This is not as it was before. Just a few decades ago we played our music and paid the rent, got more gigs and paid the taxes, and on and on -- for 40 years. Nobody ever thought about it. We figured if anything was wrong with the way we did it, someone would say something. Left unthought about, and therefore, unspoken, was the feeling that, if anything was wrong with the way we all operated, it was usually just easier to get forgiveness than permission.

Many of us came to folk music feeling we were like the fur trappers of old in the Rocky Mountains. We had thoroughly negative feelings about morality cops of all kinds and authority figures who demanded this kind of cash from you just for doing gigs and house concerts like they were always done.. We were on our own hook and we were making an actual living "without working" --- and we were proud of that fact. ( By that I mean that MY MUSIC never, ever, was work. I did it for love, and therefore, had no choice. ;-)) Addictions are hard to get past.

But I digress.

Staying small-time, in any show-biz sense, while being immersed in the big folk subculture of the 1960s and 19770s--even the '80s---thirty solid years flying below any radar like these organizations was the way to go for me.

In 1981 we had a Folksingers Rendezvous modeled after those old fur trade gatherings of the 1820s. We met in the woods near Stevens Point, Wisconsin and founded HEY RUBE -- an organization that we hoped might allow us to get health care insurance. Utah was there--Sparky and Kuddie and Pop and Haywire Brack and Rosalee and Jan --- many more--and me too. I firmly feel that the seeds planted there eventually became the Folk Alliance; alas, most of the good intentions have given way to bureaucracy and hugeness where, it seems to me, the music plays second fiddle to the machinery of "the business" --- much like the good intentions of ASCAP and BMI etc. are being mutated into unforeseen growths on the body of the beast.

I'm not sure I've said what I meant to say. It's late and my MS keeps me a bit muddled as the day wanes. But this is a serious topic. I don't think these organizations understand the way we always did business within our subculture in times before! And to see them having the law with them as they demand money from shoestring operations doing our music FOR LOVE---well, all I can say is that it all makes me very angry---and rather nauseous.

There is a good chance I never would've said all this if I was still active musically and would lose out my telling the truth of it.

As I'm fond of saying, "Some people have tact, and others tell the truth!"

Good night, and love to all,

Art