Read interviews with Danny Carnahan, Marla Fibish, Daniel Manor, Bobbi Nikles, Lewis Santer, Jason Pollack, Mickie Zekley, Peter Kasin, Robert Feiner, Daniel Hoffman, Davy Levine, and Bill Ochs
I’ve been singing about Jesus all my life, without being a “believer” in any sense of the word. I bet it started with those tiny booklets of Christmas Carols that the John Hancock Insurance Company gave away.… (Read more)
How I Fell in Love with My Late Wife
I met Mary in the spring of 1986, at the Castle Folk Club in San Francisco. It was just like the traditional English folk clubs I’d experienced while living in the UK 15 years earlier; a “select room” upstairs from the Edinburgh Castle Pub in the Tenderloin, where you’d buy your pints and fish ‘n chips downstairs and bring them up to enjoy with the music.… (Read more)
When I arrived in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day of 1981, I had very high hopes for a career in High Tech. The many contacts I had made working for Hybrid Technology Corporation (HTC) back in Concord MA seemed to assure an easy entry.… (Read more)
Tom Savage and the Sausalito House Fire
In 1992 I went off to England with my Mary to go pick up my *new* Dipper concertina and attend Concertinas at Witney. Our friend Tom Savage had been working as a shipwright a little north of us on an historic boat, The Wapama, that was in drydock in the Sausalito Marinship works, and getting to live aboard it as part of his compensation.… (Read more)
A Conversation with Louis Killen (Concertina & Squeezebox, No. 31)
Louie, was it Newcastle where you first found the concertina? Well, Gateshead; I was born in Gateshead, across the bridges from Newcastle. I’m the youngest of four sons, and Vincent, the third in the family, was taught concertina by a colleague of my father’s, a very fine concertina player.… (Read more)
Concertinas at Witney (Concertina & Squeezebox, No. 29)
I took an autumn holiday in England last year, to collect my long-awaited Dipper English, and to drop in on Concertinas at Witney. Neither was a disappointment, to say the least! Continuing the good work of ’91, this festival was well-organised by Jenny Cox, and musically directed by maestro Dave Townsend.… (Read more)
My favorite political writer, William Rivers Pitt, comments on my memories of a winter walk in New England.
