Remebrances of remarkable individuals I’ve known whose lives illuminate important truths.
My effort to write about George Winston has been interrupted by a natural disaster. I will resume that series of posts after a few notes from downtown Montpelier, Vermont, now a federal disaster area. Our beautiful capital city has been ruined, gutted, by the flooding of July 9 and...
This is my second post about my friend George Winston, pianist, fan, and philanthropist, who died on June 4. Around the time I first met George – 1981 – my little finger was a mess, but I was trying hard to push my playing technique anyway. I wanted to...
I had just begun re-posting entries from my “Meetings With Remarkable People” series when I heard that my old friend George Winston died on June 4. I was overcome by a sense of loss. We had seldom seen each other in recent years, but we corresponded often, and I...
I can’t resist writing about Bill Lederer as the first installment of my series on Meetings With Remarkable People. Around 1975, I was living in Plainfield, Vermont, and eking out a living by various means, including teaching classical guitar. It was my first full winter in Vermont — I...
I began this series almost ten years ago, and I have been meaning to update it since moving on to other things. In the intervening time, I have received many comments on various posts, despite the passage of years. Most of these I never got around to publishing, so...
I got recently got a wonderful e-mail from Karen and Mark Rogers, farmers who kindly advised me on dairy farm practice while I was writing On Brassard’s Farm. They attended my April 12 reading in Montpelier with a sick, four-day-old lamb in the car. Naturally, as guests of honor,...
I’m still just beginning to catch up with the “authoring” trade. I put the word in ironic, or dubious, quotes because my old friend Bill Lederer (author of The Ugly American and many other famous books) said — this was while I was still a guitarist and had never...
This is my third post about the American finger-style guitarist John Fahey, one of a series I’ve titled Meetings With Remarkable People. After our show at the Great American Music Hall, Fahey was transcendentally drunk, but he managed to make it to the party at my brother Nick’s place...
Looking at YouTube videos of John Fahey in concert recently, I recalled vividly the technique I once so admired. Plant your right hand little finger on the pick-guard; pick away with the thumb and two fingers, get that alternating bass thumping beneath your treble melodies. His left hand had little agility,...
Every young person needs a madman, a Loki, a Coyote, a misfit to look up to, and John Fahey filled that role for me. Long before I met him and performed with him, I knew from his writings and recordings that he must be a remarkable person. But he was one...