James Reams | Old Time Music from New York & Kentucky

March 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  That was a tune from James Reams and the Barnstormers from an album called Troubled Times.  The song is called Troubled Times and now we have the honor of chatting with James Reams and these are indeed troubled times so welcome to the show James.

James Reams:  Dr. Kent, it’s so wonderful to hear your voice!

Dr. Kent:  You are from Kentucky and you ended up in New York.  Tell us about that journey.

James Reams:  What happened was when I was a kid I really enjoyed print work, there was a person that I met who was actually a young girl and I had some romantic interest in her and also I had some interest in print making and I came to new York city with a cardboard box and a pair of work shoes and got thrown into the whole trade and it was probably the best thing that happened to me in my life as I was raised there in eastern Kentucky and it was sort of hard scrabble but all of a sudden I came to new York and it was a completely different world.  I got to meet people from all walks of life and it was an amazing adventure and still is.

Dr. Kent:  As someone who, I live out on Long Island but I do know there’s an old time thriving music scene in New York and what I love about your music is it’s not polished to the T, it’s got that old time feel to it.  Tell me about your theories on music and how that fits in New York City?

James Reams:  Well you know yeah, I actually like the old time sounds and I was raised that way and I know also that you appreciate it too.  I know that you have a book coming out about Doc Watson actually and he’s a hero of mine and so many people and what I like about music is I like it to be authentic and real and when we go and record an album we do it live in the studio with very little fixing and I also for years in the city I helped support a blue grass and old time convention that happens every year and this following year will be 12 years that we’ve had it going on.  It’s called bluegrass and old time jamboree in park slope and it’s held by the Ethical Society and we have over 700 people who come in and have workshops and we have masters of the instruments.  New York has a lot of great figures and they show people how to play mandolin, fiddle, banjo, we have film series and we really enjoy it, we’re having it in September.

Dr. Kent:  Where do folks find out about that?

James Reams:  They can go to my website at www.jamesreams.com and also a facebook page that has a listing of things and a nice film of last year where we had a new lost city ramblers celebration.  We had two of the original new lost city ramblers and it was special to them because it had been 50 years from the night that they played together and its very rare film footage on that facebook page.  You don’t have to be a facebook member to see it.

Dr. Kent:  I’m looking at it right now, it’s in September 11-12, 2009 in Prospect Park area.  That seems pretty neat and there’s some video up there of John Cohen, I think that’s who you’re talking about right?

James Reams:  That’s right, John Cohen and Tom Paley.  Tom has this really interesting history because he used to work with Woody Guthrie.  Toms a New York fellow who is a big part of old time music and played with Woody Guthrie and now he lives over in England and he comes over occasionally.  I recorded an album with him too, something that came out on Copper Creek Records.  Mysterious Redbirds were Tom and I and Bill Christophersen recorded an old time album of some of the old-time songs and tunes.  Tom was just such a big influence on me and part of what I love about music is to honor those who have made it and I also had another opportunity to make an album with a real legendary character, somebody in bluegrass many people may not know probably, a cult legend named Walter Hensley who was the very first banjo player to play Carnegie Hall.  He played with Earl Taylor and I think it was 1952 [1959] and I did two albums with him and that was really exciting too and one was actually nominated for a blue grass recorded event of the year by the international bluegrass music association, which I know you’re a member of.

Dr. Kent:  I am now, I just joined and the funny thing about blue grass I like that the world talks about old time music as bluegrass but there’s such a big difference.  There’s a different amount of heart in old time music I think.

James Reams:  I think there is a big difference and the music that I love the most straddles those two and in the 1930s and 1940s and probably even a little into the 50s there were people who straddled those two and that’s the type of music that really inspires me and there’s still some people doing that today, like the Dry Branch Fire Squad and there’s a number of groups that try to straddle that old time bluegrass, but you’re right there’s two different camps and that’s sort of a shame.  Even in bluegrass there’s like two different camps, traditional and contemporary and I think all the labels and I know that you’re a believer in this too.  All those labels, they help have people understand, but also they hurt.  I think that a lot of times musicians like yourself and myself what we do is create music and its almost organic, it just comes out from us so I’m hard pressed to even sometimes label what I do even though I think most of the time I get my records thrown in the bluegrass bin.  It feels like an extension of me and I think that’s where music becomes a wonderful part of your life.

Dr. Kent:  I had the great pleasure this year, I went to the thanksgiving concert of Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger at Carnegie hall and that was a real blast for me because I grew up with that music and their music crosses over between bluegrass old time somewhere in there and Pete Seeger, it was so neat to see him as part of the inauguration ceremonies this year.  Talk about Pete Seeger and I guess the history of this music.  What’s your take on all of it?

James Reams:  Well Pete Seeger is I think an unsung hero of music and also his half-brother Mike Seeger too but Pete Seeger had that rainbow quest television program out of NYC and you still get the films of that where he brought in like Doc Watson and Clint Howard and Fred Price and those folks and also Johnny Cash and the Stanley Brothers.  People in the urban world had become aware so I think Pete Seeger has really made so many people aware of their roots and that’s what I think right now in America you really see this new type of music; Americana, and you see that its being embraced by more and more people and I understand how people say I don’t really like country music because its turned its back on the roots of music.  I think that if people have a sort of idea that they don’t like something like country music maybe they should explore the roots because the roots of it are extremely beautiful because it’s made by everyday people who struggle and with making their lives better through music.

Dr. Kent:  All right, so you’ve got this record Wild Card, another one Troubled Times.  Give us your advertisement about that.

