The Road I Walk

In my younger days, when summer was never ending and the river never stopped flowing; when snow fell before me, just because it was beautiful in its silence; when my muse was a single stick and a blanket to pitch my tent beneath the summer moon; when a walk on a...

The roar of the Stelling, the smell of the crowd

Some weeks ago there was a post on the CBA message board from the Contra Costa Civic Theater in El Cerrito seeking a banjo player, a fiddle player and a bass player to perform in a production of “Foxfire,” a play by Hume Cronyn and Susan Cooper. That kind of piqued my...

The Rock

A week from today I’ll be sixty years old, but I swear I’m a nineteen-year-old kid trapped in a downwardly spiraling body. In many ways I still think like a nineteen year old, though a little bit wiser, have the same tastes, though a trifle less extravagant, the same...

The Rock Island Line

Friday night is music documentary night on BBC Channel 4 television. I always check the schedule and click to record any programme that promises to show people playing fretted instruments. The BBC has access to a load of old material and I’m rarely disappointed....

The Roving Community

On any given weekend at almost any time of year, the moving bluegrass community re-creates itself in fields and campgrounds around the country. Like an amoeba, it swells, changes shape, splits and re-creates itself anew somewhere down the road. It has a life and shape...

The Saga of Stella

She would show up at our front door one or two times a year; loaded for sale—bags of homemade goods. She knitted and hand stitched anything you could imagine, from beds, to dresses, to men’s underwear, or cozies. She had two gold-front teeth and her hair was always...