Mike Compton and I wrote this one. Mike moved to Johnson City a couple of years ago to teach at East Tennessee State University. I got my graduate degree in Appalachian Studies there during the lost Covid years. I fell in love with the place, and my wife and I bought a little house up there. Johnson City is such a cool place. It’s an acquired taste, like oysters, you have to learn to love it. The red brick railroad buildings against the mountains and the sky, the view of Buffalo Mountain from our front door, the Down Home a block away, Little Animals brewery in the old downtown area. We love spending time here, it’s become our “East Tennessee Outpost," It’s a great place to hike, read, write, and hang with Mike Compton.

An autobiographical song I wrote with the late, great Peter Cooper. Every word here is true–well, maybe not every word. But the fact that I heard Bobby Bare sing on a German TV show in October 1981 is true. And that that moment changed my life is true as well. Bare and I have become friends, we’ve performed and recorded together. He lit a fire in my soul. Seeing him was an archetypal experience and it informed everything I was to do going forward. I love Bare. The Black Forest is still a lovely place. You should visit some time. They got good cake there, good beer and wine...and wolves. I played my Martin 000-28 Norman Blake guitar on this, recorded with an AEA R84 ribbon mic through and AEA mic pre, and with a Brauner Phantom C condenser mic through a Sonic World The Brick mic pre. The vocal was recorded with an AEA R44 ribbon mic through an AEA mic pre. I played and sang at the same time. I overdubbed the banjo part using on my1922 Gibson-GB, a six-string banjo from a time when those were still cool. It’s got a14”head-it’s huge. Papa Charlie Jackson played one. I saw it on the Retro fret website and after a couple of weeks of losing sleep finally bought it. It’s so much fun to play, and it’s already “given” me a bunch of songs and tunes. I recorded it with the same microphone set-up described above

This is one of the earlier songs that Tammy Rogers and I wrote together. I remember finishing it at Tammy’s house on a Wednesday morning. We both thought that it was cool, but I don't think we felt that it was a very special song. As it turned out the other guys in Tammy’s band The Steeldrivers disagreed. They loved it and ended up recording it on their album "Bad For You" Since then, it has become one of their most requested songs. It is being played at a lot of weddings. As a songwriter you need a good Christmas song be cause Christmas comes around once a year. You also need a good wedding song because as long as people get divorced, they ’ll need more wedding songs. This version is quite different, and much slower than that of The Steeldrivers.

This is a song that I wrote with my friend Captain Sean McCarthy. The word captain is not used ironically here. Sean is a real boat captain who has run huge yachts up and down the Eastern seaboard for years. He currently resides in Fernandina Beach, FL where he is running boats for his brother's business, plays lots of shows, and writes songs. Sean is a wonderful singer, think Buffet meets Jerry Jeff. We got to know each other at the Fernandina Beach Songwriters Festival that he founded with Tammy Rogers and Zan Maxwell. There, Sean and I became fast friends. We share a love for history and started writing some songs about the history of Fernandina and Florida in general.

Just hours after receiving landmark status, the Mississippi John Hurt Museum in Avalon, Mississippi burned to the ground on February 21,2024.

John Hurt lived in this three-room shack for years .

It’s not my job to pass judgement. However, the coincidence between the museum being put on the National Landmark Registry and the incident seems uncanny.

John Hurt’s music has brought innumerable hours of joy to my life. It has taught me a lot about simplicity, drive, and musical gentleness.

I know it has done the same for generations before me and will do so for many to come.

Adam Wright and I wrote this song a few days after the fire. We wanted to pay tribute to the great man, and to the place he lived in that is now lost forever.

We are all poorer for it.

I had the opening lines about the flames. I read them to Charley, and he started spitting out lines faster than I could type them.

I picked up a guitar that was tuned to open G from a previous recording project and started riffing on a G7 voicing that sounded cool to me. The combination of decidedly major-feeling melodic elements and more bluesy ones seemed to fit this song. The song evolved into a meditation on the multi-faceted natures of the elements. The guitar part was played on my Martin 000-28 Norman Blake signature model, in Open-G tuning with the capo on the 3rdfret.

The banjo is a 1922 Gibson GB six-string banjo. It has an enormous 14-inch head, and sounds like it comes from very distant time, which it sort of does. I recently got the banjo from @retrofret in New York. It’s so much fun to play