Coffee Is My Drug
By Larry Bruner
“Chittlin”
has changed her name, and is now more properly billed as Jessica Lea Mayfield. She
has an eponymous EP CD, a Nashville
agent, and a band consisting of her brother David (“Bass Boy”), Mike Lenz and Jason Edwards. As such, they
are out on the road, on tour to the West Coast, as opening act for the Avett Brothers.
It’s not too often the Recording Industry awards Gold
Records for folk music, even less to folks who live around here. In 1997 the Smithsonian had reissued
on CD the Anthology of American Folk
Music, a box set known as folk music’s bible, and it went gold last
year. Edited by enigmatic “sonic
sociologist” Harry Smith, this
repertory of the past is given immense credit for the Sixties Folk Boom. Nick Amster, who lives in Rocky River,
has now received a gold record for his spearheading role in the reissue. The original compilation, consisting of a
wide variety of out-of-print recordings from 1927-1932, had first been released
on vinyl in 1952, around the time Nick was born. Awarded a lifetime achievement Grammy in
1991, Harry (Nick assisted him to the podium) said "I'm glad to say that
my dreams came true…I saw America
changed through music."
Inez Browne
passed away March 15th, at age 86.
She had been a Cleveland Public Schools special education teacher for 27 years
and was the widow of Tedd Browne the folk singer slain in 1968
on Cedar Hill in Cleveland Heights.
Alexa
Lloyd notes
that Mocha
Dreams, a coffeehouse at 20665 Center Ridge
Road in Rocky River,
has closed for good. It was a location
that had a few different iterations and had attempted to appeal to a younger
crowd. About a hundred aggressive rock
bands had played there.
At the February Folk
Alliance
conference in Memphis, Folk Alley had a renewed presence, after
not attending the previous year. Jim Blum and others from Kent
were especially visible taping performances in the host hotel’s lounge each
evening.
Utah’s Local Roots
In last month’s Continuum, did you read Deborah Van Kleef’s notes on Bruce
“Utah” Phillips? What you may not know is he was born May 15, 1935, in Cleveland. His mother fled his father, and Bruce the
child went with mom. After that I’m not
real clear on his travels before and after the Korean War. I first met him at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, in 1978 I think, and decided he was just
the greatest M.C. ever for a folk festival. I tried a few times to book him to play in Cleveland,
but the closest he ever got was Kent and Oberlin. His father passed away here a few years ago, having
never seen Utah play. Anne
Feeney, the songwriter activist from Pittsburgh,
played our town for the first time last month, at the Unitarian
Church in Cleveland
Heights. She
says she will be putting together a benefit concert for Utah
in Pittsburgh soon, and performing
at one in Madison Wisconsin in May. You
can check her website [http://AnneFeeney.com] for updates.
Marcia Petchers
worked hard putting together a CAC (Cuyahoga Arts & Culture) project grant
application for Folknet, the first
time we’ve sought outside funding. If
you are Interested in the process, CAC will hold public hearings on all the
applications, April 23 & 24, 8:30am-5pm, at Trinity Commons, and anyone is
welcome to attend.
Finally, a personal note. I’m now scheduled for Deep Brain Stimulation
surgery procedures at the Cleveland
Clinic within the next month and a half.
I trust my subthalamic nucleus will survive implantation of electrodes
in my skull – see you all on the other side!
These tidbits are solely the opinion of the author, not of the
organization Folknet. They're often
edited by Marcia Petchers.
If you have
items to submit for this column, write larry@folknet.org