Dude, hello.

There was a time I played music on a steamboat on the Miss. River -- and I was in need of a related recording to hawk to passengers. One day in the late '80s I went into a friends studio in Chicago and recorded lore and songs of the river. Mostly, it was all first takes. The cover of it was the bar napkin's stylized drawing of the Str. Julia Belle Swain. Most of our passengers then had no use for CDs, so for a decade I sold that recording as a cassette on the steamboat J.B.S. and on the diesel-electric excursion boat Twilight.

MIKE FINK's BET led off the first side. It was a very short tall tale I used as an introduction to the first song:

Mike Fink bet a fellow he could jump the Mississippi River. He jumped---and realized pretty quick he wasn't going to make it. -- So, he turned around and went back!

I'd been talking to Sandy Paton about possibly having it come out---with some extra material, like my Great Turtle Drive story -- as a Folk Legacy CD. I was giving it to Folk Legacy, Caroline and Sandy just to say thank you for having me on board, hell, to say thanks for all of it. But it didn't happen...

So that's Mike Fink's Bet---for what it's worth.

I hope you are well!

Art