Well, as expected, Tanglefoot warmed up a subzero Maine winter evening yesterday with their robust singing and playing. There was a nice crowd there to greet them and the organizers should be very pleased with the evening.

They plunged right in with "Dollar Bill," their song about an eccentric tavern owner during the all too dry days of prohibition, and they never stopped generating energy!

It was only a year ago that Sandra Swannell joined the group, and her voice and fiddle have adapted well while adding a "spark" to the group; their new CD is appropriately titled DANCE LIKE FLAMES. I also loved Sandra's song "Maggie" about an intrepid woman who over a period of twenty years constructed a massive stone bridge, coaching the glacial boulders down the hillsides to "their new home," fitting them together like puzzle pieces into her bridge.

I was also delighted that the rest of the band had joined in singing Terry Young's "Lunenburg Skies," a song which commemorates his first experience with the glorious Lunenburg Folk Harbour Festival in Nova Scotia. I had heard it at the Festival a year or so ago, fell in love with it, and purchased Terry's personal CD then. The chorus runs:

And the Lunenburg skies were warm and alive
And a melody danced on the breeze
As the notes poured down all over the town
We joined in the sweet harmony.

Then there was Al Parish's anthem called "Hard Work," brilliantly rendered by the gang:

From everywhere around the world
We come here to build this land
We've done the hard work through the years
With our strong backs and our skilled hands.

And there was the song commemorates that moment in the War of 1812 on the Great Lakes when Commodore Chauncy permited a smaller British warship and her consort to pass because they are conveying the personal possessions of the respected British General Brock back to his homeland.

Some of the new songs I'll have to hear many more times before I can fully appreciate them but it's a task I look forward to.

If Tanglefoot is playing within 3 hours of where you're living this weekend, don't miss them. This evening, Saturday, they're at the Middle Earth Music Hall in Bradford, Vermont. Sunday, they're at the Tupelo Music Hall in Londonderry, NH.

Cheerily,
Charley Noble