The folk process is NOT Odetta's hairdo - for goddam sure.

It has only been a forty year's long treasure hunt for me--and that's all.

And the sounds I heard and the people I met HAPHAZARDLY, luckily, albeit, by chance---incandescent as a bright spot on a sweaty face with a guitar at the Earl Of Old Town --- 5 AM. Wobbly Paul Durst--93 years of ridin' freights from 1868-----and on into the 1960s to tell it, and sing it, to me and my reel-to-reel machine. This was my folk process. What was FOUND was, indeed, incandescent. Some good parts of it got documented by LPs and CDs I made putting down the captured folk songs---the stories with tunes that told those others' real and lifelong adventures--or their fantasies of how things should've worked if this actually was the proverbial best of all possible worlds.

Their immortality isn't somewhereup in the sky when they die. Their immortality is actually, and ultimately, only the way we remember it and then portray it!

To all of you who keep them alive, Please, stay on pitch. It's the least we can do for them that showed us the way to make our own adventure!

When you get to the end of it---recognize it for the grail hunt that it has been all along the whole damn trip.

Love,

Art Thieme