There were these weird green lilly pad looking things growing on the top of the coffee, so I thought it was time to start a fresh batch.

Just odds and ends going on over here in Connecticut. Some good, some bad. And maybe some of the bad stuff will prove to be good in the long run.

My bass singer Joe's wife was hospitalized earlier this week, and Everything came down, right during a Gospel Messengers practice. She came home from the hospital yesterday, but the problems are not resolved. Every day seems a little on the edgy side these days. A familiar experience to all of us.

Tomorrow, we're going to a funeral of a family member, and that carries its own suffering, along with release, as the woman had cancer, and is now released from her suffering.

At the same time, I've mostly written a new song. I read all the songwriter threads, and read articles on songwriting, and I find it very hard to relate to. I can appreciate on a limited way, some of the mechanics discussed, but mechanics don't usually produce a good song. For me, songs happen (Hmmmm... I wonder if I could make a million dollars selling bumper stickers with that phrase?" They find me, usually when I am bubbling over with enthusiasm. Mixed in with the hard-times, there's plenty of enthusiasm, too and it's stirring up songs not yet written in my mind. What I'm finding is that my love of rhythm and blues groups, which has been set on fire singing with the doo wop group, and having them sing with us, has stirred the pot, and I find that I have Penguins floating to the surface. Earth Angel Penguins. The last two songs I've written have flowed out of songs of theirs no one has ever heard. It looks like the circle will not be broken.. rhythm and blues groups coming out of black gospel quartet music, and now I find myself bringing rhythm and blues full-circle, back to gospel.

I had a wonderful experience along those lines, many years ago. I wrote a song titled Ten Pound Radio that remembers the old rhythm and blues groups and songs warmly. I recorded it on one of my Folk-Legacy albums, singing all the parts myself. A young woman who liked my music went to Africa with her husband, where he was doing research on mountain gorillas, and they were camped in a Pygmy village. She had a battery powered tape player and played my albums for the pygmy children. The one song they really loved, and sang along on phonetically was Ten Pound Radio. Talk about an unbroken circle. Africans brought over here as slaves, singing black gospel music, which evolved into rhythm and blues, and then a white kid from southern Wisconsin writing and recording a song paying propers to rhythm and blues groups, which ends up back in Africa, with pygmy children singing along.

Music makes its own way.

Jerry