James Reams:  The Troubled Times record is really interesting because it has a CD and DVD.  In the DVD I actually interviewed a lot of the pioneers of bluegrass music.  Jimmy Martin, Sonny & Bobby Osborne, and the DVD is free when you buy the CD Troubled Times, its one of those two-for discs and there’s a documentary about myself and the jamboree and the Barnstormers and follows us making this music out of NYC, which so many people say this seems so strange – a bluegrass band out of NYC but we do and if you look at our schedule we’ll be playing west Virginia this year and places like that.  The documentary shows how we grow bluegrass in the cracks of the city where we say red clay meets concrete.  I guess you can get it at cdbaby or amazon.  Plus I have a number of other albums available like you said; Wild Card, with the great John Glik and all of them are still available except my very first one Song Birds, which is out of print.

Dr. Kent:  I love the sound and we’re going to play one more track.  This one is from Wild Card, we’re the kind of people that make the juke box play.  Tell me about that?

James Reams:  I’ll tell you what that is; I like to take some of the older country forms and I love honky tonk country music and we’re the type of people who make the juke box play is a honky tonk song written by Johnny Paycheck that he was never able to record.  We found it, changed it and made it bluegrass and we’re just so proud of it.  So yeah, we hope that everybody enjoys it and I want to thank you for your time.  I really appreciate you calling.  I’m in Arizona now and I appreciate you tracking me down!

Dr. Kent:  Absolutely, I would love to have you on again sometime.  Its fun chatting about old-time music.  There’s not many of us out there, I think a lot of people would love it if they hear it, but I’m a big fan.

James Reams:  I know you’re originally from Oklahoma and the whole bit and I think it’s wonderful what you do along with everything else.

Dr. Kent:  It’s been an honor speaking with James Reams.  We’re going to listen to a track from Wild Card called We’re the Kind of People that Make the Jukebox Play.  Troubled Times has a bonus DVD and what a perfect song and album for these times.  Thank you so much for chatting with me and lets get together again down the road.

[music]

Dr. Kent:  That was a beautiful tune from a guy named James Reams and that was his band with him, the Barnstormers.  You can find out about him at jamesreams.com.  What an honor to speak with all our superstar guests today.  Alphie McCourt’s A Long Stones Throw, Dr. Allan Hamilton with The Scalpel and the Soul and Donald Greco’s Abramo’s Gift.  Be safe and we’ll see you next week and read a good book between now and then!

Posted by admin | Filed Under Gospel, Bluegrass, TRANSCRIPTS, Folk, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Frieda Gates | Author of Sawney Beane & Childrens Books

March 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  Welcome to Sound Authors!  It’s already almost the end of winter here in New York.  It’s a beautiful day; the sun is shining, crispy late winter air out here.  We’ve got four guests on the show today; I’m very excited about it.  We had our final guest cancel on us, he’s got the flu, and it’s that time of year so I’ve got a special guest to sit in for him.  Her name is Sarah Watkins and we’re going to chat with her at the end of the program.  She’s an amazing vocalist and violin player, she’s famous for being the lead singer of Nickel Creek and we’ll talk to her at the end of the show.  She’s of course our author of sound.  Then I’ve got three sound authors to start off the show.  Those will be Frieda Gates, the author of Sonny Beam – it’s a wonderful book.  Bob Cesca with a Forward by Ariana Huffington a book called One Nation Under Fear: Scaredy cats and fear mongers in the home of the brave.  A very clever title and clever cover.  Then I’ve got the third guest on the show who is Keith Lee Morris with his novel called The Dart League King.  It’s a gorgeous book.  So we’ll start off the show today speaking to Frieda Gates about her book, Sawney Beane.  Welcome to the show.

Frieda Gates:  Hello!

Dr. Kent:  So tell me a little bit about this book.  Where did it start?  Where did it come from in your mind?

Frieda Gates:  Well it’s based on an actual event.  The event was recorded by Daniel Defoe and actually when he wrote under the pseudonym Captain Charles Johnson and there’s some dispute there whether it was actually Defoe or not.  But it’s about Sawney Beane who was a legendary character throughout the British Isles and is noted because he existed on cannibalism and propagated incest.  For 25 years he lived in a cave and living in this manner until he was finally discovered, it took a long time.  And executed along with his entire family.  Now there’s some law where they wonder if the children, since they were brought up by these cannibals and therefore know no other way of life, yet they were executed just because they were his children and that’s been kind of a question of law whether children growing up in such circumstances are actually guilty.

Dr. Kent:  Now what a fascinating topic for a book and you know, we could all listen to this all day long about these mysterious times and events and all of that.  Now you’re well known for children’s literature and you’ve done a lot of other things.  This is a heavy topic.

Frieda Gates:  Yes, in fact I was wondering if I even should have written it under my own name because I didn’t want it to be put into the children’s section by mistake.  The fact that it has sex and violence it’s certainly not for children.  My other books are children’s books and textbooks.  So this is quite a ways and it was funny because I took a course in short story writing and one of the assignments was to write a dialogue while eating.  I did that and then I wrote 40 other short stories all in the same subject.  One had to do with cannibalism and I love research.  In researching cannibalism I came across Sonny Bean and couldn’t really understand why there was never another novel written about him other than the record by Daniel Defoe.  And it just was ripe for the telling so I did it.  Of course I had this reputation and they said if Frieda invites you to dinner watch out because she may be it.

Dr. Kent:  And this isn’t normally something we think about coming from that part of the world.  We have such a love affair with Ireland and Scotland and we think of upright folks and the hunt for the holy grail and the Dan Brown novel and the bagpipes and the kilts.  So what’s been the reaction to this?

Frieda Gates:  It’s interesting you say that because Daniel Defoe was English and a journalist and the Scots always claimed that the story was fictitious and he just made it up because he wanted to write something derogatory about the Scots.  I went to Scotland of course to do research and I was amazed that everybody knew who Sonny Bean was but they always had this reticence to talk about him because there’s ballads written about him and he’s very famous but whether it’s actually true or not is up for grabs.  Of course Daniel Defoe wrote under many different pseudonyms, in fact he wrote for four different newspapers at the same time with four different opinions and he was imprisoned for not paying debts.  He was a terrible character so even the life of Defoe is interesting.

