Lots of times come to mind, like Jean Ritchie last Saturday night in Washington, DC (how often does one get to hear a national treasure with the consciousness that one is doing so at the time?), or Stan Rogers at the Sounding Board in West Hartford, Connecticut, about a year before he died, and where he explained how he came to write "The Mary Ellen Carter". Or one evening at Augusta Vocal Week in Elkins, WV as vocal week drew to a close in 1984, and I was at a small sing-around with Jean Ritchie and Helen Schneyer and Norman Kennedy and Ethel Raim and Craig Johnson, and maybe 15 other people.

And I remember one evening in February, 1978. A great blizzard had shut down the city of Boston, Mass. But the late Marshall Dodge was scheduled to give a lecture/demonstration on region types of humor at one of the houses at Harvard University. He lived just a few blocks from Harvard at the time, so the event was on, and I walked the hour or so from my home in Brookline through the snowdrifted streets to hear him. It was worth the cold walk. He showed the compression of Maine humor and the expansion in Texas jokes. And I had a long walk home to mull over his stories and repeat them to myself until they worked themselves into my memory.

--Charlie Baum