“I am in the midst of a great fortune,” Valerie June proclaimed, arms outstretched like an evangelist beseeching sinners to the altar.  “The weather is beautiful,” she enthused to a crowd on a Pacific summer evening on the Santa Monica Pier.  “The people are beautiful,” she said to (and of) her audience.  Ms. June went on like this, piling up …

He was the sort of guy who never met a stranger and toured the world while staying deeply grounded in his culture.  He was the least full of himself performer I ever met, blessed with an impish sense of humor and big infectious grin.  Today I revisited some Lps he had long ago autographed for me when I got the …

Note: In May 2015 I visited Albania to experience a week-long, once-every-half-decade folk festival held in the southern town of Gjirokastër.  The festival was terrific, and the journey to it held pleasant surprises aplenty.  Here’s an account of those encountered on Friday, May 8th. “Someone told me, `I guess Albania’s OK, if you want to eat roots.’ We eat more …

“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” -Jack Kerouac   “Our Father, Who art in traveling, hallowed drive Thy car, to kingdom come, on earth, if I can’t in heaven.” -Chuck Berry (from The Autobiography) “So what do you think about Bob Dylan getting the Nobel Prize for Literature?”  The lady who put that question to …

Have you ever been seized by the urge to burst into song at three a.m. but repressed it, fearing angry howls from slumbering neighbors?  Philip Olsson feels your pain.  He shares it.  Repression drove him to create one of the more interesting innovations at the 2017 NAMM Show.  “In the capital city of Sweden, Stockholm, everyone lives in apartments,” Philip …

Ever buy a calendar for how it sounds?  For fourteen years now, some blues fans have been doing just that.  Blues Images delivers a calendar adorned with vintage advertisements for `new’ blues releases accompanied by a CD of the music being advertised, plus several extra tracks.  The calendar’s producer is John Tefteller, a blues collector whose fanatic devotion to the …

San Antonio’s Gunter Hotel is haunted.  The ghost is believed to be a woman murdered and dismembered there in 1965.  She is nameless–her remains were never found–but her restless spirit has shaken enough subsequent guests to become part of San Antonio folklore.  The specter most associated with the hotel is no former guest: he couldn’t have lodged there in the …

For sky watchers anyway, it was big news: On Oct. 18 the moon passed over Aldebaran, a giant star (“the bull’s fiery eye in the Taurus constellation” is one description) in an event visible across much of America, one called an `occultation.’  A site called Space.com anticipated it with dramatic flair: “As the moon, three days past full, ascends the …

“Death,” Rev. Gary Davis sang, “don’t have no mercy.”  It may be a cold admission on my part, but the passing of the famous, even of those whose work I greatly admire, rarely moves me much.  It may cause reflection on their legacy, but unless I felt some personal connection, I seldom grieve at news of a celebrity passing.  So …

Geography, it’s been said, is destiny. Woody Guthrie is defined by two widely contrasting geographies, the Texas Panhandle of the Dust Bowl `30s and the New York City of the folk Left `40s.  But two recent books convincingly argue that it was actually the West Coast that made Woody Guthrie, well, Woody Guthrie. The first offers twelve essays by as …