Dr. Kent:  So bring us into what was the setting back then in the 15th century.  I mean it’s such a murky, we understand history back about to 1700 and 1600 and in this country people get a little nervous before that.  What was happening around there, before we usually hear about?

Frieda Gates:  I love research and I love history so I enjoy thoroughly going into all of this; actually 16th century and of course Mary Queen of Scots was executed at that time and monks were on the run and there was a whole thing about Catholicism, particularly in Scotland and Knox who was of course popular at that time so religion was a very important element and I had to of course include it in my story.  In order to get to the story of Sonny Bean and the record that Defoe tells is about Sonny Bean being a lazy kid who has a disagreement with his father, steals his fathers’ money and runs off and hooks up with this prostitute.

Then they meet up with a knight and find themselves living in a cave on the coast of Galloway.  Of course I get into the wars because the knight had just returned from all the wars the Scots and the English were having and the French were involved.  So history plays a big part in my novel and as I say I am a history buff so I enjoyed it all.  I would look up every thing like what kind of shoes they wore or when I talk about loot I wanted to know what the loot was that they stole from the people they killed.  I had to work in how they became cannibals.  Why they first decided to cook and eat the child and it gets a little bit weird.  Finding out what people taste like and I found that out had to inject that into the story.  So it was pretty fun doing the book really but friends didn’t really want to come here for dinner worried about what I was going to serve.

Dr. Kent:  Go into the story itself here.  It’s the abduction of Elspeth Cummings; Sawney Beane.  Give us a nutshell.

Frieda Gates:  Well the abduction is purely fabrication.  I had to somehow explain Sonny Bean and how he got caught so the easiest way to do it was to dwell on the life of a young girl who is captured by the family and kept alive for awhile.  So then since I got into that part of the story I had to backup and say how she came to be on the road where she was abducted so it all would tie together.  That’s when I really had to do research into what Scotland was like at that time, what the architecture was like, what the trades people were in, everything; even the clothes they wore and what they ate so its really a history lesson.

Dr. Kent:  What got you into this in the first place?  Tell us a little about your background as a children’s author.

Frieda Gates:  I started out in advertising and I was an art director and an illustrator.  I illustrated a book that a friend had written.  I was puppeteer at the time and I became very friendly with the editor who I was working with and she said to me why don’t you write a book on puppetry and I said well I’m really an illustrator and she said oh you can do it, I’ll help you.  So I wrote a book on puppetry and before I knew it in ten years I had written nine other books. It just seemed like one followed the other.

Then I started teaching how to write and illustrate for children and I realized there was no textbook on the subject so I wrote a book called How to write, illustrate and design children’s books, which I am at the moment revising because now I have to put in all the computer stuff that wasn’t in it 25 years ago.  So one book sort of led to another.  My husband was also a writer of textbooks so I worked with him on several textbooks he wrote in the art field and the last book I wrote for children was an Indian legend called Allies and I have a whole collection of Indian creation stories because my father was a Mohawk Indian, which is another area I’d like to write about some day.

Dr. Kent:  Your father was a Mohawk Indian?  Tell us more about that before you go on!

Frieda Gates:  Well he’s from kanawaka, which is a reservation on the other side of St. Lawrence and they were the first field workers when the Canadian company needed to put their bearings or whatever it is on the kanawaka’s land and the only way they could do it was if they employed the Indians there. The reason they were called Mohawks is because of the French Jesuits converted the Mohawks to Catholicism and when they got the reservation in kanawaka it was predominantly Mohawk although there were other Oneida and Quoi nations but Mohawk was the language that they adopted.

Anyway the Mohawks became these you know the lower kind of workers that would be carting materials around and they didn’t like that; they wanted to get out and become riveters, which they did.  There was a letter written one time saying it was like putting ham with eggs.  These Mohawks were just so great at it.  So they helped build that bridge and before you know it, they came to New York and they were building sky scrapers.  They started a community […] so the Mohawk language, they had grocery stores where they would sell things like bear grease and the community was Mohawk and all the people working there were sky men.  They had to fight for the right to live in Brooklyn because they came from Canada, and that’s a whole other story!

Dr. Kent:  Wow, so you’re full of them!

Frieda Gates:  A little bit yes.  Well I’m a researcher.

Dr. Kent:  Its really amusing speaking about all of these things.  Lets talk about now how has this book been received in public?  Back to the Sonny Bean, it’s a dark book but it’s great to read a dark book now and again.  Its not something you want to read curled up ready for bed, its kind of spooky, but what was it like going through the experience of writing a dark book?

Frieda Gates:  Well I’m fascinated by the macabre so it’s my cup of tea.  I had some trouble with the ending of it, I won’t tell you how it ends but the first ending my agent didn’t like because it wasn’t what she felt the ending should be and she had me rewrite the ending.  Then my editor with whom the book was finally being published said she didn’t like the ending and I said well that wasn’t my original ending, which I couldn’t find and had to rewrite it but then went back to the first ending, which my editor seemed to prefer and that’s what’s in the book.  So it’s a matter of whether it should be upbeat ending or not – well, I don’t want to give the ending away!

Dr. Kent:  Indeed not!  It’s been a great honor speaking with Frieda Gates, she’s the author of many, many books and I’m excited to now see if I can find the children’s book to go with the Sawney Beane copy I have to see the great extent of work she’s done.  This book is wonderful, put out by Cambridge House Press called Sawney Beane: The abduction of Elspeth Cummings.  Thank you so much for chatting with us today.

Frieda Gates:  Thank you for having me.

Dr. Kent:  My next guest on the show is going to be Bob Cesca; he’s the author of One Nation Under Fear: Fear Mongers in the Home of the Brave.  We’re going to speak to him in one minute; come on back for that.

