Homeless

Homeless

I was going through the newspaper a few years ago and I came across an article about how the east bay city of Albany relocated homeless people from a waterfront peninsula called the bulb in order to make way for a new park extension. A couple dozen or so of the last...
Good Mistakes

Good Mistakes

“There are no mistakes in playing music. Only notes you didn’t intend to play. If you find a note you don’t like, well, don’t play that one next time.” (Dan Levenson) We all know what bad mistakes are. They happen all the time. We wanted to do something good and...
Lintheads

Lintheads

Everybody knows the term “red neck”. It’s usually used in a derogatory fashion to refer to unsophisticated southerners. Hillbilly. Cracker. White trash. Not something you’d want to be it seems, and yet some southerners have adopted the term to...
Shine

Shine

Few topics have inspired more bluegrass and old time song writing than the subject of moonshining. The New Lost City Ramblers devoted an entire LP to the subject called Prohibition is a Failure. And the fascination with the subject continues to the present day with...
The Corona Virus Blues

The Corona Virus Blues

Daily Grist #1: “The more populous the world and the more intricate its structure, the greater must be its fundamental insecurity. A world structure too elaborately scientific, if once disrupted by war, revolution, natural cataclysm or epidemic, might collapse into a...