Joanne Balladeer,

If I find the willpower to keep out of the B.S. and political threads department, maybe Mudcat will have a chance to stay the way you describe it!

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The words I sang on my CD were a bit different from what Wolfgang deciphered back in them dark ages:

"Caught between the country and a factory town" refers to rural America as opposed to life in an urban big-city factory area. As a German language speaker mainly, our friend Wolfgang didn't understand the rural alternative meaning of the word country. To him it meant a country like England or France---and it didn't seem to fit the context.

And the "gun-stick laurel" is a plant that I believe kids used to pretend they had rifles.

Also:

Bury me down in Tennessee,
"He lived for a dollar" -- let my tombstone read,
And he died unknown in a strange country,
Way down the road.

also, no big thing, but...

The bombers roared low in the blacked out skies
Way down the road.

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I met Craig Johnson first when he was living in Washington D.C.---- a big house where many musicians lived--in the 1980s. Cathy Fink lived in that good house too then. And there was a grand party one day with mucho moonshine galore. (To see photos from that day with Craig, Cathy wearing her monkey mask (dumping a hollowed-out watermelon carved like a pumpkin by craig onto Craig's head), Mike Seeger, Alice Girrard and several others, look into my folk photos site at:

http://rudegnu.com/art_thieme.html

Craig and I sat down at their diningroom table there and I recorded a whole slew of his great songs. That is how I first heard and got Craig's "The Keweenaw Light" and "Fire In The Jackpines". The first time he sang "The Keweenaw Light" I was so emotionally tear-ed up that I forgot to turn on my recorder. What a great song it was and is. There are no better songs than Craig Johnson's to evoke the feelings of the people and the land of those both good and hard times in the iron and copper country of the Upper Peninsula of the state of Michigan.

And there are tapes around that Craig made for a possible album---but he never really liked 'em much I don't think. Cathy Fink produced it back in those other times... (But I loved them.)

Art Thieme