PAUL DURST---because he is the man who pulled me into this music first. It was 196i---I was 20 years old & taped Paul's WOBBLY (I.W.W.) songs on my old 2-track reel-to-reel Webcor. Those songs opened a window to history for me that has never shut. 93 years old then, Paul born in 1868---was a human time machine---a fiddler filled with fire and anger at things unequal and economically and socially obscene. A hobo riding the rails from harvest job to warm sunny southern places while winter froze the North. Jumpin' freights with a fiddle on his back. Was at the Ludlow massacre and asleep under a Chicago boardwalk when the bomb went off at a place called the Haymarket----yes, THE Haymarket. Built a raft/flatboat of Northern hardwood in Minnesots and rode the Mississippi to the Gulf where it brought good cash for the lumber.

And I've never seen him since that day...

Ask Mick to tell ya if I'm jive; I sent him a tape of old Paul Durst a while back, knowing Mick's dedication to his union. Come on in, if ya will Mick. Don't that ancient tape evoke the man and the time and the struggles.

That's why Paul Durst will remain the finest folksinger I've ever known.

Art Thieme