Folkways Records

In the early 1960s the folk music revival in the UK was gathering pace. As a college student at the time I really wasn’t sure what folk music was. We had sung so-called folk songs at school, and elderly, usually rural, people were being ‘discovered’ singing old...

Follow the Leader

Last week I attended a workshop on leadership, courtesy of my employer. It’s always interesting spending a day soaking up knowledge from a room of over 100 library-types. Of all the things I learned that day, the thing that stuck with me the most happened in the last...

Folsom pickin’ blues

Sometimes writing a monthly welcome column is an absolute piece of cake. I flipthe page on my wall calendar for a new month and within a few hours a topiccomes to me, and I start thinking about it, working out the start and the middleand the end, and a few days before...

Folsom Prison Blues-Grass

As we approached the tall, grey stone walls I couldn’t tell how high they were. Fifteen feet? Twenty feet? Thirty feet? However tall, they were a pole vaulters dream. Especially from the inside.Getting out of the old, dirty, stinky prison bus, I stepped out with the...

Footloose? Fancy free? Me?

Reading Ted Lehman’s excellent column on the IBMA got me thinking. At first, I was thinking about the theme of his essay, about the benefits the IBMA has for promoters. Then, as so often happens, my mind started to wander, and I remembered the times I had been to the...

For the Birds ()

There’s a big old oak tree in my neighbor’s yard that I can see through my bathroom window, and there’s a song bird in the top of that tree that could swear has been on the same branch singing his little heart out for the last ten years. I know it couldn’t possibly be...