This is from the “Borrowers” chapter, specifically this strip. It works well down in the basement here, given that the first line of dialog reads:

Just remember, folks, the creatures you share the basement with aren’t monsters. We can all benefit from dialogue.

I believe I got the art for this strip free during a promotion Shaenon was running. (I’ve since bought some other original art from strips that I still need to get framed.) The framing was done by Mark Hutchins at Hangfire Design.

Elizabeth is an amazing ballad singer:

Anna is also a great singer:

I just found Anna’s project documenting six Kentucky women’s musical history, In Her First Heaven, and am looking forward to spending some quality time with it. Cam pointed out to me a while back that most of the history of old-time music we know about is really the history of who the revivalists and academic folklorists were interested in, and they were mainly men. Like pretty much all of the history we were taught in school, I guess. In any case, that project looks great.

I really love the way these two sound, both individually and together. And, jeez, those crankies.

It’s slightly different from the version notated in Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes and the Milliner-Koken collection, so I made an ABC transcription:

X:1
T:Rose in the Mountain
C:From John Salyer via Rafe Stefanini
Z:abc-transcription Josh Larios <hades@elsewhere.org>, 2015.04.21
N:Works well with fiddle tuned ADae
N:* Crooked tune; extra beats at midpoint and end of high part, but only at end of low part.
S:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peq7i2Qz31s
M:4/4
L:1/8
K:D
|: "^*"A,B, | "D"D2 DF A2d2 | ABAF EDB,C | D2DF Acde | fd- d2 "A"e4 |
"D"DCDF Acde | fgfe d2 A2 | "G"BcdA BAEF | "A"A2 [DA,]2 "D"[+slide+DD]4 | "^*"D2:|
|:"^*""D"eg | f2d2 "A"ecea | "D"fdfd "A"e2eg | "D"f2d2 "A"ecea | "D"fdf2 "A"e4- | "^*"efge |
"D"f2dB ABde | fgfe d2A2 | "G"BcdA BAEF | "A"A2 "D"[DA,]2 [+slide+DD]4 | "^*"D2:|

Click to embiggen:

It’s a crooked tune, with 8 and a half measures in the A part and 9 measures in the B part. Hrm. Maybe I should have written it in 2/4, so it’d be 17 and 18 measures. I’m never quite sure, still, when to use 4/4 and when to use 2/4.

During the Folklife Festival, there is a hospitality lounge for performers and volunteers just south of Key Arena, northwest of the skate park. There is a fenced-in area with tents and benches for jamming, an indoor area with more jamming space (and probably a piano), free coffee and soda, inexpensive beer, and an instrument check. Its description in the performer packet reads “The Hospitality Lounge is a great place to have jam sessions, catch up with friends, or check your instrument.” Every time I’ve been there, there have been at least three jam circles going, mainly playing old-time music.

The only time I’ve seen the hospitality lounge mentioned in communications from Folklife is when they mention it as a perk of donating and becoming a Friend Of Folklife at $100 or above. It’s described there as “a special insider access area”, which doesn’t really give you any idea of what goes on. But as far as I’m concerned, what’s going on in Hospitality is the Folklife Festival I remember from when I was a teenager, bringing my fiddle to all four days of the festival and knowing I’d almost certainly be able to find someone to play with, and that I could check my instrument and enjoy the rest of the festival if not.

You need a hospitality button to get into the hospitality suite. Performers get buttons, as do volunteers. Volunteering at the festival can be a lot of fun; you can find more information about volunteering at http://www.nwfolklife.org/festival2015/participate/volunteer-festival/

You can also get a hospitality button by registering as a street performer. Information about that process can be found at http://www.nwfolklife.org/festival2015/participate/street-performing/ — I do recommend that if you get a hospitality button this way but don’t intend to actually busk at the festival, that you make a donation to the festival commensurate with what you think the value of the hospitality suite is to you.

I encourage you to share this information with anyone you think might be interested.

Here’s a great version of “Johnny, Don’t Get Drunk” with her on fiddle at a jam at Clifftop in 2013:

She plays banjo and has a great voice:

And she’s no slouch on guitar, either:

You can hear more at CD Baby and Reverb Nation.

