Like Blind Blake Sang, "Diddy Wah Diddy," it's the..

Long Tall Bluegrass, Volume 1, Number 2 Lovely Folk Edition

Here's the Set List:

The Lilac and the Apple rendered by Kate Wolf,
Cannonball Rag rendered by Ike Everly,
Preaching Praying Singing by Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs,
Mind Your Own Business rendered by Ruby Jane Smith & Jim Stringer,
Fix Me A Pallet rendered by Grandpa Jones circa 1952,
Dust on the Bible rendered by Wade Mainer’s Mountaineers,
Eternal Vacation rendered by Buck Owens and his Buckaroos,
Earl Scruggs Recollections on Lester Flatt collaboration,
Way Down the Old Plank Road rendered by Uncle Dave Macon,
Odd Couple Guest Appearance rendition by Roy Clark,
I Saw the Light rendered by Hank Williams, Sr.,
Uncle ‘Pen’ rendered by Bill Monroe circa 1956,
Are You From Dixie? rendered by Grandpa Jones,
Picking in ‘E’ renderings by Mose Rager,
Roanoke Wheel Hoss Medley rendered by Ruby Jane,
Poor Ellen Smith rendered by Molly O’ Day and the Cumberland Mountain Folks,
Little Cabin Home on the Hill rendered by the Osborne Brothers,
A Buncha’ Tens rendered by Bobby Thompson and Roy Clark with friends,
Love’s Gonna Live Here rendered by Buck Owens and his Buckaroos circa 1965,
and concluding with Kate Wolf doing Across the Great Divide.

Enjoy and have you all a wonderful August.
-Franklin Dee

Right, Blind Blake's not on this compilation, we're saving him for our 'Blues Down the Line' edition of Blues founding musicians from the mid to late 1800's.

Keep pickin' y'all.

Devotedly yours,
-BWLP

"Honey, are ya'..."

The moment your heart breaks?

You’d think heartbreak would be the first step to empathy- to completely imagine, identify, thus ‘feel’ someone else’s pain.

chord usage. song pattern. theme. guitar.
I see guitars and I see ghosts. I have two I learn through and they haunt me.

I’ve got a guitar lesson coming up. Each time I set up to sit down for a finite time with my teacher, there’s usually some distinct question in mind that walks me to their doorbell at the prescribed time. Tonight my paradigm will go in shifted to the process of translating chords to song and their relationship to vocal harmony with a bent on Bluegrass and Blues. I’ll let all the information fall where it lay, picking it up in bits here and there in practice.

My whole idea around a time-to-time journal is sharing the experience- a bridge to connect what makes us all these thinking, feeling and sentient beings. But also as an end to convey what we all actually DO. Our culture of community. All it takes is two; better if there are more. But if anything, sharing through journal is some small statement of keeping the record straight about intent and perspective. If you can’t tell your own story, it only leaves it up to someone else to share it for you- or not.

Some might say thoughts aren’t news. And I would agree that indeed, thoughts on their own aren’t much. But in hindsight of action, previous thoughts are an interesting account towards manifest destiny. If you put your mind to it, you can do it. You may not be doing what you expected, exactly as you thought you would, but in every action, there is a reaction. Energy is never lost, only transformed. Best of all, there are no regrets of ‘what might have been.’

Which brings me to history. We as people walk around; vehicles of energy transformed through experience in time and space- with the biological cards we’ve been dealt. We’ve come a long way in understanding our physical make-up through technology and how best to live in accordance with nature to yield best results regarding physical an emotional health.

Yeah, point being?!

All this hinges on an explicit awareness of these very features that drive us through our lives- inspirations based on what makes us who we are: experiences in time and space within the vehicle of our persons. We become our history as our history becomes us.

I’m thinking about questions in Bluegrass like the Osborne brothers had, “Ruby, are you mad at your man?”
I’ve got questions in Blues on my mind too, like, “How come love done left like it did?”
Also, I think of Nina Gerber’s album after the passing of Kate Bush.

I’m thinking of the last time my heart broke; the engine in long train of heartbreak cars. I think it was seeing my son swim from the wall of the deep pool, out and ‘round his instructors, back to the wall. 3 weeks ago this kid cringed at the idea of getting a shirt wet.

Ahhh heartbreak, and ghosts.

And a lesson’s coming up tonight. With maybe a few in the interim.
Good day, everybody.

Guitar by Schultz, Fiddle by Vandiver and Bluegrass by Monroe

Arnold Schultz was a country and blues man who's blues licks added to Monroe's flavorful arsenal of playing style.
Pictured above with Monroe's fiddling Uncle Pendleton 'Pen' Vandiver (mom's brother), they were credited by Monroe as being the primary influences to his inimitable musical style that he would come to coin as Bluegrass.

Nice.

info as referenced from the Kentucky Blues Society at:
http://www.skybluessociety.org/history.htm
and wikipedia @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Monroe

Keeping America Beautiful; Still A Challenge

I was a child of the 70's.

Last week on my way to swim class, there was a man on an overpass with a bicycle, a huge banner, waving signs that said, "Free Leonard Peltier!"

Then I remembered something about the 70's, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Marlon Brando, and a pot load more people, incidents and socially significant events, that crying Native American commercial?

And bloodshed. We're all still in search of that illusive, yet beautiful ambiance called 'community.'

Now, and then in CRAZY hindsight. We have a truly gorgeously complex country.
The 60's and 70's had ALOT going on. (80's, 90's & 2G's too!)

DGMW

Me being big on unfoldings of the great big 'go-along' of life, I see everything as a release of the prescribed from on high.

But I also think of the Black Hills of South Dakota, struggle of MANY, but also
Bluegrass music, immigrant roots, earshot to the indigenous.

Can't it be about love and living in accordance with nature?
Live long enough and you'll see, right?

Nature will make it so, even if we choose to live like were entitled to 'it' all.

Blended Americana that folk tell stories of, is a microcosmic plethora of humanity.

Every day more and more people set a new direction previously unfathomable through technology and dreams.

But I'm banking that as easy as it is to forget the past in light if such a glitzy future, it all comes at a price.

My Martin or my laptop?
My Martin of course.

And I wouldn't have to write anything, I suppose I could do it like people always have and just sing.

Just sing.



Here it is again.