<P> Initially, he felt squeamish about recording it, much less releasing it, because he disliked the idea of capitalizing on a tragedy . But after he played it for his wife Denise and for his producer, Keith Stegall, and it met with their approval, Jackson went into the studio to record "Where Were You" that week . On Stegall's advice, Jackson played the finished track for a group of executives at his record label . "We just kind of looked at one another," RCA Label Group chairman Joe Galante said later . "Nobody spoke for a full minute ." </P> <P> The verses focus on others' reactions in the form of questions . One verse asks, "Did you lay down at night and think of tomorrow? / Go out and buy you a gun? / Did you turn off that violent old movie you're watchin' / And turn on I Love Lucy reruns?" In between, he asks about the locations of people when the tragedy played out, "Were you in the yard with your wife and children? / Or workin' on some stage in LA?" In the chorus, Jackson tries to sum up his own feelings, first by calling himself merely "a singer of simple songs", and "not a real political man", and finally by paraphrasing the Biblical New Testament's first letter of Paul to the Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 13: "Faith, hope and love are some good things He gave us / And the greatest is love ." </P> <P> The song is in the key of C major with a vocal range of A-C and a primary chord pattern of C-G . </P> <P> Jackson was scheduled to perform at the Country Music Association's annual awards ceremony on November 7, 2001, to be aired on CBS . Originally, he planned to perform "Where I Come From", which at the time was the number 1 hit on the Billboard country charts . But mere days before the awards show, Jackson's manager, Nancy Russell, played a recording of "Where Were You" for four of the CMA's top executives . All four were crying by the time the song ended . </P>

Where were you in the world stopped turning