Posted by admin | Filed Under History, TRANSCRIPTS, Halloween, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Keith Morris | Author of The Dart League King, Speaking About Darts & More

March 24, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  Welcome back to Sound Authors!  I’ve got a bit of a change in schedule here and we’re now going to speak directly to the third guest on our show.  We weren’t able to be in touch with Bob Cesca at the moment, we’ll try to get him on later in the show.  My next guest is the author of the Dart League King.  It’s a novel, a beautiful little book and welcome to the show Keith Lee Morris.

Keith Morris:  Thank you, thanks for having me on.

Dr. Kent:  Tell me a little about this novel.

Keith Morris:  Well, it all takes place on one night in a bar in a small town in North Idaho.  A bunch of kind of regular guys hanging around, not too different from my own experiences back in Idaho several years ago but there’s a lot of back story and a lot more dramatic things going on underneath the surface.  One thing I wanted to do with the novel was try to write a book in which if somebody were to wander into this place where this novel is taking place on this particular night, you might not see anything really going on but from the readers privileged position, being able to get inside the characters heads, you know there’s an awful lot going on and the potential for stuff to happen.

Dr. Kent:  Now just the simple game of darts, give us a window into that world because I’ve been in a couple small town bars and I’ve seen that world but I’ve never participated in it and I don’t know much about it.  So tell us about your dart league king in this book.

Keith Morris:  I’ve never been a serious dart player; in fact I’m a very bad dart player although I used to play darts a good bit.  I had some friends, I used to live in New Orleans in the early 80s and had some friends who used to play in bars down there and got me started.  I would actually fill in for their dart league every once in awhile and you would have these people who come in; I’ve played before, I remember one time these guys came in who were professionals who play.  There was no way you could beat them and I was never very good anyway.  Later on when I moved back to Idaho it was in my hometown I started up a dart league there that went on for a couple of years and the way its described in the book, I mean that’s what we would do.

We would get together, there’s several bars there in town and people would get together and you’d have two teams matched up and play one another.  If you’re from a small town or if you know anything about how small town bars, there’s always some kind of drama there.  So what I was trying to tap into was to take the game itself and the people who were playing it are interested or committed to one degree or another, obviously it’s very important to the main character.  But the rest of it is people who happen to be hanging around on this Thursday night.  Darts is a good game to focus.  I love bar games of any sort, pool, darts, foosball, you name it.

Dr. Kent:  It’s so fascinating; tell us about, I actually grew up in a small town in Minnesota but I still heard a little about the gossip here and there.  What is it about towns and communities that, you sort of describe some of these twisted relationships in here?  Talk about that.

Keith Morris:  Sure, the town I grew up in was about 4,000 people and we went to high school and there was the same people year after year so naturally by the time you graduate high school and by the time you’re in your 20s everybody’s dated every body else’s girlfriend, boyfriend or somebody gets married and all the ex boyfriends and girlfriends are hanging around and you see them out at places so I think those kind of relationships definitely get more interesting and more involved in small towns.  I’ve seen a few people from bigger cities who read the book and said how strange that would seem to go to the same places and see the same people all the time.  Things from long ago still matter and are still part of what’s happening there.  The bar is a place where in small towns; it’s where it all happens.  I write about bars a lot actually.

Dr. Kent:  Now, you talk about Faulkner in several places and you name him always as a great influence on you.  I remember reading As I Lay Dying in high school and thinking I don’t quite get this and over time it grew on me.  He sort of is able to build a different window into American society.  How do you feel that you’re able to do that in a way?

Keith Morris:  There’s not a lot of fiction about Idaho for one thing and another thing I feel like with writing about the west there are some people I really like.  Marilyn Robinson lived in my hometown actually and her book Housekeeping was set in the same town.  I loved that book.  One of the things I find about writing about the west a lot of times is a lot of its done by people who aren’t from the west actually, who write about the west, they come over for writing programs that are from the east coast and I feel a lot of the writing about the west represents one side of it, which is the guys are strong silent type and they’re out fixing their car engines, and the women always endure and are hearty, et cetera, everybody’s very individualistic and that is one side of the west.  But having grown up there myself, having had a lot of different kinds of friends, its not that different than anyplace else and a lot of the things that people are doing there are the same.  They have the same desires, the same interests as people everywhere else.  So I think I try to give a little different picture of what goes on in a small town in Idaho than you would get from a typical novel set in the west and I’m generally sort of up to that same kind of thing.

Dr. Kent:  On the back of your book there’s a quote from Donald Pollack who I had on the show a couple months ago.  He’s the author of Knockemstiff, another wonderful book about a place and I was wondering with him in mind and then you’re also a professor and you work with students all the time.  What are your thoughts about where writing about small towns is going?  What do you teach your students?

Keith Morris:  That’s interesting; well I really enjoyed Donald’s book a lot, its one of my favorite books last year and I had a chance to correspond with him a little bit since my book came out.  He’s taken the whole sort of small town gothic thing a little further than I ever would’ve dreamed of doing it.  But I recognize those people and those situations you know.  I don’t think I write about small towns just the same way.  I teach at Clemson in South Carolina and a lot of my students are from small towns in South Carolina.

I don’t think there’s a lot of one particular thing that I talk about in terms of writing about small towns.  To me it’s all based on the same thing, its one of the things I think that drives my fiction.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a small town really, people are the same all over and while the person and the circumstances and where they’re coming from might seem different once you get to know the person as a character you’re finding some of the same things about that character that you would about anybody else.  So to me writing about people in small towns is part of the human experience, its trying to uncover those kinds of layers that everybody has, the different layers of experience that people have in different places and get to the same thing.  When people can read about my characters and coming from a different background and they’ve had and say they recognize some of these things as familiar, then that’s what I’m looking for.

Dr. Kent:  The reason I also brought up Donald Pollack is that his life story is very different than yours and I wanted to know a little more about where you come from because of course he came out of the coal mines to be a writer. Tell us how you became a writer.

