Posts under ‘Music’

I never heard of Iris Dement before, but this song really speaks to our present predicament. The first 30 seconds or so of the video is shaky, but after that it’s O.K. In 1997, Forida State senator John Grant, after hearing the song played on public radio station WMNF in Tampa, got a $104,000 grant [...]

I recently had occasion to painfully recall the line, “Especially, do not feign affection”, from the well-known poem Desiderata, which was very popular in the late 1960s and which achieved even more popularity when the talk-show host, Les Crane, recorded it in 1971. I couldn’t find a video of it that I liked enough to [...]

Leonard Cohen’s famous song, Anthem, has the oft-quoted line, “There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” We would all benefit if we took his words to heart.

I went to church this morning. Paging through the hymnal, I was surprised to see “Morning Has Broken”, a song I always associated with Cat Stevens, who has since changed his name to Yusuf Islam. The song has always been one of my favorites, but I didn’t know that it was a religious hymn. It [...]

I haven’t disappeared – I’ve been on vacation! I left for Floyd on June 23 and stopped at the Greek restaurant just outside of Willis for a gyro before getting into Floyd around 1 p.m. I found that the owner of the restaurant had sold it and opened a new restaurant in Hillsville. But the [...]

I’m going to a house concert tonight at Palm Lodge, a house built out of Dade County pine in 1912 and a designated historical landmark. After the closing of Main Street Cafe in Homestead three years ago, my friends opened their house as a venue for concerts as a way of keeping the musical community [...]

This is one of my all-time favorite songs and I think it is very appropriate to listen to it again, after the first days of the Obama administration. No, not all is perfect, but what a difference, eh? Update 12/05/2010: I was looking at my visitor logs and found that someone had read this post. [...]

I’ve been pre-occupied with some personal issues that I can’t elaborate on at the moment, but perhaps this classic, from The Kingston Trio, will help you understand my lack of activity recently. I’m hopeful that the sun will start shining once again in the near future.

In years past, a family tradition was to play Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Thanksgiving Day Massacre every year at Thanksgiving, much to my younger brother’s dislike. Perhaps that is because the song is only truly appreciated by someone who was “of age” during the late 1960s when the the threat of being drafted into the [...]