Turns out “Candle in the Wind” wasn’t the first quickie ode for the departed princess to hit the bins of stateside record stores. David Griffiths and Lori Bryan, a pair of Christian singers from Silver Spring, started shipping (OK, hand delivering) their “A Song for Di” to local outlets just three days after her Mercedes hit

the wall.

“Lori and I were in the studio working on another project the night after Diana died, and nothing was working out,” says Griffiths, who admits to having a Princess Di screensaver on his PC. “We concluded that things weren’t going well because we were both bummed over what had happened to the princess, and we both thought that writing a song would be the best way to get through it, to start healing.”

Programmers at a Baltimore gospel station, WLIF-FM, thought enough of the dirge to place it in heavy rotation during Diana’s funeral. And although Griffiths realizes that the princess’s mourning has incredible legs, he doesn’t plan to market his single in any format other than cassette.

“CDs would have taken longer and been more risky financially,” he says. “But with tapes, whatever we don’t sell we can just record over.”

—Dave McKenna

“A Song for Di” lists for $4.99, and the artists promise to send any and all profits to “the charities that Princess Diana supported.” The tape is available at local Tower Records stores and from the Potomac Adventist Book Store in Takoma Park.