Keith Morris:  I didn’t come out of the coal mines but actually I think he and I have a lot of similarities in our background in certain ways.  I was born in Mississippi, my parents are southerners born in rural south and we moved up to Idaho when I was six years old and lived in small towns up in Idaho and I messed up through school so I went off to college and managed to last a year and a half before I flunked out.  Then spent the next five or six years wandering around to different places.  I’d gotten into acting a little bit but I took all kinds of different jobs, spent some time in southern California, new Orleans, kept going back to my hometown in between and really kind of ended up back in college by accident almost.

The professor at the University of Idaho, who ended up being a good friend to me and a mentor got hold of some of my writing almost by accident and asked me to come in and talk to him.  He convinced me to go back to college; I was in my late 20s at that point, so I finished my undergraduate degree at the university of Idaho and got a graduate degree and by that time I had a wife and son and went to grad school with a family already and finished up in north Carolina, then ended up here in Clemson.  It was a fairly non-traditional way of getting through the whole thing.  Not as much as Donald’s though.

Dr. Kent:  What I find fascinating is now how much does your own life, what is it about what you lived through what you observe?

Keith Morris:  You mean in regards to my own work?

Dr. Kent:  Exactly, how much is the work that you produce based on what you observe and what you’ve experienced?  You always hear that adage that you have to have lived something.

Keith Morris:  Yeah you know and I think that’s true to some extent and not true to some extent.  Obviously you only have one set of experiences to draw from so that’s your stockpile furnace.  Then there’s all the things you hear, all the things you read, and all the things you see on TV or movies or whatever and just what your imagination then concocts.  I don’t really, I’m not an autobiographical writer, I don’t try to write things straight from things that actually happened in my life or somebody else’s life, I always try to make sure that my characters are in some way a little bit different from whether its me, a friend of mine, I always try to create some kind of gap or some kind of space there.

It’s easier for me to write that way.  I find that if I actually try to draw on real situations or real people it limits what I’m able to do with something because I keep getting stuck in this rut of trying to write what actually happened instead of what could have happened.  What could have happened is almost always more interesting and so I don’t write straight from experience but certainly my experiences shapes everything I write and I think I’m kind of fiercely loyal to north Idaho and consider that home and I feel like its part of what I’m doing to express what its like there for myself, and I have a lot of great friends back there now and still to this day and they all pay attention to what I write and that inspires me.

Dr. Kent:  Tell us the story of how you became published the first time.  You have two books out on University Press.  Tell us about those and how did you go about getting published the first time?

Keith Morris:  I’ve been publishing short stories since about the mid-90s so I was publishing for several years before I had a first novel published.  I can tell you the story as far as my first publication.  I was in grad school at the time and had been writing for years but not that seriously.  I knew that’s what I wanted to do.  I submitted a story that I finally got around to finishing things a long, long story, about 60 pages that I actually sent to Quarterly West in Utah and they lost the manuscript.  Of course I didn’t know what I was doing.  I called the editor after a few months and said are you going to tell me anything and he said they lost the manuscript.  But if you send it back to me and also if you have something else that you’d like for us to look at, send that too.

So he was kind of giving me a little bonus at letting me send two manuscripts at one time.  They usually don’t do it and I didn’t have any idea what was going on.  I had just written a two page story that when I wrote it was a poem and then decided it was a story and took out the line breaks essentially.  So I sent both of these things to quarterly west and they ended up rejecting the long story I had sent in the first place and taking this two page piece, which my first published story and almost one of the first things I’d ever submitted.  So I thought wow, this is easy what are people talking about?  This is no problem.  Between the first and the second came 100 rejection letters so by the time I got to the second published story I had a better idea of how things worked.

Dr. Kent:  Exactly, so the Dart League King is a wonderful novel in a beautiful setting and tell us just a little more.  Give us a kernel of something we can look forward to in this novel.

Keith Morris:  Well I hope everybody finds the five characters, I tried to, I worked very hard, trying to make each of them “equal weight” in the novel and I hope that what people enjoy about it is that they get involved with all the different characters.  Some of them seem really repugnant at the outset.  By the time you get to the end I hope they’re all sympathetic characters to one degree or another and people will feel like everything builds toward one moment where everything comes together towards the end of the novel.  My primary interest is in characters and the thing that makes me happy is when they can relate so I was happy with the response from this book.  It’s always a different character, I hear from people and it’s never the same, which tells me I hopefully did something right.

Dr. Kent:  Well it’s been such an honor chatting with Keith Lee Morris and his book is called The Dart League King, fantastic title, it’s a wonderful sized book also.  Very cleverly printed, put out by Tin House Books, it’s a beautiful novel.  Thank you so much for chatting with us.

Keith Morris:  Thanks so much, it’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Kent:  My next guest on the show, we’ve not been back in touch with our political guest Bob Cesca and we had a little more time to chat with Keith Lee Morris and that was great.  So my next guest on the show will be the famous musician.  In fact formerly of Nickel Creek.  Her name is Sarah Watkins and that’s a special treat because we only booked her yesterday because our former guest had the flu.  So come on back and we’ll talk to Sarah Watkins.  I’m going to play a song from her album and I don’t know the title of this track, it’s an upcoming album and we’ll ask her about that in a moment.  This is track 6 off the album being released in April.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, Fiction, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Sarah Watkins | Award-Winning Nickel Creek Vocalist Releases New Album & Talks About It

March 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment

[Music]

Dr. Kent:  That’s a beautiful tune off of a brand new upcoming album by Sarah Watkins and that’s of course Any Old Time, by Jimmy Rogers if I’m right!  Welcome to the show Sarah Watkins!

Sarah Watkins:  Hello! How are you doing?

Dr. Kent:  I’m doing pretty well.  So I didn’t know the name of that track when I put it in, all I knew was track 6 and track 9 of the upcoming album and of course that’s Any Old Time.  Tell me about that tune.

Sarah Watkins:  Well I heard that song off Tony Rice record.  I think it was church street blues, his recording of that song and I just loved it and over the years of songs that I liked it sort of stuck around and ended up on the record.  It was really fun to record.  Tim O’Brien is on there too and that was fun to do.