I really like, in her fiddling, how she’s able to switch between playing lead and backup without losing any energy. That’s something I’ll have to work on in my own practice, because it’s not something I think I’ve noticed as a particular strength in other fiddlers I like, and now that I’ve seen it I very much want to be able to do it myself.

Her take on “Cumberland Gap” on the album “Nothin’ But Corn” is currently tied with Adam Hurt’s version on “Insight” for my favorite interpretation of that tune; both make me want to take a year off and do nothing but learn to play clawhammer banjo.

Evening teacher and counselor Ron Williams had attended a workshop presented by a young English professor, Charles Wolfe, from Middle Tennessee State University, now a widely known expert on country music history. The topic was using traditional music as a starting point in creative writing lessons for high school students. Williams obtained permission from his boss to drive his students around the county looking for old folks to document their musical traditions, naively assuming that they would easily find local traditional musicians, who had been waiting anxiously over the years for a group of emotionally disturbed adolescents and their longhaired teacher to pull up in a State van in their front yard to record their performances of fiddle tunes and ballads passed down through the centuries.

Amazingly, it turned out that this was what happened.

There’s a particular recording from these sessions that I’m interested in, a 4/4 version of the tune “Irish Washerwoman”, which I’d always known as a jig. I’ve heard it played this other way around town a few times and had a hell of a time tracking down a source recording — I eventually got an mp3 from a guy in the UK, but by that time I’d set a search agent to watching for a copy of the LP for sale. One showed up mint in shrinkwap for $13 the other day (quite an improvement over the $200 the one seller at Amazon wants), and I snagged it. It arrived today, and now I have to take apart my turntable so I can hook up a line out and rip the whole thing.

The second piece of media to arrive today was a copy of Drainspotting: A Guide To The Pavement Features Of Sheffield. Does what it says on the tin.

Between those two, I’m feeling like last week’s arrival from the Basque Country of Arkaitz Miner’s new album ESAN was almost mainstream.

I get a lot of undeserved credibility in the old-time scene just for the way I look — white, middle-aged, beardy, not visibly queer. I get more credibility for having been to Fiddle Tunes as a teenager — somehow this means I grew up with the music and have it in my blood. I didn’t, and I don’t, and it shouldn’t matter anyway. Part of the reason I placed my most recent tattoo where I did is that it’s visible while I’m playing the fiddle, something that in my (admittedly limited) experience is fairly rare in the older generation of players and almost unheard of in the contra dance scene. At least around here. I don’t know if that’s a generational thing or what, but I feel like “has visible tattoos” is a signifier of a group of people I like and feel part of but can’t quite articulate the group boundaries of. I’d like to see more of us in the old-time community.

I’m not sure whether the important word in that last sentence was “community” or “see”. And I don’t know what other hyper-local scenes are like. But it feels to me like there’s a weird missing demographic in old-time music in Seattle, some combination of mid-20s to early-40s, female, queer. Maybe I just haven’t been to enough Subversive Square Dance Society events.

In any case, one thing I’m going to do is, as much as possible, bring tunes to jam sessions which were either written or made popular by people who aren’t old white guys. Many, if not most, of the fiddlers who I would like to sound like are younger women. Some are queer. Some aren’t white. Some are classically-trained, some aren’t. I’ll be trying to post about them regularly here. Which is not to say I’m abandoning the canon of old white guy music. I just feel like if I’m going to have this unearned credibility, I ought to do something with it: I’m personally kind of ashamed that a group of folks I was in recently didn’t know who Rayna Gellert is. This doesn’t reflect on them — she plays in a style that they, for the most part, don’t — but apparently I have been insufficiently enthusiastic in talking her up.

I’m going to try to change that this year. I’ll start with the posts next week, I hope. For now, a concert recommendation: Porterbelly Stringband, The Barn Owls, and Sawdust Hill are playing at Conor Byrne tomorrow (Saturday, January 3) at 9pm. I don’t know anything about Sawdust Hill, but Brittany Newell and Noah Frank of the Barn Owls and Porterbelly are two local fiddlers I really enjoy and respect. I was one of the oldest people at the last concerts of theirs I went to, and I’m only 40. I have no idea if it’ll have any effect, but I’ll post about the show to the old-time Seattle mailing list, and I’ll be there myself. One way to even out that weird demographic dip might be to reliably come out in support of people in that valley. Let’s find out.

