`Old time music’ may suggest sounds rooted in pre-mass media Americana, but it is no less a marketing label than is `urban’ (contemporary black music) or `young country’ (post-Garth Nashville pop). It’s just an older sales hook.
Check out this excellent article by Mark Humphrey at the Old Time Music Home Page
The Ark
We’d scramble up the other side of the bridge and put pennies on the tracks so the engines could flatten them. Me and Carl loved watching the big freights rumble past like monster ghosts from some other time.
We walked over to find the old man who lived in the little shed back of the vacant lots along the tracks. I thought he was a hobo even though I had never met a hobo before. He had a long grey beard down to his belly and long grey hair tied back and an engineer’s cap on his head. Everyone called him Dangerous Dan. The guys who ran the burger place said they called him that because he killed a man once in a bar-fight.
We found him there dragging skids and ripping them apart. He used a crowbar to pry the planks off and the claw of a hammer to yank out the nails. Dad said steer clear but we wanted to find out what he was up to.
“Mr. Dan, Mr. Dan?”
“Huh, whadayou want, kid?”
“Mr. Dan, are you building something?”
“It’s a, it’s a… I’m making an ark.”
“You mean like a ship?”
“A fuckin’ ark.”
“How come.”
“I had a vision.”
“A vision?”
“There’s gonna be a flood, see. I’m gonna float this fucker down Maria St over to Runnymede and south down to the lake.”
“Aren’t there supposed to be animals two by two and all that?”
“I dunno kid, that wasn’t in the vision.”
“So you’re just gonna float away on your own?”
“I ain’t got nobody else. Just me and the rats.”
“Can I come?”
“Hey Carl, c’mon, we gotta get back for lunch.”
“Yeah kid, you can come.”
“Carl…Carl?”
“When do we leave?”
“When the rains come in the spring, they won’t stop. You just be here before the flood gets too deep.”
The Queen’s City Leatherworks, that was Grandpa’s business. They made gloves down the basement for the railwaymen. That was when The Junction was a railroad town more or less. Up front they had a store and they sold gloves retail there as well as work socks, coats and hats and everything needed when you got a job on the railway.
One day a fellow came in and asked for an engineer’s outfit. He wanted the whole thing from boots to gloves. Dad was a boy then, so this was in the 20s. He told this story for years after. I must have heard it 100 times. He told it so many times I believed it was true. They outfitted this fellow with everything an engineer needed, from boots to bandana. It was a good sale back in those days.
When he left, Grandpa said, “Son, did you notice anything strange about that guy?”
“Only that he seemed different than most of the guys come in here for clothes.’
“Soft you mean.”
“Maybe that’s it.”
“Did you see his hands?”
“I just noticed they were clean is all.”
“They were the hands of a man never worked a lick in his life. He ain’t no railwayman that’s for sure.”
Next day, the outlaw Red Ryan, Canada’s Jesse James, was gunned down by police in a Sarnia liquor store. They say he was dressed up like an engineer.
“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”
Francis Bacon, painter.
Doc and Merle Watson were fantastic performers.
Is it true it snowed in Regina today? Oh my….
After mulling it over for some time, I’ve made some changes to this blog. I may make more adjustments to it in the coming days. For instance I want to get my brain around what to do about a blogroll. I could create a page and make the page a menu item and maintain a list on that page. When I went through my blogroll before I made the changes, it was obvious that I hadn’t updated it in some time. There were a number of blogs on there that simply aren’t active anymore and haven’t been active for some time. Nobody has complained to me about that and I suspect nobody has noticed. I need to chew on how I’m going to approach links. One of these days I’ll get around to making a custom logo….but not today.
I hope you like the renovations.
27th Street 