Hi guys. Fairweather back from the doldrums of home repair. Spent part of the week painting walls a soft sunny yellow, and may have meditations about painting (and whitewashing) later on. At the moment though I'm thinking about instrumental music. I don't play an instrument myself--I was in my late thirties before I got ballsy enough to say I am a musician whose instrument is my voice--but I love a good instrumental, especially guitar, fiddle or mandolin led. The thing is most of those are from bluegrass, not country, where the emphasis tends to be on lyrics and vocals.

What set me off on this tangent was a pleasant midweek surprise: the guys at Countdown playing an instrumental version of "Orange Blossom Special" behind a segment, without apparent snarky intent (which takes some doing from them, says Willard). Me, I couldn't hear it over the sound bites well enough to identify the performer, but no matter. I came up with a short list, in reverse order, of some of my favorites.

From Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, a gorgeous dance piece called "Scotland" where the fiddles simulate the drone of bagpipes.

From Chet Atkins, a hard-rocking electric guitar version of "Sidewalks of Nashville." It's got this great bass line where the beat sounds like the words "jug of rum." Very cool.

From Dan Fogelberg's l980s bluegrass CD "High Country Snows", a guitar duet with the legendary Doc Watson called "Wolf Creek." I've always been fascinated by the story about Doc Watson's Gallagher guitar, built by a man from War Trace TN--a man who didn't play guitar building one to the specifications of a blind man. Anyway, Doc played the fool out of his guitar on this piece, and Dan Fogelberg acquitted himself well for a guy better known as a folk-pop vocalist and songwriter.

From Jim and Jesse McReynolds, "Last Train to Clarksville." Jesse plays mandolin in a style called cross-picking; I can't explain how it works, but the end result sounds like tiny bells ringing. This Monkees hit from the l960s seems to me unbearably poignant now, because Clarksville, TN is the closest town to Fort Campbell, the home base of the l0lst Airborne--and a lot of our soldiers stationed there aren't coming home. And Jesse's mandolin sings those words with an impossibly sad jauntiness--and I don't know if I'm ever comin' home.

And my favorite of all: Bill Monroe's "My Last Days on Earth." Mr. Monroe wrote that in l980 when he was facing the first of several cancer surgeries he would undergo over the next decade. Fortunately his prognosis was not so dire, and we got to keep him until l996. There are critics who refer to the "moody surf sounds" that open the piece; to a hillbilly they sound less like the ocean than like the wind in a pine thicket, but that's a minor quibble. This is one of those pieces, like Mozart's Requiem and Albinoni's Adagio in G minor, that I go to for comfort when I need to grieve. I played it over and over on April l7, the day after the VA Tech shootings.

Whatever. Just my opinion and rather more out there than usual, since I have no idea how instrumentals actually work. If anybody out there can spare some rain, send it this way. Till next time, fair thee well.

Hi, guys. You'll have to excuse Willard and me. We're all in an uproar. My little hometown here in the knobs is in the midst of a nine days wonder: we've sprouted crop circles. The initial reports came in about ten days ago.

We haven't been to see them yet, but the intrepid Miss A and her faithful sidekick the Dragonsketcher have been to visit daily since the flap started. We gather that the whole thing began with a report of a wheatfield on the back forty of a nationally known family's farm suddenly breaking out in a cubist riot of diamonds and other geometric patterns. The farmer who rents the property shakes his head and says "I can't believe it"; an enterprising local newsman rented a plane and took aerial photos; and then he posted them on the Internet. And that was when the fun began.

We've had reports of people from all over the world, all dead serious and sporting funny accents (funny to hillbillies, although ours would not bear close inspection), coming to study them. Rumors fly that a local man has reported seeing a UFO the night before all began. My brother has been to take pictures of them. With more curiosity than good sense, he took a whiff of the stalks and reports they smelt burnt. HMM!

Willard's theory is that the culprits (we refer to them as Marvin the Martian and company, and piously hope they didn't mean to cause an earthshattering KA-BOOM) overshot their mark; they actually meant to leave their artwork over nearer our rival city (which gives itself airs because its population exceeds 5000). Me, I would like to know if they were imitating Picasso or Kandinsky. As a final point let me add that it beats our usual big news: another recordbreaking meth lab bust.

On a more serious note, let us pray for the safe return of our boys of the l8lst National Guard unit, deploying to Iraq tomorrow. God be with them, and may they come home safe and sound. Till next time, fair thee well.

The frightening Dennis Kucinich rendition of "Sixteen Tons" got me thinking about coal mining songs in general and about "Sixteen Tons" and "Dark as a Dungeon" in particular.

Merle Travis, who wrote both songs, is more highly regarded as a guitarist than as a singer and songwriter; he was a major influence on, among others, Chet Atkins. He wrote the songs on assignment; he had a contract with a song publisher that required him to write a set number of songs per week. A native of the Kentucky mining country, Travis saw close up abuses of miners and their families by mine owners. He invested the songs with enormous anger, but that anger is not noticeable in his recordings of them, both of which are relatively sedate.

Two other men, one a bandleader/arranger and the other a singer with a voice as deep as the mines, got hold of the songs and did dramatic arrangements of them that elevated both to classic status. The bandleader was Jack Fortunato; the singer was the legendary Tennessee Ernie Ford.

I don't know much about Jack Fortunato, other than that he was Ford's bandleader when Ford hosted his own network TV show. About Ford, I'm on a bit more solid ground. Born in Bristol, TN, in l9l9, Ol' Ern (who also called himself the Ol' Peapicker) inherited his wall-rattling bass from his father. Ford was an oddity in country music for another reason; he was one of a handful of country singers who had formal musical training.

