Tales from the Microbial Laboratory

Courtney Barnett, "Avant Gardener"

~the Earlysville White Oak (in a video...)~

Since late December of 2007, I've stopped and photographed an old white oak just outside of Earlysville, Virginia whenever I could.  It was often when I was leaving town after visiting my Mother who was battling lung cancer - and now it is during visits to see my Father, who has since been diagnosed with vascular dementia.  It has become nothing less than a ritual - one of those comforting things that you do amidst less than comforting times.  But tonight as I write this, I realize that I've also been steadily documenting this tree that has lived more years than either you or I might imagine to live.  I've come across the term witness trees before, and while I have no idea whether civil war-era bullets will ever be found in this white oak, I can imagine that it was a worthy place to stop - for a lengthy conversation, a meal, or a night's rest for Civil War troops who found themselves traveling through this part of Virginia.  If only trees could talk...

 So between Christmas and New Years, I received an email by someone (1mandomaker) who had crafted a video for the song "Sticks That Made Thunder" by the Nashville-based group The Steeldrivers.  The song is written by Mike Henderson and Chris Stapleton - and is about American Civil War events as told from a tree's perspective.  The image chosen for the video - for the tree - is one that I first posted on 27 December 2007.  The video now has just under 83,000 hits - and it makes me smile that this beautiful white oak, considered the second oldest in Virginia, sitting alongside a Charlottesville-Albemarle airport runway (the airport is now caring for it), has been viewed so many times.  It's one of the trees included in the book Remarkable Trees of Virginia.  It's a deserving tree.

 

Happy 4th Everybody...

Marvin Gaye, Tiger Stadium in Detroit - Game 4 of the 1968 World Series (October 6).

 

José Felicianos - his controversial version of "The Star Sprangled Banner" - Game 5 of the 1968 World Series, Detroit, Tiger Stadium.

 

Jimi Hendrix, Woodstock, 1969.

 

 

Marvin Gaye, 1983, NBA All Star Game.

Watch Awendaw Green's Barn Jam Live... fun!

Watch live video from awendawgreen on Justin.tv

Johnny Cash does Easter... :)

Happy St Patrick's Day!

(I had my Guinness today... did you?)

No Escape from the Blues (3a)

So I took a break from reviewing grants, and purchased access to AVS Audio Converter 6.2 software - and so here is the start of one of my blues show, without the annoying woman's voice every minute or two.  Success!

Okay, another test...

No Escape from the Blues (CD 3a)

(Okay, now I've uploaded the file to www.4shared.com and then they provide a link to the MP3 file...).

This is a test...

3D, when I converted each CD to an MP3 file, they were just over 100 MB each...  too large to upload or email (unless by a for-fee service).  But!  It seems that typepad can accept the m4a files - so see if you can download this... and play it.  (It is CD "3a").

Download Track01

(As for the rest of you who might happen by - this is partial recording of a blues show that I did sometime between 1981-1983) at the Virginia Tech student station, WUVT.  The show's name was "No Escape from the Blues" - a Muddy Waters tune).

Frank Fairfield: This is about where things left off

Hi, This is 3Dsound... Not long ago, Pam sent me the hyperlink to an NPR interview from last summer with the country singer Frank Fairfield. I was shocked to hear a contemporary musician playing Fiddlin' John Carson's "The old hen cackled" from 1923 and doing such a good job with it that I wanted to hear their whole album.

But that's Frank Fairfield. He takes old music and changes it up, in a way I can't quite put my finger on, and makes it engaging for a 21st century audience.

Here's what I can say: When Fairfield sings a song, he drags the beat, even as his instrumental playing pushes the song forward. The effect surges as an engine for both Fairfield's ballads and up-tempo songs and shows us how smart he is at taking 100-year-old material and making it new. Because, however much we want to say Fairfield's approach sounds like one of the "pioneering recording artists" of country and western music from the teens and 20s, in fact, Fairfield cultivates his allusions to early recordings without slavishly reproducing them. Which is what he tells us in his NPR interview, where he says, when asked if people should hear his music as being nostalgic of an early kind of playing:

Ya know, people talkin' about the past. This is all the same stuff – Right here, all the time. Nothing goes anywhere.

You know, I want to continue playing the music that people used to play before it got cast aside. And this is the most natural place to go from – this is about where things left off, and I'm just picking up where things left off, and keep playing and see what happens from there.

That's the forward-looking attitude that explains how Fairfield's self-titled debut album, from one year ago, hasn't got a drop of the mawking – but enjoyable – nostalgia we hear in many artists who love their 78 records (think of any number of old-timey bands or Leon Redbone).

Fairfield's fiddle playing, for example, might squawk like it comes from the Georgia highlands, but we are hard-pressed to identify which of the artists from the Columbia 15000-D series – which is ground-zero for the commercialization of American white rural music – who Fairfield sounds like exactly. The same goes double for Fairfield's singing, in which we hear all the nuances of intonation, casual phrasing and ways of telling a good story that we recognize from early country singers like Jimmy Rogers or Uncle Dave Macon, but it's impossible to single out just one singer who Fairfield seems to have primarily learned his tricks from.

What we've got are Fairfield's songs. The ones I like are "Nine pound hammer" (exquisitely well recorded, which is true of his whole album, but we hear it here first); "Call me a dog when I'm gone" (the torque on Fairfield's guitar pulls his shuffling, fun lyrics into the present, where his girl is wondering where'd he been so long); "The blackberry blossoms" (fiddle playing so hackneyed you might think he doesn't know what he's doing); "The dying cowboy" (high pathos, where the vocals and fiddle work together elegantly; which is also true to a lesser extent of the next song, "Old Paint"); "The train that took my girl from town" (remarkable for how Fairfield lets the song do the singing).

Soon to be cross-posted in a slightly different form at Draggin' the Line.

-3Dsound