Ed Haley died in 1951, leaving a number (I don’t know how many) of unpublished recordings with his descendants. BMI manages the performance rights for 73 of them; see the table below for the full list. Fourteen of them were first published in 1975 (the copyright date on the vinyl says 1976, Wikipedia says 1975, and it doesn’t matter much for our purposes) by Rounder Records as the album “Parkersburg Landing”:

• Parkersburg Landing
• Humphrey’s Jig
• Stackolee
• Cherokee Polka
• Cuckoo’s Nest
• Wake Susan
• Cherry River Rag
• Flower of the Morning
• Grey Eagle Jig
• Man of Constant Sorrow
• Forked Deer
• Lost Indian
• Done Gone
• Dunbar

According to Cornell’s copyright status cheat sheet, those 14 arrangements (or compositions, if they’re original) will enter the public domain 95 years after the publication date. So, in 2070 or 2071. That’s 120 years after Ed Haley died, mind you. The rest were published in 1997, which means they enter the public domain either 70 years after the creator’s death or in 2048, whichever is later. In this case, that’s 2048, nearly 100 years after he died.

Does this affect you? Well, if you play any of the tunes below, it might. Are you playing in a public venue? How sure are you that the version of Arkansas Traveler you play isn’t very similar to Ed Haley’s version? If the place you’re playing in doesn’t have a BMI license and you play Ed Haley’s version of one of these tunes, the venue could be sued by BMI. For the next 34 years, at minimum. Do you want to make and sell a CD which includes one of these arrangements? You owe the Harry Fox Agency 9.1 cents for each copy you distribute.

To be safe, you should probably stick to playing tunes which you wrote or which you’re playing exactly the way they’re printed in a book published before 1923. Traditional music, learned from other musicians in the folk process? Better keep that at home. Play it in public and someone is probably owed money, and just about the only way to know is when you get the threatening certified mail.

Just so you know, in case Jon Stewart wants to include this tonight, 85 NYPD officers were killed after 9/11.
—Brian Kilmeade, Fox News

According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, here’s what those 85 NYPD officers were killed by:

1: Assault
1: Fall
1: Fire
1: Gunfire (Accidental)
1: Stabbed
2: Automobile accident
2: Duty related illness
4: Heart attack
10: Gunfire
58: 9/11 related illness

(Four are unaccounted for in this tally.)

Unless criminals in New York are armed with mesothelioma weapons or time machines, it looks to me like there are closer to a dozen officers who have been “killed” (the implication clearly being “by bad guys, because cops have such dangerous jobs and could be killed at any moment and you’d better respect that”) since 9/11. In 13 years. I’m not counting that one “accidental gunfire”, because that was a white cop killing a black cop — it wasn’t an accidental shooting; it was an accident that the victim turned out to be a cop.

This isn’t to say that police don’t have tough jobs. I wouldn’t want to do it. But I’d rather be a cop than a NYC taxi driver. I don’t have the stats handy, but I think I read that they’re about 30 times more likely to be killed on the job than NYPD officers are.

So, you know. There’s that.

It’s definitely a story to inspire parents to do the right thing when they hear their kids being bullies. But, probably because I’m a cynical asshole, I decided to do a quick fact check. The story had details which could easily be verified:

Chad [Hymas] was a senior at West Jordan High School in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the captain of the basketball team.

Well, that more or less checks out; Chad Hymas played basketball for West Jordan High school: Deseret News. I don’t know if he was the captain, but that’s not important.

The cheerleader in the story isn’t named (“we’ll call her Jenny”), presumably because the story is really about what Chad’s father did. But it does say that her story made the news:

Her story made the local news, which was quickly picked up in syndication and reprinted in newspapers across the country. Soon people that usually didn’t come to basketball games were showing up, but not to watch the game. They came to watch Jenny.

