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Remember rock ‘n’ roll? You don’t hear it much these days.
Fred Lincoln Wray Jr. was born on this day in 1929. He was known as Link. Mr. Wray played the guitar like it was on fire. Rock ‘n’ roll just exploded out of him. Here he is with Robert Gordon. Take cover.
Grocery stores are making some effort to disinfect shopping carts between use, but that effort varies widely. The last time I shopped at my local No Frills (that’s Jeff, Rose and Herb’s No Frills at Lake Shore and Brown’s Line in Long Branch), the kid they’ve got disinfecting carts has abandoned all pretense of wiping them down. I expect the guy will spray the handles, then wipe them down with a disposable towel and discard the towel. The other day I was there and the guy sprayed the carts with disinfectant and just left them there dripping wet for the next customer. FAIL. BONE LAZY FAIL.
I like Asian veggies and various other specialty products I get at Grant’s market at Dixie and Bloor. My advice: don’t go there when they’re busy. I was there one afternoon and they made no effort to limit the number of people in the store. It was very busy, but they only had 3 checkouts going and there were lineups halfway up the shopping aisles. It was very difficult to shop and maintain social distancing. In fact I took to extending my arm out to keep people at least an arm’s length away from me. FAIL. Usually mornings mid-week it isn’t so busy there.
I wish these stores would make more of an effort to protect their customers during the pandemic!
This horrible invasive weed delicious herb was brought over from Europe sometime in the 1800s. Thank you Europe! Now it can be yours. Pick all you like from our back garden. Get yours before it’s all gone.
In other news, it looks like my backyard ramps failed to come back this year. I brought a shovelful of ramps home from a place that featured both ramps and yellow morels – before it was turned into a housing development, and I planted them in a woodsy area in our backyard. This was several years ago. Each year they would come back and I would harvest just enough for one meal. They never took off back there but they did reliably return each year – until this year that is.
Out front, I have lettuce, chard, scallions, Chinese broccoli and bok choy growing already in containers and everything seems to be starting out OK.
Sierra Ferrell (from her YouTube channel) performing the Mel Tillis song Snakes Crawl at Night….
Here’s Charley Pride’s version. I think it was one of his first hit songs, from 1966 (back when there were 2 kinds of music, Country AND Western.
I’ve been listening to lots of versions of the Gaspé Reel lately as I’m learning this tune on fiddle. Here are a couple stand-out performances of this Quebec tune I found on YouTube:
Here’s Pete Fletcher on button accordion
And here is Louis Beaudoin on fiddle…
Listen to the latest episode of The Agency Podcast here or find it at all the good podcast places.
This week: documentary update; homemade dog cookies; The Oscars; 2 art museums in Miami; podcast recommendations; The Future is Unwritten and Life on Mars. Please join us.
I enjoyed a 1 hour walk this morning on a pleasant forest loop trail. It was quite a sunny morning, as you can see from the photos, but it was also quite cool. There were few birds around. I saw 2 crows and a few blue jays and that’s it. I plan to do as many forest walks as I can between now and August (when I’m planning on a canoe trip in Quetico with my buddy East Texas Red). I want to build up my stamina some in preparation for 20+ portages. Maybe I should bring a pack on these walks? I’ll give that some thought.
I cleaned my fiddles today. I should say I wipe them down with a soft cloth after every practice session so rosin doesn’t cake up on the fiddle or the strings, but now and then I also use a violin cleaner and polish and try to do a better job of it.
The fiddle on the right is the family fiddle. It was given to my brother by our grandpa on our dad’s side, when my brother was a young tyke. Our grandpa used to make fiddles (this was not one of those, unfortunately) and repair fiddles as well, and he passed that skill on to Uncle Gene (yes I was named after him), who went on to make a name for himself making stringed instruments in the Chicago area.
The fiddle my brother was gifted is a German copy of a Giovanni Paolo Maggini violin. Apparently there were quite a number of Maggini copies made in Germany between 1880 and 1900 and I imagine this is one of those, although it could be a later copy as well. My brother took lessons for a while, from a teacher who was less than encouraging (I think my brother may have used the term sadist to describe him) and so the violin stayed in its case for over 60 years. We had a little bit of work done on this violin and I started to learn to play on it. It’s a loud fiddle with a somewhat harsh tone, but I’ve discovered that tuned to low cross-tuning – GDGD – it sounds pretty good and so I often play A tunes in G using that tuning. There are plenty of possible fiddle tunings:
At this point, as I learn to play, I’ve been using cross-G, cross-A, standard tuning and high-bass tuning. I imagine I’ll eventually explore some of the other old time tunings. The biggest reason fiddlers use alternate tunings is to make satisfactory drone strings available beside the string the melody is on. Old time fiddle uses a lot of drones (compared to violinists but also compared to some other fiddle styles such as Canadian Old Time).
My other fiddle (I want to say my new fiddle, but it’s just new to me) has a much sweeter tone, and it’s an instrument I really love. It’s a Vuillaume á Paris violin. Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume lived from 1798 to 1875. His workshop made over 3,000 instruments. My instrument has been restored. It has a new fingerboard and tailpiece and pegs and it’s been refinished as well.
These days most of my playing time has been devoted to learning fiddle. In fact I have to make a point of playing banjo just to keep all the tunes I know top-of-mind. As I’m improving on fiddle, I want to play it more and more, so you might say I’ve been fiddling my way through the pandemic. I wish I had started as a kid! Starting to learn a difficult instrument at 60 is not easy, and when I started I was plenty enough discouraged by the steep learning curve. At the rate I’m learning, though, I hold some hope that after a couple more years I’ll be playing fiddle tunes decently well.
Sierra Ferrell and Timbo cover Dolly and Porter….
27th Street 