The arrangements that Fortunato did of "Sixteen Tons" and "Dark as a Dungeon" are deceptively simple, consisting mostly of fingersnaps, snare drum and upright bass. "Dark as a Dungeon" also features minimal brass and a remarkably ominous clarinet fill. What brings them both to blazing life is the power of Ford's all-but-operatic cavernous voice. When Ern roared, at the end of "Sixteen Tons," "St. Peter, doncha call me cause I can't go/I owe my soul to the company store" you could almost hear St. Peter murmur "not today."

Ford used a different vocal technique to achieve a similar effect on "Dark as a Dungeon." By dropping his voice to its lowest possible note on "rain" in the lines "where the rain never falls and the sun never shines/it's dark as a dungeon way down in the mines" he made it feel like the bottom had literally dropped out of your gut.

Hey, just my opinion--and if you don't believe me, you can probably download the songs from somewhere. Check 'em out. Till next time, fair thee well.

Willard and I have been depressed over our lack of success at attracting new members for the Ornery as Hellfire Club. In a fit of desperation we decided we’d check in with our local psychic, Madame Sadie, to see if the spirits could give us any advice.
Mme. Sadie lives in a pink house that always smells of Clorox, talcum powder, and some faint perfume I can’t quite place. She was, I regret to report, not exactly on form. She ushered us into her parlor, where she sat for some moments grumbling over her crystal ball. "The crystal is dark," she complained.
Fortunately, Willard had just come from cleaning a house. She whipped out a swiffer cloth and briskly dusted the crystal ball, removing a layer of talcum powder. Unfortunately, some of it stirred around in the air, and we had a round robin of sneezes before Mme. Sadie announced the crystal was now clear.
She waved her hands over the crystal for a moment, then fixed a bloodshot eye on Willard. "Beware the dark-haired man, " she said impressively.
At the moment Willard is carrying on mild flirtations with three dark-haired men, so she asked brightly, "Which one?"
Mme. Sadie wailed, "AAH!" and spent a couple of minutes murmuring to herself. She was apparently channeling a spirit who may have been speaking in tongues. After a bit she roused up and intoned, "Harpo tells me you will get what you seek from a red-haired man."
That surprised us. Harpo Marx TALKS in the afterlife? He doesn’t whistle and beep his horn? Damn.
I asked Willard sotto voce, "Do we know a red-headed man?"
By now Mme. Sadie was showing signs of exhaustion, hinting broadly that the crystal was fading in and out and would be completely dark before long. We rose to go, but Mme. Sadie grabbed my arm. "There is a tall man sending me a message for you."
"Yeah? What’s the message?"
"He wants his turnstile token back, without restrictions." With that she sank back into her chair and began to snore.
I barked before I thought, "When hell freezes!" Mme. Sadie opened one eye and shut it again, and Willard hustled me out with a growl of "Down, girl."
(I should say that I refer to my –ahem—active fantasy life as a turnstile, and the tall man, who shall remain nameless, has had his turnstile token revoked because he keeps hurting my feelings over my beloved classic country. And no, he is not getting it back.)
On the way back to my house, Willard and I puzzled over the red-headed man. Eventually we decided that Mme. Sadie had been referring to our favorite goofball TV producer, Willie Geist of MSNBC. Willard was deputized on the spot to ask Mr. Geist for an endorsement for the Ornery Club—redheads make great Orneries—and, after she went home, I wrote up these notes for presentation at our next Ornery meeting. One last note: as we left Mme. Sadie’s we caught the unidentifiable perfume from her garbage can. It’s a mid-priced scent called Bud Lite.
Respectfully submitted by recording secretary Fairweather Lewis, and until next time, Fair thee well.

Hey guys, Fairweather here. Another musical anniversary this year: the release of U2's THE JOSHUA TREE. My brother is a pain in the ass to get Christmas presents for, but that year he told me something specific he wanted: a tape called THE JOSHUA TREE by an Irish rock band called U2. When I asked, pray tell, exactly why he'd suddenly abandoned fifties rockabilly for an Irish rock band, he said that they had a guitar player called The Edge who was really something. Coming from my ornery brother, that was high praise indeed.

Needless to say, I gave the tape a test run before I wrapped it and put it under the Christmas tree, and I was hooked from the get-go. I was actually more fascinated with the vocal gymnastics raspy-voiced lead singer Bono attempted--sometimes with more success than other times--than with Edge. A few years later, I found great comfort in one particular song on the album, "One Tree Hill," when I lost a workmate to AIDS. Bono had written the song for his Maori roadie, Greg Carroll, who died in a l986 motorcycle crash.

Time flies, and in the school year just past my niece Miss A had an assignment to write a column about l980s music for the school paper. Her dad and I, who actually lived through that generally embarassing musical decade, told her about the three biggest sellers of the 80s, all of them legendary even now: Michael Jackson's THRILLER, Bruce Springsteen's BORN IN THE U.S.A., and U2's THE JOSHUA TREE. We told her how The Boss's title song figured into the l984 presidential campaign, when both Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale mistook that incendiary song for a patriotic ditty, how the video of THRILLER influenced all videos made since, how U2 proved with that CD that they were brilliant rockers as well as social and political critics. We fondly expected she would do us proud by writing a brilliant piece about musical history.

A few weeks later, our fond hopes were dashed when she proudly showed us her newspaper column. She wrote that, in her estimation, the most significant event in l980s rock was the Metallica split that resulted in the formation of Megadeth.

Oh well. She comes of ornery stock. Remember our dead of all wars, particularly this one, on this Memorial Day weekend. Till next time, fair thee well.