Needles and pins

I bought a couple of CDs today. I was running out of road trip music. I went to get Charlie Haden Rambling Boy and I also bought Lucinda Williams "Sweet Old World" as sort of an afterthought as they had a low price on it.

If you are reading Curt, you'd like the Rambling Boy CD. You'd like the Lucinda Williams too but I suspect you might already have that one.

If you click on the Rambling Boy link and have highspeed you can listen to the album as it just starts to play. Charlie Haden is a jazz bassist who plays with Pat Metheny but this ablum is sort of classic country/ bluegrass. It has several greats on it. Pat Metheny, Vince Gill, Ricky Scaggs, Rosane Cash, Bruce Hornsby, Dan Tyminsky on mandolin and Jerry Douglas on Dobro. But the real reason I bought it was because of Haden's three daughters, Petra, Rachel, and Tanya's three part harmony. Their voices blend in a very special way I guess because they are sisters.

In this recording Haden goes back to his family roots. I can sort of relate to that. When I was young we played music together as a family in the cabin. I'd play mandolin and guitar with my dad who played banjo. My mom played church hymns on an old pump organ. We'd have a fire going in the fire place and make popcorn. That's a pretty simple pleasure.

My mom was classically trained and my dad an old time musician. I was somewhere in the middle. Piano lessons and violin in orchestra.

I was repsonsible for keeping my dad's banjo in tune. It was hanging on the wall in a room I had to go through to get to my room. So every now and then when I went by I'd take it down and tune and hang it back up. Now and then I'd have to put new strings on it. I hated doing that as sometimes I'd break the high string on it and my old man would be mad as it wasn't easy to get strings for it. There was something about it that made it really tricky to get that high string all the way up to pitch without breaking it.

Talk about being on needles and pins tuning that string! tink..tink..tink.. BOING! :)