Hey, kids,

There was a **SMILE** on my post. It was a parody---a humorous post. My signing "Ewan MacColl" to it was just an allusion to the fact that, in other times, Ewan (a giant and a monumentally important figure in things folk) saw a real and valid need to have actual rules at his Singers Club so the people who set that up could/would hear the music they had started the club to perpetuate and enjoy. That is certainly within their rights. If you don't like that, that your new songs about love in Brooklyn won't serve as a ticket into some groups, start your own situation. You and they will be more fullfilled.

"Folk Mafia" is just a designation to put people who don't agree with you in a bad light. You've probably succeeded.

Please, don't worry about being bitter. It's o.k. Bitterness has a way of turning into real enlightenment when, like pain, it is allowed to teach valid lessons. You folks who spend time paying your dues and trying to get musically and aesthetically "good", please see that it's time well spent. Enjoy it. Find ways to let the hard times be character building for you. Romanticize those. Turn them into literature and love them. These will serve you in good stead when the real hard stuff of life hits you--as it most assuradly will---as attested to by so many of us Mudcatters who have been soothed by this place on occasion----even by the nurturing B.S. threads. Those often seemingly banal threads, just may have helped to save some pretty beautiful minds---if not lives.

Bert, you are correct -I remember a ten year old Mark O'Connor going to the fiddle contest at the Winfield, Kansas festival and WINNING. It was easy to "encourage" that young man. With other kids, it's not so easy to do 'cause they think their little song creations, which are really only just musical hairballs, are already Beethoven's 9th Symphony. For those, "going to the crossroads" might be a better idea if they are intent on being talented quickly.

Art Thieme