An “Over the Rainbow” Primer and Duet

"Let the boys have the damn song." How "Over the Rainbow" almost didn't make the cut for "The Wizard of Oz." A look back at a "sacred" song in the American canon, on the occasion of a down-and-dirty music video version by the boys.

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Categories Songs Video

The Art of the Song Lyric

The hand-transcribed song lyric considered as a work of art. Bouncing around Paris and the volcanic heartland of Gaul before easy access to printers and scanners, you had to make do when you wanted to travel with lyrics to the songs you hoped to sing.

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Categories Memoir

‘A Dream of Perfect Motion’

I've spent years collecting footage of trains rumbling through West Virginia's hills, dales & valleys. I also scribble poems that play on Buddhist allusions. And there's this electronic music maestro I know named Lucas the Flow, who composes ethereal tunes. Mix them together and this is what you get ...

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Categories Art Poems

‘A Hoeft Marsh Melody’

Hoeft Marsh in Greenbottom WV is where I get off to when I want to get off the timeline of the world's news. Here's a short musical visit there. It's a little fishy, too.

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Categories Essays Video

‘All These Pages’

As a writer, purveyor, and publisher of creative works, I am constantly wrestling with my ego’s desire to see such work as of lasting significance, a hedge against my own mortality. Yet such works, too, will soon pass on by and melt away, swallowed by the river of time. Here’s a video-poem about that.

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Categories Essays

Listen to an “Appalachian Round”

The song "Appalachian Round" is one of the prettiest, most evocative group songs in the English language. Here is a 2009 four-part harmony version a bunch of fellow travelers and I recorded down in Princeton, WV.

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Categories Essays

“Sonata for Piano & West Virginia, No. 1”

I invite you to take five minutes from feeling harassed by the news or our own hectic heads for "Sonata for Piano & West Virginia No. 1." It offers another way of looking at West Virginia and those parts that remain uncorrupted, fresh, and true.

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Categories Art Video