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I was sweating when Roscoe Jones said he liked my finger-picking and asked me to join him in his turn at open mic at The London Bus Pub. Nothing like improvising finger pick lines in public with one of the guys who invented the genre! Fortunately, the entire "public" at the LBP that night were friends.

Yes. I have been working on Smoke On The Water, and Beamer and I are still working on a version of Stepping Stone.

That's good news. You've been recovering from whatever it was that got you down in the first place for a long time. I bet it felt great to sing a little.

Welcome to Chordie Kevin.

Welcome to Chordie peteh.

I've never uploaded a chord sheet to a site, so I don't know where you would do that. I know that I find a lot of what I'm looking for on UltimateGuitar.com. Maybe they host. I honestly don't know.

Nevertheless, I'm sure we'll have lots of interesting musical things to talk about despite a variance in instruments and keyboardists' horrendous preference for keys with lots of flats.

Lyrics schmyrics. I never get them right.

Sadly I can't tell Alvin anything. He passed away five or so years ago. The mid-Atlanic river fishing community was shaken to its core, and it broke my heart. Honestly, I am still recovering from his loss. At least twice a week, I still wish I could call him. It made for an interesting funeral though, in which there was about half of the group who hadn't been inside a church in decades and the best clothes they owned were covered in many, many pockets. His dear widow, Miss Tricia, loved on every one of those weepy, grizzly, deeply tanned, mostly intoxicated individuals...showing just what a remarkable individual Alvin was to attract such a strong, moral, caring, and loving woman.

But...here is a picture Garuchi (recent Chordiestock attendees know him) took of me playing bass with Alvin singing that particular song in Garuchi's basement studio. The knee-biters are my kids.  I'm holding the bass. Alvin is laughing at my kids' antics. As was his wont. That youngest one remains pretty darn punk, as the picture would indicate. If it looks like Alvin would have barely fit through the door behind him, that's because Alvin was a very large man who would have barely fit through the door behind him.

And here is another picture of that dear man. He never earned a lot of money, and he frequently rued the fact that he didn't have a boat to row. He loved to row boats. He was amazing rowing boats. A stronger "engine" you will never find.  The mid-Atlantic river fishermen got together and bought him an inflatable pontoon boat for his birthday. This is a picture of when the present was revealed to him. There's not a dry eye in the campground. The days had been running over 100 degrees. About this picture, Alvin said, "I know it was hot because my eyes were sweating."  Dirty Ed was there and wrote a song for him titled "Special Men." That's Dirty Ed in the background, sitting with a guitar and wearing a head lamp. And...I think his eyes might have been sweating a little bit too.

And the next day, that crazy old Hillbilly hadn't stopped smiling. I came across him on the river while he was testing out his new boat, and he was still smiling ear to ear.

Not sure how this old post got pulled up, but now that it is, I've played a few Seagulls.  I think the one that has stuck with me is the S6 - a cedar topped steel string guitar that's slightly wider than usual at the nut.  I very much liked the feel and sound of the guitar.  As for the headstock...eh.  If it sounds good, it is good. Put a sock puppet on the headstock and talk to it between songs if it bothers you that badly.

Well the technical information was over my head, but I have got to agree with the beauty of a blue stripety guitar.

I saw a blue stripety violin once and should have bought it.  I still regret not buying it even though I don't even play violin. It was that pretty.

My favorite Christmas song to play is John Denver's Christmas for Cowboys. This is a very American Christmas song.

The most poignant Christmas song I know to perform - though I do it only poorly - is John McCutcheon's Christmas in the Trenches.  It is a song about an Englishman, but it was written by a man who lives about 80 miles from my home in the Virginia Piedmont.  I'm not sure if that counts, but we tend to be willing to bend the rules for a good song, and I think this is a great song.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJi41RWaTCs  It is perhaps relevant to know that my grandfather was a man of Swiss heritage drafted by the Americans who spent a few years killing a large number of German people in Belgium. There was a battle where he was the last man alive from either the Germans or Americans.  He picked up his BAR, carried as much ammunition and as little food and water as he could, and walked 40 miles away from the front to the closest American position he knew about. When he reported that he - standing alone - represented what was left of his entire division, rather than permitting rest the Army determined it would be wise to ship him off to Verdun. Those who are military historians know well the horrors of Verdun, and my grandfather was a machine-gunner. Feared for their ferocity and effectiveness, and targeted for the same reasons. When he returned to his home town, his ferocity was reserved only for rabbits in his garden and Joe Garagiola's baseball play-by-play.

Jambalaya. I forgot the lyric about catching all the fish in the bayou. So...forgive me.

https://soundcloud.com/user-35218982/jambalaya-cfsotm