Dr. Kent:  Yeah, Tim O’Brien is the best.  So lets get into right away, now you’ve been in the bluegrass scene for a long time for somebody whose 27 years old.

Sarah Watkins:  Yeah, I grew up playing in a band called Nickel Creek and we were together from the time I was eight until a little over a year ago now so this is my first solo record and that’s actually the only song of that style on the record.  Most of it well there’s a lot of different things on there, but that is definitely the only two-steppable song on there.

Dr. Kent:  I love the steel guitar and nickel creek towards the end was also you were starting to develop a real edgy sound and do some really interesting things and of course Chris Telay has gone off and done his own stuff; incredible mandolin player and you are a great fiddle player.  Do we hear some good fiddle playing on this album?

Sarah Watkins:  Well there’s fiddle playing, you be the judge of how good it is!  But its yeah, there’s a couple fiddle tunes on there and true to form when doing interviews on the phone there’s always a siren that goes by whenever I’m on the phone with somebody.  I hope it’s not too loud but yeah a couple fiddle tunes on there and I play a good amount on the record actually, probably on almost every song.  That steel stuff is awesome, Greg Reese plays all the steel stuff on the record and he’s amazing.

Dr. Kent:  So is there a point in your career when you started playing with people and saying wow, these are some amazing musicians and on this record of course you’re being produced by John Paul Jones and you’ve got all these amazing musicians.  Tim O’Brien singing harmony vocals, Gillian Welsh and David Rawlings on here, I mean at what point in your career did you all of a sudden say man, its pretty fun?

Sarah Watkins:  Oh a long time ago I started saying yeah.  It’s been great especially this last year working on this year working on this record has been really special and I’m so grateful and so glad to have all these musicians play on it who I have known and loved for a very long time. Some of them I know on a more personal level than others, but everybody who’s on this record means something to me, professionally, personally, very often both.  I’m so grateful to have that kind of connection with the record where I wasn’t necessarily having to pay for everything just to get it the way I wanted to buy the help that I needed to have.  It has so much more of a more personal attachment to me because I love Greg Reese, I love playing with him, I’ve had the privilege of playing with him over the last five years and now his music is a part of my life and I could say that about every musician on this record.  Each one of them has a special place in my life, whether it’s just musically I’ve grown up listening to them or I’ve just played with them over the years.  It was great to have Shawn & Mark Shaft and Christie Lee on the record, which have been for so very long, so there’s a deep attachment to all these songs and the performances that came out on the record.

Dr. Kent:  Here’s a question for you; Shawn is your brother, right?

Sarah Watkins:  Yes.

Dr. Kent:  Being on the road with him and Christie Lee and your bass player when you were young and being on the road, did you get into some pretty vicious fights?

Sarah Watkins:  Oh yeah, of course, every brother and sister and brother obviously get into fights and every band gets into lots of fights so it’s a great combination to have both in there!  but we also I don’t know if you have siblings but most people that I talk to, the best part about having siblings that you get along with on any level is you can have these huge blow out fights and just five minutes later you’re like alright, you’re my brother, your still here, hang out and move on to the next thing.  That’s a really great relationship to have in a band because you do live together and you’re traveling on the road and that’s a helpful basis for a relationship.

Dr. Kent:  Did you ever get sick of it?  Like the Ben Claiborne complex where he was famous so young and said I got to get out of the public eye.  Was there a time when you said this is too much?

Sarah Watkins:  No, I’m not in the public eye.  I mean nickel creek fans were really enthusiastic and totally into us and they made us feel like rock stars but that is a very small world and I don’t think we ever felt like it was too much for us or that it was an unreasonable amount of exposure.  The world is very big and nickel creek was very small so we didn’t have to deal with it.  I felt that I got tired of touring a lot because in that machine there’s five or seven years where I had not been home more than two months at a time and very often it was only a week or two weeks at a time.  After awhile it changes your relationships with your friends and family and I got tired of that.  So it’s nice to be home for over a year and be able to nourish those relationships back to functionality [inaudible].  That was what I got tired of and I’m really glad to have had some time and now I’m actually ready to go back out again and really excited for the record and all that.

Dr. Kent:  What’s it like so far the difference for you between being on the road with Nickel Creek and now being out there under Sarah Watkins, your own name?

Sarah Watkins:  It’s a huge difference.  I’ve done limited amounts of touring by myself, I went out and opened for a few people this year; for [inaudible], and a couple others and its completely terrifying at first and then after awhile, I started remembering I can do this, this is fine, people do this, I can do this.  It’s a matter of getting used to it and making changes in how I perform and I can learn how to be a better entertainer.  Its an adjustment but its really fun to realize more and more that I actually can do it and I’m not going to be out there all by myself a whole lot this year, I’ll be out with one, two or three other people depending on the trip, or if I open for somebody or do my own show, I’ll have a band.  It’ll be a huge range of situations this year and I’m looking forward to experimenting with each scenario and just you know having fun with it.

Dr. Kent:  Tell me about this record.  Its self titled as far as I can tell and it’s coming out on the None Such Label.  We heard one song off it, you’re western swing tune, tell me about the rest of the tunes.

Sarah Watkins:  Well half are mine and half are songs that I borrowed from other songwriters and they’re not terribly far off from Nickel Creek stuff, except there’s not much mandolin because one you play with Chris Deeley it’s hard to play with others and we have the shining crewship of [inaudible] playing mandolin and John Paul Jones on one.  So it’s represented.  Chris plays mandola but the songs I wrote are well, you’re just going to have to listen to find out.  It’s not super crazy but I was glad to be able to play some songs that my friends had written that have come close to my heart in recent years and it’s good to record them.

Dr. Kent:  Immediately once you’re in the process of getting on the road to support an album, you’re already thinking about the next album because it’s been so long since you recorded that one.  Are you already planning the next one?

