Things look so official and scholarly when they are bound into a BOOK and issued with a great dust jacket and foot notes etc. etc. etc. But I think that I was play-acting when I tried to "collect" songs. I had instincts in the right direction and I knew what I liked---what I hoped to find. After that, it was pure luck.

In '62 I was emulating Woody & Steinbeck's Joads and Jack Kerouac. I was 20 years old and met Del Bray in a bar in Cheyenne. He was an elderly cowboy who sang "A Cowboy's Barbara Allen" for me. I scribbled it town. The tune was as I remembered it a long while later.

About '65, in Evansville, Indiana, I had a summer job in my uncle's factory. I tape recorded Jim Shelby's Afro-American Baptist church gospel group that year (I think). Jim Shelby was the "porter" at the factory. Porter=dirty job doer. My uncle never forgave me for telling his workforce that they ought to start a union. (They never did; Mick, where were ya?)

Around the same time I made tapes of Lazy Bill Lucas (piano)and Walter Vinson (a member of the Mississippi Sheiks in the '30s) in Chicago. It was on a whim. Somebody said they were going over to an apartment on S. Michigan to hear some guys that did blues. I took my 40 pound Webcor along and got tapes I still listen to.

Another summer in Evansville I found Lee O.B. Quiggins picking an old Martin guitar on Main street. He was blind and made his living keeping to the southern states and playing on the street. He was not terribly good and my family always made fun of me for going out to hang with "those unwashed baritones". I taped his songs in his fleabag hotel room with the sounds of Boots Randolph's sax coming up from the bar below...

I made some great tapes of Bill Chipman from Senath, Missouri, in the "bootheel" of that state. I did that while I was on duty with a hand-held mike (between customers) at the Old Town Folklore Center in Chicago where I worked. (1965 or '66) I think I recall that Frank Hamilton learned his "UTAH CARROL" from Bill. (Is that the one on your new CD, Frank?) Bill had borrowed cash from me and made the tape to pay me back and erase the debt. I doubt that Dawn Greening and many others ever got their $$ back. Bill, where are you now...?

In other threads I've mentioned the 93 year old Hobo singer and Wobbly fiddler, Paul Durst, that I taped in Chicago around 1960. He'd been with the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, at the Hymarket Riot--Chicago, at the Ludlow Massacre (labor) in Colorado. Paul was born in 1868. He was a time machine for me--a kid who grew up in a Chicago high-rise.

There were others all over that I learned songs from---many who add to this forum here at Mudcat. But it was always just being in the right place at the right time. (But my whole life has been lived that way.) On several occasions I hauled the tape recorder out to get the songs. Many times I didn't do that---and I'm still kicking myself...

Art Thieme