Sandy,

There's a sound---a kind of gutsy edge to Ed's singing on this that's more forceful than anything I've ever heard him do. Do you hear that? It's a wonderful album. I love it! And "BROKEN HAND", the song about Tom Fitzpatric, the trapper, leads it off. Another song with this "feel" is on Skip Gorman's CD called __A GREENER PRAIRIE__. The song is "The Emigrant's Lament For Oregon". If I was still pickin' I'd have learned it a year ago. And Skip's "Blue Mountain" is the best I've ever heaqrd that song done. (Even better than my own record of it. ;-) I first learned that song from Frank Hamilton who had it on his __FOLSINGER'S FOLKSINGER__ LP for Concerdisc Records. It's great to see such fine songs about that era and it's men. (There were no women out West in the trapping era except Native-Americans.) I see the efforts of Walkin' Jim Stoltz in recent times as being rather reminiscent of some of those folks' adventures.

Art