That ought to be easy to find; plenty of newspaper archives from that period are online and searchable. Chad Hymas graduated from West Jordan High in 1992, and West Jordan’s sports were covered by the Deseret News, so let’s search the Deseret News for stories about a cheerleader in a wheelchair at West Jordan: search

Huh. You’d think that something would turn up. I mean, if you remove “West Jordan” from the search, you do get some results, including one from 1994 which mentions a former cheerleader now in a wheelchair because she didn’t wear a seat belt. And I just found a link (pdf) with a different name for the cheerleader — Melanie — and the detail that she was interviewed by Katie Couric.

He began […] by showing a picture of Melanie, his disabled high school friend. […] He told how his dad led him and his buddies – all popular basketball stars and school leaders – to quit shunning Melanie and befriend her. A few days later, she was voted head cheerleader at their large Utah school, and Katie Couric, TV anchorwoman, interviewed her at one of the school’s basketball games. As a result, 7 million viewers saw Melanie with her new friends.

I know not everything’s online, but surely some news archive would have a blurb about Katie Couric interviewing the local inspirational cheerleader.

But why would Hymas make up a story like that? I mean, he’s kind of the villain of the story. His father is the hero (and Melanie is the MacGuffin).

Turns out, Chad Hymas wound up in a wheelchair himself, paralyzed after a farm accident. And he’s an inspirational speaker now. (Salt Lake Tribune, ChadHymas.com) Who portrays himself as an asshole in a story? Someone who wants you to be impressed by how he’s changed.

Now, it could just be one of life’s little ironies that an able-bodied person who had a formative experience involving personal growth thanks to someone in a wheelchair became himself a person in a wheelchair selling able-bodied people formative experiences involving personal growth. Stranger things happen. But I’d really expect to be able to find a story about a cheerleader in a wheelchair at West Jordan in the early 90s if that were the case. Maybe I’m just not searching well, but I can’t find anything about “Jenny” or “Melanie” on Google, in Lexis-Nexis, or in NewsBank.

I can find a tiny photo of Hymas on stage in front of a photo of a young woman who is presumably Jenny, or Melanie. So his story must be true, right? Or at leas true-ish?

In this video, here’s how Hymas tells the story:

He showed up at my high school unannounced and uninvited during lunch. Walked into the cafeteria, asked us all if we would follow him. We went over to the girl’s table, and we got to know her. Eight days later, she was voted the head cheerleader of the third-largest high school in the state.

He tells it slightly differently in this video (warning, mainly pop-country music, with voice interspersed):

The next day at school, the exact same situation. I’m sitting in the corner with my buddies, Melanie’s sitting at the middle table, when my dad walked in on us. “Melanie, my name’s Kelly Hymas; this is my son Chad, and these are all of his friends.” And he introduced them all by name. And then he asked her, he said, “how would you like to go to McDonald’s today, and grab a milkshake?” We went to McDonald’s that day and I got to find out who she was. I carry that with me because I think about her every day. Today I get to go through just a little bit of what she went through every single day of her life.

Those stories don’t conflict, really. They just have different levels of detail. But isn’t that a classic tell of a story that isn’t exactly true? The teller thinks that more detail makes it sound more true, and so keeps adding details?

Speaking of details, Hymas’s web site prominently quotes the Wall Street Journal calling him “one of the 10 most inspirational people in the world!” And it’s true that he’s been included in a story about inspirational speakers in the Wall Street Journal. But it’s not a story listing the ten most inspirational people in the world, and what it actually says about him is that he’s “[o]ne of the hardest-working inspirational speakers”. His site targeting workplace safety speeches says that he has been “Voted Most Influential Safety Speaker in the World”. Well, ok, by whom? Someone probably did give him an award for safety speaking; I can believe that. Universally declared the most influential safety speaker in the world? Not so sure about that. That’s the sort of thing that makes his big motivational story about the disabled girl who became the captain of the cheerleading squad not pass the smell test for me. There’s probably some truth to it, but how much?

I dunno. Maybe this is just a long post about how I suck at searching news archives and have a heart three sizes too small. But I’m not buying it.

(Paul Smith describes himself as, among other things, a “story consultant”.)