Sarah Watkins:  I’m not planning it.  I kind of feel like I’m not ready to start packing away ideas but I’m looking forward to it and I’m always trying to gather songs and thinking about what the next step will be but I’m actually still very anxious to look forward to see what happens with this record.  Since it’s my first one I don’t know what to expect, I don’t know if I’ll be touring this summer or working throughout the year, it depends on how people respond.  I’m just taking it day by day, month by month and see what happens.

Dr. Kent:  Now you got a couple shows coming up – you had one last night in LA and you have a couple more coming up?

Sarah Watkins:  Yeah, when I’m home off the road, we have a residency in Los Angeles at a club called Largo, which has basically my home club.  Shawn, my brother and I played there for six or seven years but we used to be our little outlet from nickel creek when we were off the road, it was our way of playing non-band material, songs we liked.  It was a safe plays to spin with songs we had written which we maybe hadn’t finished developing and since the bands off tour, we’ve played there more often.  Basically almost every Thursday we play so yeah, next month until I start traveling more promoting my record.

Dr. Kent:  Awesome!  The record’s called Sarah Watkins, it’s on None Such Records, and it’s coming out April 7, is that still right?

Sarah Watkins:  That’s correct, yep!

Dr. Kent:  I’m excited to listen to it and now you don’t know what track 9 is do you?  That’s what we’re about to play?

Sarah Watkins:  Oh shoot track 9, there are fourteen tracks on there so I have no idea what track 9 is actually.

Dr. Kent:  Okay well we’ll be surprised then.  It’s been such an honor chatting with Sarah Watkins of the very well known group Nickel Creek, with her own upcoming solo record, Sarah Watkins.  Thank you so much for chatting with me.

Sarah Watkins:  Thank you.

Dr. Kent:  Let’s listen to track 9 off Sarah’s upcoming solo album.

[Music]

Dr. Kent:  That was a gorgeous track off the upcoming album by Sarah Watkins; its self titled on the None Such Label and we chatted with her about time with Nickel Creek and her upcoming tour and all of that with the new record.  Go out and buy that record, it’s beautiful.  Amazing vocal tracks; some originals and beautiful fiddle tunes like that one.  Thank you so much for tuning in to Sound Authors today, this is Dr. Kent and enjoy these last days of winter.  Pick up a good book.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Bluegrass, Pop, TRANSCRIPTS, Folk, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, Jazz, PODCAST 

Frank Romano | Author of Storm Over Morocco

March 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  Welcome to Sound Authors!  It’s a beautiful day out here in New York, there’s still snow on the ground and I’ve got four guests on the show today, three authors and one musician.  At the end of the show it’s my honor to have musician Sara Lee Guthrie on the show with me, the daughter of Arlo Guthrie and the granddaughter of Woody Guthrie.  Before that, I’ve got three authors and my third author will be the author of The President’s Henchmen; Joseph Flynn.  I’ll be speaking to the author of No Urn for the Ashes – Alison Sawyer, a beautiful story and right now I’m speaking to my first guest, his name is Frank Romano, the author of Storm Over Morocco.  He’s written an incredible book that is placed in an area we’re thinking about all the time these days.  There’s been some serious unrest in the middle east and when hasn’t there been, honestly.  So welcome to the show Frank Romano.

Frank Romano:  Hi Dr. Kent, glad to be here.

Dr. Kent:  Tell me a little bit about Storm Over Morocco.

Frank Romano:  I was studying in 1977 at the Sorbonne in Paris trying to find myself and studying philosophy and had sort of a vision that if I traveled to the middle east maybe on the way I would find myself, find out what my spirituality was and maybe help in the peace process.  So I just took a train and went down to northern Africa.  Started out from morocco and was going to head out across Africa and then Dr. Kent, I decided that I would learn about Islam before I got there because that’s one of my goals.  So I was invited, I met this group that invited me to learn about Islam in their mosque and learn Arabic as well and after a week of doing that, I was no longer free to go.  They had me imprisoned and it turned out to be an extremist group there on the outskirts of Sri Lanka.

Dr. Kent:  I’ve always wanted to go to morocco.  I don’t know if you know but I’ve actually been in the Middle East for awhile, I lived in Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

Frank Romano:  Oh really?  Great, so you know about the area, good.

Dr. Kent:  Oh yes and I try not to read the news about each day’s bloodshed and this and that.  But now talk about I wanted to go to morocco on vacation but now you ended up in I guess the cradle of the Middle East in the holy land.  Talk about the conflict there as well.

Frank Romano:  Yeah Dr. Kent I just got back as a matter of fact and my goal is to bring together different religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and other religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, but in particular the three main religions that believe in one God.  I organize interfaith teach marches and I just got back yesterday from a ten day visit to Bethlehem.  Of course I visited Jerusalem one day but I’m focusing on involving the Palestinians since it’s hard for them to get through the checkpoints and stuff in Jerusalem to participate in a myriad of groups that are doing things for peace, serious groups in Israel except they can’t get in there.  I go to Palestine and I’m trying to just contribute in my own little way to bring people together and start thinking about working together.

Dr. Kent:  What’s your take on the whole situation right now?

Frank Romano:  Well for one thing people have a tendency of putting Gaza in the same basket as the west bank and we’ve got two different places.  In other words we are organizing now to go into Gaza and do the same thing for sure.  Do the peace march and of course bring in medicine and so forth because it’s difficult right now.  My take is this, I really feel, as opposed to a lot of people, a lot of Palestinians, have no hope, they don’t think they’re ever going to settle the crisis, there’s always going to be conflict, and they’ll never have their auto determination with respect to a country having their own country.

So my take is this, there is a chance for peace and a lot of people are talking about ways of doing it and helping people financially but the bottom line is we got to get over there and start working with these people and I wrote Storm Over Morocco version and I added a last chapter of a meeting I had with extremist militant Muslims in the Jeanine Refugee Camp, which is suicide bombing derived and the suicide bombing that took place in Jerusalem came from there, and from Hebron to talk with extremists first and even those folks really want to work with Israel, I mean sincerely and if we can get beyond the hate and knee jerk stereotypes that one person of one religion has of other people.

