December 5, 2014
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Swamp Pop for a Friday night

Ever have a song sneak into your head which you actually haven’t heard in a really long time? That happened to me today. I’ve known the song for many many years but I can’t remember the last time I heard it. It’s by Rufus Jaganeaux and I think if you wanted to categorize it you’d call it Swamp Pop.  Here’s Opelousas Sostan….

Let’s stay with the theme….check out Betty & Dupree by Cookie and the Cupcakes….

Now here’s Kenny Tibbs novelty tune about Holly Beach – the Cajun Riviera – to the tune of Under the Boardwalk….

And finally let’s get out of this post with a visit to the Promised Land. Of course this is a Chuck Berry tune, but it’s Johnnie Allan singing with the mighty Belton Richard squeezing out the fantastic accordion breaks. Love this one!

December 4, 2014
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Books I never got around to reading

I started reading The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. It’s one of those books I overlooked along the way. Maybe this was because I saw the movie many years ago. Sometimes when I see a movie based on a book I avoid the book, especially if I really loved the movie. I don’t want one to be spoiled by the other.

I’ve only read one other book by Mordecai Richler – Solomon Gursky was Here, and I thought that one was most excellent. I started reading Barney’s Version at one point but it didn’t grab me and I didn’t feel like investing more time in it at that time.

I confess there are lots of books I perhaps should have read but skipped for no real reasons, and a much smaller number of books abandoned along the way. Reading a novel requires the commitment of time, compared to painting for instance. When I look at a painting I see the whole business at once and I can decide in a pica-second if I want to spend more time with it. But with a book, you don’t get to see the whole picture without investing the time. Of course then there are the books which hold you in and make you feel like you don’t ever want to leave.

Do you read old-school books or do you read them on an electronic device or both? I’m in the both category. I’d say 2/3 or maybe even 3/4 of the books I read are in hard-copy book form, but I do read some on an i-pad and I’m ok with that. the ipad is especially great for reading at night – excellent for camping and reading in a tent for instance. You loose the tangible qualities of the book object though, and I still like those. I like the smell of the paper and the ink. I like to flip through, read about the author on the back page and so on. I imagine I’ll get over that at some point. When I am reading something on the ipad it seems just fine. If anything the ipad is a little heavy. A smaller notebook or an e-reader might be better for reading. A phone is decidedly too small.

Are there books most people you know have read which you skipped along the way?

December 1, 2014
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Five Miles From Town

IMG_2593I’d like to give you a sneak peak tonight into the goings on in my little basement studio. I’ve got a number of smallish canvases on the go and some of them are beginning to assert themselves as paintings. This one is called Five Miles from Town.

The title of this painting comes from the title of an old time fiddle tune. Readers not familiar with old time music might not know the tune, so here it is beautifully performed by Pete Sutherland & Brad Kolodner (from the YouTube).

Filed under: Art
November 29, 2014
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…but it’s a dry cold

I returned today from a whirlwind work trip to Edmonton. I landed in a city already enjoying a serious snowstorm.IMG_2581 And it just kept on snowing and snowing. So every conversation started with, “quite the snowstorm, eh?”

Then the temperature started dropping, leveling off at around -30. This does not phase Edmontonians, who like to say things like, “but it’s a dry cold”. I like folks in Edmonton a lot, but let me say this…once it gets below -20 –  wet, dry it’s all just freaking cold.

IMG_2579 2I asked my taxi driver from the airport if Edmonton was a good city to live in. He said, “I come from India, been here 9 years. It’s a good place, good jobs….but the snow sucks”….then he added, “at least it’s a dry cold”.

It was an excellent work trip, but there was an added bonus. I got to finally meet longtime blog pals Karen and SME. It turns out there is a term for this: MIRL, as in MEETING IN REAL LIFE. What an enjoyable evening! Hoping to see them both again when I return to Edmonton in December.

IMG_2578I’ve had a couple other MIRL experiences. Last year I met up with Barb AKA Bad Tempered Zombie in Calgary, and a few years back, another long-time blog pal, Allyson, visited Toronto, and I can say each of these events has been fabulous!

I flew back this morning, arriving this afternoon, with enough time to unpack and have a coffee before going off to brother-in-law Peter’s 60th birthday dinner. Great dinner, fantastic company. Between all the travel, my body’s difficulty coping with the time zones, and the big meal, now I’m totally zonked and am going to bed shortly. Good night all.

 

November 29, 2014
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Jim the Boy

Jim the Boy is the 2000 novel by Tony Earley.  I bought my copy in the bookstore in Paris Ontario, a bookstore from an other era, where the fellow who runs the place proudly stocks books he likes and cares about. I don’t know what it is about the book that struck my while I was in there browsing. I picked it up, flipped through it, read the back cover, and opened a few random passages which I devoured in the store. It’s appropriate I bought my copy in a small town since the book takes us to the fictional village of Aliceville in North Carolina.

It’s a disarming book, very simply the story of a boy, Jim, in his 10th year. It’s set during the depression, at a time when electricity was coming to the town, a time when the the old village school and the old mountain school both closed, and a new bigger school for the town kids and the mountain kids opened in Aliceville, just awaiting ceilings and electricity to be complete.

Jim lives in town with his mother and near his 3 uncles, who help raise him. Jim’s father died shortly before Jim was born. We get to watch Jim begin to grow up, learn many new things, discover his past, and begin to learn about himself. Ordinary events seem big when you’re 10, and we see Jim dealing with his town changing, experiencing the complexities and joy of friendship, growing up with his unmarried uncles stepping into father-figure roles.

The prose is simple and flows beautifully, simple and kind of sweet, without becoming saccharin. I found it deftly took me right into Jim’s world.

This is not the kind of book I would normally choose to read, but I like doing that sometimes. It’s so easy to be closed-minded. I really glad I picked it up and read it, and I recommend it to you too. A free copy of Jim the Boy is available right now in the 27th Street Book Box.

November 24, 2014
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Bonaparte’s March

One of the things I love about Old Time music is that songs are passed along and revitalized over time. In the pop music “business” on the other hand, every lick has to be considered “original”. How many performers have sued one another over the years for steal each other’s tunes? It seems hard to believe when you consider that most pop tunes only have three or four chords to them. With traditional or folk music, the emphasis is on the performance instead, and if one song morphs into another, that’s fine. It’s fine because in folk music we own the songs together, something I really appreciate.

The Indian Creek Delta Boys (featuring the late Garry Harrison) were a band who explored the traditional music of Southern Illinois – a place known as Little Egypt. They went looking for their tradition, looking for old fiddlers and they learned tunes and ways of playing those tunes from primary sources and did a great job of collecting those tunes and sharing them with the rest of us.

Bonaparte’s March is a tune the Indian Creek Delta Boys learned from a fiddler named Harvey “Pappy” Taylor. I like this tune a lot. I learned to play it on clawhammer banjo from Cathy Barton and Dave Para at the Midwest Banjo Camp. Here are the Indian Creek Delta Boys.