
I had other plans last night - dance class chaperonage and an early fast food supper out with the kids; a long school committee meeting; a late-night blog entry that bowed to a particularly delicious crop of video-driven mailbox coverage. But Mother Nature had a different idea, and here, in a town ravaged by October blizzards and June tornadoes, we've learned to listen to her insistent ways. And so, after months of startling sun and warmth, and what was surely the driest season on record, winter came at last to our little pocket of [...]

Clarence and Roland White: 1972 Photo: Frank Chino And so we come to the final calendar year of Clarence White's life. I've put this off for as long as I could because I know how it ends: tragically, painfully, and with a myriad of musical possibilities extinguished. His death on July 15 left a huge hole in the development in rock and bluegrass, but the loss to the White family was (and is) immeasurable. The beauty of the first 7 months and 14 days of 1973 wasn't just that he [...]

Mornin to you. MP3: Muleskinner - Mule Skinner Blues MP3: Muleskinner - Dark Hollow Youtube: Muleskinner - New Camptown Races + Dark Hollow (Live, February 13, 1973)

I had a totally different entry planned for this weekend, I swear. But outside, the flakes are falling thick and fast in the first snowfall of the season. And inside, for the first time in a very, very long time, my heart is singing, loud and clear in the otherwise-quiet of a snow-hushed world. It starts in earnest just after supper. By the time I clean up and make my way outside, there's a two-foot-high snowman, squat and cheerful, looking up at me, the elderchild's scarf wrapped tightly around its [...]

Clarence White & Doc Watson - Footprints In The Snow [ purchase ] Muleskinner - Footprints In The Snow [ purchase ] Today we bookend the career of guitar hero, Clarence White, with a bluegrass standard popularized by Bill Monroe in the 1940s. The duet with Doc Watson in July 1964 was, in some ways, Clarence's coming out party. The Kentucky Colonels' masterpiece, Appalachian Swing , had been released that April, but for bluegrass fans not living in the band's home base of California, the [...]