Joan's cancer walk

Our neighbor Mike, a 39 year old man who adored his wife and twin infant girls, died of a heart attack last night. We visited his widow as she was surrounded by her family. Hard to know what to do when there's nothing you can do, but we showed up, expressed our sorrow and our willingness to be of support if needed.
Joan also signed up for a walk in support of cancer research, as part of a team from her temple, Temple Ner Tamid of Peabody. If you'd like to support her efforts, you're welcome to use this widget. Nothing much you can do in the face of death but pray, live each moment with awareness, and love 'till you've loved it away.

May 9 streaming concert w/ Buddy Mondlock

I got a call recently from Don Porterfield, bass player, musician, impresario and now radio producer, who hired me a while back to do a split evening with Buddy Mondlock at the Sautee-Nacoochee arts center in the beautiful hills of north Georgia. It turns out that Georgia Public Radio will be streaming the concert--which from my perspective, was extremely enjoyable--on May 9 from 8-10 pm EDT at http://www.gpb.org . I myself will be hopefully having another enjoyable, if less collegial, evening in Orange, CA at St. Matt's After Dark, 1111 Town and Country Road. But if you can't make it to Orange, tune in your computer to the sound of two respectful singer-songwriters enjoying and playing off of one another.

Bob Franke sings My Lover's T-Shirts

Just a little late for April Fool's day--a postmodern love song for modern lovers.

Making my way back

Well, as Steve Gillette used to sing, I'm back on the street again, full-time in music, having been laid off from Harbor Sweets last November. In the interim, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has cleaned up their health insurance act a bit, so it's a strange situation: once more I can theoretically afford to follow my bliss without courting homelessness, but can I really? Hard to say. Joan has been doing a great job of putting my calendar together into the summer and fall. I'll be teaching once again this summer at Puget Sound Guitar Workshop and Summer Acoustic Music Week. John Schindler and I will be kicking off what I hope will be a new Thursday night concert series in Salem this May 21st. I'm looking forward to a Notlob Music show next week with my old friend Martin Grosswendt, and to again being with Martin, Sally Rogers, Howard Bursen, Sloan Wainwright, Chuck Hall, John Kirk and Trish Miller, Kate Seeger, Kim Wallach, Geoff Bartley, Ellen Groves, Paul Combs and Joshua Levin-Epstein on April 5 at St. Andrew's in Marblehead for my Passion cantata. The privilege of performing it in the midst of that community, with the choir of St. Andrew's, is nearly overwhelming to me.

In the interim, I find I'd gotten used to luxuries like paying all the bills on time. Then again, my sense is that many folks are kissing that luxury goodbye these days. I will continue to seek out ways of returning to my former amateur status (that being, by the way, a condition of the very helpful unemployment checks that come in from time to time). But meanwhile, I will remain thankful for not only Joan's support but also for the folks who hire me to sing my songs, and the folks who come out to hear them.

To Hear Your Banjo Play - 1947

Martha Burns pointed out this link to a video of Pete from the year I was born.

The Hard Love Video

I just realized that, despite the fact that I talked about it here first, this is one of the few places I haven't spread this video. Hereby the repair of the omission:

an echo of Willie Johnson

Today's Gospel reading in many churches was Jesus' parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids; I took advantage of the opportunity in my capacity as artist in residence at St. Andrew's in Marblehead, MA to offer my attempt at Blind Willie Johnson's "Keep Your Lamp Trimmed And Burning." Here are the notes I offered to the congregation in this morning's program:

Blind Willie Johnson (1897-1945) was a street evangelist in Beaumont, TX who made 30 commercial studio recordings from 1927 to 1930. His remarkable slide guitar technique and his songs have had a significant impact on American music; his musical meditation on the Crucifixion, “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was The Ground” was included on the gold record carried by the Voyager spacecraft beyond the bonds of the solar system.

What strikes me about “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning” is the intensity of Willie Johnson's encouraging witness. As much as I love our beautiful Anglican musical heritage, I love even more the Anglican view of the Church's catholic nature, which asserts that Willie Johnson and all of us here at St. Andrew's are members of the same Church, though we may be in different branches of it. My offering this morning is a faint echo of one of my musical heroes, and our brother in Christ.

According to Wikipedia, Johnson remained poor until the end of his life. In 1945, his home burned to the ground. With nowhere else to go, he lived in the burned ruins of his home, sleeping on a wet bed. He lived like this until he contracted pneumonia two weeks later, and died.

Unbeknownst to me, our choir had prepared an Andre Thomas choral arrangement of the same song for later in the service. The contrast was striking, and after the service, our choir director Amy LeClair told me that I had supplied the dirt in my arrangement that she had been unable to put into hers. I replied that Andre Thomas had pretty much laundered it out, but that both arrangements were African-American.

The truth is that Blind Willie Johnson and his contemporary colleagues in country blues have had an enormous impact on me throughout my career. Even when my music sounds nothing like theirs (which is true most of the time), I can't put together a song without being conscious of what these artists achieved with solo guitar and vocal under the most abject poverty and oppressive social conditions. They have been guardians in me against the arrogance and self-pity that are not unknown amongst singer-songwriters. That connection, and its importance in my life, are really what I was celebrating in God's presence this morning. It was a joyful noise.

A summer of hope and reassurance

I write this from the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee at Summer Acoustic Music Week.
This week and Summersongs have been the highlights of the summer for me, as most of my time has been spent in more immediate efforts at survival. Teaching has given me the opportunity to be inspired by my students, by their dedication to learning new and powerful ways of expressing the truth of their lives. Watching their skills unfold has made for a wonderful two weeks.

I just had a talk with a friend and former student here about how the internet is changing and offering new ways of connecting with my audience. How video, for instance, is becoming an important part of the mix. I'd love to put up a simple video of Hard Love, for instance, so that astute young guitarists can get a sense of how I make the chords, and how it all goes together. I'm hoping to get this together before too long. Meanwhile, any day now, my first digital reissue will go up on iTunes, a reissue of The Desert Questions. Paul Bryan, Duke Levine, Dave Mattacks, Julie Dougherty and Ellen Groves made an album about hard times into one of my favorite of my own recordings, through their brilliant contributions.

The nice thing about iTunes is that you can download only the funny tunes (Acid Polka and Go Heal Somewhere Else), only the sad ones (Upper Room, for instance), or only the angry ones (say, This Blank Page or El Nino). Nice for folks on a budget. Each song becomes a potential "single".

In order to figure this out, of course, I had to get my own iPod and learn how easy the process is, and why CDs are becoming an ancillary form of music distribution. I didn't put my Nimbit store on my MySpace page until the folks at the Tamarack Institute in West Virginia told me that they'd hired me because they'd gone to that page and listened to the six songs I have streaming there. It takes a while to integrate this new information into action, but I'm working on it. I hope to make it much easier for those who came to my music through Ellen Wittlinger's wonderful book to discover that Hard Love is only one example of the many songs I've written that hold meaning for thoughtful people, and to give those thoughtful people who know me better more access to my work.