In a small home, with a bust of Elvis, a pile of guitars and a poodle named Red, there lives a country western singer.

"I have a little story, friends, that I would like to tell ..." he begins, sitting at the edge of his easy chair holding his guitar. On the walls of his home hang photos of him on stage, of other opry singers, of his wife, whose stage name is Loretta Gail.

" ... about a little girl," he sings, "who fell into a cold dark well."

He has a great gray wave of hair, two flashy jackets in his closet, and his name is Bobby George.

For 50 years now, he's had this dream - to be like Waylon Jennings and Porter Waggoner, to stand on stage and sing songs and tell stories - to be a country western singer.

His work toward that dream hasn't brought him fancy cars or homes with marble floors. He doesn't play to sold out crowds who know every word he sings. But, in his own way, Bobby George is doing what he's always wanted.

And it all started with a song.

"But 22 feet is a long way down when you're just a little girl. There didn't seem to be a way to reach their tiny pearl."

The memory is a clear one. It's 1949, Bobby Dynes is 7. Around the dinner table, his parents talk about Jessica Pisca, the poor little girl who fell down a well and died.

At night, Bobby lay awake, scared, imagining the darkness of that small well.

He'd never forget that little girl.

Bobby grew, and as he did, he taught himself to play guitar. At 16, he played with the Teen Rockers and imagined a life of fame, of tours, of riches and vast crowds.

Instead, he got married, had kids and worked in security.

But the stage still called. And so every weekend when his daughter was little, Bobby Dynes and Brenda Lee performed at the Union Mill Opry in Edgerton, Mo. The crowds loved his daughter. But Brenda Lee, now just Brenda, never did have the confidence her dad did. After several years, she stopped singing.

But not Bobby, who soon took on his childhood name, Bobby George, for his stage name. It had a country western ring, he thought.

Big things were about to happen.

"Everything took a big change," he says, "in 1987."

"Now the hours came and the hours went but they just kept on drilling. Though tired and weak they could not sleep. They knew what they were doing."

It was just like those days in 1949. On TV there was constant coverage of a little girl who fell down a well. Except now, Bobby was a grown man with a family.

And now, he had his guitar.

So he sat down and he started writing a song as rescue crews tried to reach Jessica McClure, the little girl who fell down a well in Midland, Texas. Bobby never would have sung that song if Jessica McClure ended up like Jessica Pisca. But she made it. And, inspired by the scene, he finished "Jessica's Rescue."

"You know, I went into the front room and saw it all on TV," the spoken part of the song goes. "When they got little Jessica out for all the world to see. I saw her raise her little hand and rub her little eye. You know I sat there in my easy chair, trying not to cry."

Soon, he performed the song for the first time at Hosea Elementary School, where he was the engineer running the boiler.

The song was a hit.

"It wound up being my signature song."

Because of it, newspapers wrote stories about Bobby, who was hopeful at the time that music videos and stardom would follow. He appeared on "Good Morning America." He recorded a 45, then his first album, "The Rescue of Jessica McClure."

"That was the springboard for everything else," Bobby says.

He says another country singer offered to buy the song for $2,000, but Bobby held on to it.

"I was told a long time ago that I could probably make it to Nashville and become a star ..." he says. "But I didn't really want to do it."

He did, actually, but he wanted to raise his kids and keep his marriage alive, too.

And so Bobby performed on weekends whenever he could. His marriage ended. Big fame never came.

But he kept right on singing about the rescue of Jessica McClure.

"Now they heard her cry and they heard her sing as they listened for a sound. Only to their disbelief, little Jessica had been found."

These days, Bobby and his second wife, Myrtle, known as Loretta Gail on stage, perform on weekends at area opry shows. They spend their summers traveling and playing through the Ozarks.

"I'm pretty well known down there," he says.

And he has had some success - traveling and playing, making five albums, copyrighting his own songs.

"Without really havin' nobody pushin'," he says, "and no big time deals."

"Pushin's me," Myrtle says. "I push him."

Performing doesn't pay the bills, even now that he's retired. Bobby has a pension, and he and his wife both collect Social Security. The money he makes from sales of his CDs and cassettes goes right back into the music. But being on stage is worth the cost. There, he helps people forget their troubles, he says, telling stories through songs.

" ... He's just living out his dream," says his daughter, Brenda, "as best he can."

And that dream still gets big sometimes. Bobby wrote to Oprah, suggesting she do a show on the grown-up Jessica McClure, then bring him out to sing his song and finally meet her. And he's writing to Nan Kelly, the host of the Grand Ol' Opry.

"I just want to tell her about my career," he says. " ... She probably hasn't heard anything about me ... you never know what might happen."

It's true. A song about a little girl brought him some fame. Maybe it will continue.

Either way, Bobby George is happy singing his songs.

"Let me do one more song for you," he says at his home.

Then the country western singer picks up his guitar and plays.