For instance an extremist Muslim might think that a Jew because he’s a Jew is an agent of the devil because they don’t understand what Judaism is about.  So my goal Dr. Kent is not a political goal, bring people together to work together for peace but take religion out of the conflict.  That’s my take.

Dr. Kent:  Absolutely.  The work I did quite a while ago, I’ll tell you in a nutshell.  I work for an organization called Seeds of Peace for a few years.

Frank Romano:  I’ve heard of them, yes!

Dr. Kent:  Then I created a curriculum called Sound Peace and I actually was in a very similar way hoping to bring kids together in a musical way and talk about the conflict and then all of the fighting started.  It was a very hopeful time when I went over there, it was the year 2000.  I was there when all the fighting broke out again in the autumn of 2000.

Frank Romano:  That was the second [inaudible] that you were there?

Dr. Kent:  Since then it hasn’t stopped and now with this incursion into Gaza that was just breathtakingly awful in terms of the toll on human life.  Is there hope over there?

Frank Romano:  You know Dr. Kent there is hope and I spoke with a Shake in Jerusalem, a Sufi Shake whose daughter just got married five months before the conflict broke out and now she’s stuck in Gaza and can’t get out.  A lot of people are pointing the finger at Israel, others are pointing the finger at Hamas, I believe that when they can both sit down with the help of the US and realize mistakes because both sides have committed errors.  People are now pointing fingers in particular at Israel and yeah they had to react against the missiles being shot into their land.  But the Hamas I think on their end of it were provoking this attack as well.

So I do see there’s a lot of serious minded people, lots of effort to work with both sides, haven’t given up, even though yes it has intensified.  I think with the new administration it seems to be open on both sides of the fence through the delicate negotiations and bringing in these groups there’s a lot of angiose over there, which is the types of group you were.  Seeds of Peace work with people that are members of it and the music thing you did probably would include Jews and Palestinians together to play music.  These groups are starting to crop up again.

In spite of the conflict, the bottom line is the very difficult part is people will not go into the west bank and its difficult to get in and out of Gaza but that should evolve.  I think people should go into the west bank and see that the Palestinians are not just frothing at the mouth bloody terrorists.  Most Palestinians want peace and work with them as well as the Jews.  I’ll tell you I’ve met Jewish soldiers on the checkpoints and they’ve got a bad rap.  They’re always a minority that commits atrocities in every army and every altercation but those young Jewish soldiers want peace as much as anybody does and I spoke with them and they would rather not be at the checkpoints.  If somehow Israel can feel that their borders are secure.  Some people say it’s a two state solution; I’m not sure, but you know what?  There is a lot of positive vibe happening but I’m going over there three to four times a year trying to coordinate all these groups working on both sides of the fence.  I think peace can happen with just good old fashioned hard work and working with people.  I really believe that.

Dr. Kent:  It’s such a fascinating topic.  There’s so much depth to it and at the same time it’s been about nine years since I’ve been over there but not much changes at the same time.  It’s perpetually the same situations over and over.  The first thing that they say when you show up is what are you?  And you have to identify yourself; are you a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew and once you identify yourself the amazing thing about the Palestinians or the Israelis is I was able to identify and fit with both, like you say you do.  They’re great people.

Frank Romano:  I’m going to add another chapter to Storm Over Morocco 3 about just that.  Three days ago I met an angio in Bethlehem and there are many Jews working there.  they’ve been warned to not even go to the west bank but they’re not being held hostage or being held and they’re working not just blindly on the side of the Palestinians, they’re working for peace and I really feel hopeful but with concerted efforts and hopefully the news will come down.  Often the news is filtered from Israel and the US and they pull the fear string so that it will mobilize people to focus on the aggression coming from Palestine as opposed to the true problem.

The state of Israel is in danger here.  Why do I feel that?  Well first of all they had to fight.  The mandate in 48 wasn’t just giving a part of land to form a state of Israel, they had to fight for it but now as human beings, as Jews are, just like Palestinians, they’ve gone overboard in the settlements and religion is very much a part of it.  The settlements in the west bank are mainly inhabited by Jews who feel it’s their duty and obligation to be in the west bank.  But the religious interpretation of the Torah, which I think is a misinterpretation, so there’s all kinds of religious elements here that working with people, getting beyond whether you’re a Jew or Muslim you hit the nail right on the head; that’s the solution.

Now Jews have conflicted with each other as Agnostic Jews and Cathartic Jews and many Jews now have moved beyond that.  Why not now Jews and Palestinians?  The Jews just say I’m Jewish, not I’m a cathartic Jew, I’m not an agnostic Jew in Jerusalem and there was tension between the two types of Jews and they’ve gotten over that.  I think we can do the same thing with respect to Palestinians.  Instead of having a two state solution we could say we are human beings living in the holy land inst4ead of polarizing into different religious and political groups.  That’s what causes tension.

So my work is bringing people together to love each other but dig in there and bond together by doing stuff together.  Palestinians, Jews and Christians in that particular area, and its going to happen, we’re going to have peace.  It may not be in our lifetime, but we’re planting the seeds now and I feel positive it’s going to happen, I really do.

Dr. Kent:  It’s been a real honor chatting with you and I’d like to talk with you another time, we’ve run out of time today but we had such a nice chat we’ll have to hook up again down the road.

Frank Romano:  You bet!  Anytime Dr. Kent.

Dr. Kent:  Storm Over Morocco: Finding God in the Midst of Fanatics, by Frank Romano.  I can’t wait till the next time.

Frank Romano:  Thank you very much doctor.

Dr. Kent:  I’ll be back with our next guest on the show who is Alison sawyer who wrote a book called No Urn for the Ashes.  Come on back for that.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, History, Travel, Spirituality, Religion, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Politics, PODCAST 

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