. “I was angry,” shared Walsh. “I was really mad at God. And I felt that was a great reason to drink: ‘Poor me. God took my daughter away.’ And so I got an attitude, like, ‘This is the worst thing that’s ever happened. I don’t care about anything—just to justify that it was okay to get screwed up.”

[RELATED: The Song Stevie Nicks Wrote for Joe Walsh After Their Unforgettable Car Ride]

Stevie Nicks’ Song for Joe

A decade after the release of “Song For Emma,” Walsh was on tour with Stevie Nicks and took her for a drive through the Colorado mountains. At the time, the two had been dating for a few years. During their two-hour drive, Nicks admitted in her 1991 Timespace liner notes that she was mostly complaining to him about “inconsequential things” before he told her the story about his daughter and her death.

“I guess I had been complaining about a lot of things,” said Nicks. “He decided to make me aware of how unimportant my problems were if they were compared to worse sorrows. So he told me that he had taken his little girl to this magic park whenever he could, and the only thing she ever complained about was that she was too little to reach up to the drinking fountain.”

When they eventually arrived at their destination, it was a playground in North Boulder Park, Walsh’s daughter Emma’s favorite place. There, he showed Nicks a fountain and plaque he had dedicated to Emma in May 1976.

That moment moved Nicks deeply and promoted her to write “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You,” which became the closing track on her third solo album Rock a Little in 1985.

The fountain was later replaced, but a plaque remains in Emma’s memory.

Photo: Joe Walsh onstage with an acoustic guitar at the Omni Theatre on June 20, 1977 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)