Winter 2021

I just added a recording of my daughter Mary reciting my verse, A Frightened Fly Who Flew to Flee. I’m trying to finish the first song she and her sister Olivia and I have been writing called Forever Kiss. It’s great to have collaborators in your own COVID pod!

I added some images of Mimi Farina’s copy of Emerson, one of my favorite authors. You can see the marks she likely made next to the chapters on Self Reliance and Love.

Rolf Cahn was an important Berkeley music figure. He, Debbie Green and Howard Ziehm opened the blues and folk club the Cabale on San Pablo (now our local Good Vibrations). I just read a passage in a new biography of Odetta by Ian Zack that cites him as an influential guitar teacher for her and source of early songs she performed at shows with Rolf. He was also an early guitar teacher of Debbie Green and Joan Baez. I’ve posted some photographs I acquired of Rolf performing with the great Jo Mapes in the 1950s. Some of the concert posters I’ve added are copied off the Internet, and some of them are my own.

My mother recorded a piece in 1948 called On a Lonely Shore by a composer named Grace Helen Nash. After years of searching, I found the sheet music for it and after many more years, I have learned to perform it after a fashion. Grace Helen Nash was a prolific composer and arranger in the 1930s - 1950s. I wish I could read her music better as I’ve ended up collecting sheet music for some sixty of her compositions and seventeen scores for pieces she arranged. As it is, the only one I know is the recording my mother made on a 78rpm tin record. I play along with her on it with my keyboards and after going through it hundreds of times, she as a eighteen-year-old is still a better performer. I’ve put a shaky version of it in my Songs Covered section. Recently I finished writing lyrics to the music, which I started writing about five years ago in her memory. I had been stuck with it, but the tragic loss of a neighbor and his children lead me to the rest of the song, which I dedicated to their memory and my mother’s.