 So, we are excited to have Ramblin Dan, all the way from Connecticut, drove through the blizzard to get up here. And, here we are. Go slow, go slow. Yeah, twice as long. I'm Judy Byron, I'm the adult program coordinator. And it's my pleasure to welcome Dan. It's my pleasure to just put on programs in general. You can always contact me, Judy, with an eye, at Waterbury Public Library dot com. And, if you have suggestions or ideas or whatever, I'm always open. And, I got to know Dan because he called me up about a blues program, but he thought it was Waterbury Connecticut. By mistake, by mistake. She says yes. And I get it, I said yes, why not? Why not? DTCT, it doesn't matter, I mean, come on up. Anyway, so we've been kind of back and forth trying to find a time. The other time he suggested was the night before my son's wedding. And I thought, no, that's not a good time at all. Anyway, Dan's been all over the world. And he's performed for all kinds of groups, including libraries. And he's not just an amazing musician, but he is also a teacher. So we're really excited to have this whole kind of breakdown of the blues. What's the history? How do we get here from there, all that good stuff? And I guess that's good enough because you're going to give us all the details, right? All right. Thank you. Take it away. Thank you, wow, I'm going to let it roll. I'm also good to be here. Thanks, Judy. And it was so wonderful. Literally, I was calling somebody else. And it was Judy that answered and had this conversation. Here we are. So anyway, glad to be here. So how did I get into the blues, for God's sake? I'm from central Pennsylvania. The mountains of central Pennsylvania, literally a town kind of in the middle of nowhere. But it was kind of close to Penn State. And I was very fortunate when I was about 16 years old. I went up to the local music store, a small little place. And there was a grad student from Penn State that was given lessons. I didn't want to actually didn't want to learn how to play the guitar too much because I tried it before, and I wasn't making much progress. But I walked into the store, and there's a guy sitting in the back. And I think I'd ever seen anybody finger picked before. This song is called Freight Train. You may have heard it, Peter Paul and Mary. It was written by this woman here. Her name is Elizabeth Cotton. What a wonderful, oh, what a wonderful lady. I got to meet her when she was 84 years old. And I promised her I got to spend a little time with her. And I promised her that whatever I played this song, that I would tell the audience about the story of the song, she wrote of what she was 14 years old. She wanted to learn how to play the guitar. And nobody would teach her because she was left handed. And she ended up just turning the guitar upside down. But she didn't know that you're supposed to change the string so that the heavy string is still on the top. So she ended up playing it like this. And she just invented all her chords and everything. But it was all upside down and backwards, for God's sake. But anyway, she wrote this again when she was 14. And when I freight train going so fast, yourself, that doesn't sound much like the blues. In fact, compared to the first song that I played, which was a number by the great Jimmy Reed. And it sounds a lot different, doesn't it? Well, this Elizabeth Cotton was originally from Raleigh Doreham, North Carolina, which our tech guy that helped me out today lived down there. And there was a big scene down there many years ago. And some of the greatest blues players of all time lived in North Carolina, Raleigh Doreham, that area. One of the greats was from Atlanta. But that region in the southeast, called the Piedmont, was where a special kind of music grew up. Here are some of the main characters in that scene. Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Blake. Blind Willie McTell was the one. It was actually from Atlanta. But in that region, the style of music evolved. And it's got a characteristic of being kind of bouncy and kind of light. A lot of these songs are played in the key of C, which tends to be a kind of a happier key, if you will. The characteristic of the style, called Piedmont Blues, is that there's an alternating bass with my thumb doing this. And I'm playing the melody with mine. And Elizabeth Cotton, when she was growing up, these guys were around. And so I'm sure that she got her style from them, just here in the music and stuff. A lot of these guys used to play out of the street. And it was just real accessible to everybody to get an earful of this stuff. Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Blake, Blind Willie McTell. A lot of times they would, nowadays, we would probably call it stealing. Another guy's song, they would maybe change the title, play the rest of it the same. That's their original song, right? Or just change a couple of words. But here's an example. Just about everybody had a song that went to this aggression. Well, you gotta stop doing what you're doing to me, baby. If you don't, you're going to run me wild. You gotta stop doing what you're doing to me, baby. I mean just what I say, bit of feet. Something about you, baby, just sweet, sweet, sweet. Stop doing what you're doing to me, baby. If you don't, you're going to run me wild. Don't you do it to me, baby. If you don't, you're going to run me wild. You gotta stop doing what you're doing to me. Don't you're going to run me wild. of Tom Holland who wants me top do what you do to be baby don't you gonna run me wild I mean don't you gonna run me wild that was black boy full of song black lake had money went all truckin mama I think they dead did the song drunk by blues away well keep you can get it in thing you want houses restaurant from the railroad track houses characters in that scene was this guy his name was Reverend Gary Davis man what a player I never actually met him but I got to see him play live was fantastic he's got that big guitar it's called a J 200 normally when I'm playing these shows I bring I have a guitar just like that that I bring but I couldn't afford to bring it out in the cold you know but anyway Gary Davis was quite a character he lived in a Raleigh Dora Mary as I mentioned he ended up moving to New York City and lived in Harlem and he became a preacher a lot of these blues guys had an element of gospel music and some of them were actually ministers and they played a lot of religious songs as well as blues and other stuff but anyway he moved to New York City and he would in Harlem he had a store front church and he would stand up front play a guitar and sing and when he was singing he kind of was a screamer you know kind of a crazy voice if you get a chance to look him up sometime online you can you can tell but anyway he would play that gospel stuff get people to come in the church and then he would do his preaching I happened to meet over the years several guys that studied with him and there's some funny stories that I heard first of all the lessons were five dollars they had the lessons in in Brooklyn he moved to Brooklyn and bought a small house with the proceeds from the song if I had my way and his title was Samson and Delilah but it's the same song Peter Paul and Mary recorded it and I guess they made enough money off it he was able to buy a small house in Brooklyn so that's where he gave his lessons and you if you got a lesson from him you went to his house paid him five dollars the lesson lasted all day and included lunch so he would be down in a basement playing his guitar and his method of teaching was kind of a kind of different he was blind and so he would sit in his chair and just play this complicated music that he was known for just over and over and over and over and you could just play it a thousand times if you just watch him a little by little you would get it you know but that was how he taught but the story was that sometimes he would actually fall asleep during the lesson and you have to wait for him to wake up but and occasionally his wife would come down with lunch right he loved the blues and he was quite a character you can you can see in this next picture he's smoking a big old cigar there I guess that's kind of unusual for a preacher I'm sure but anyway he would be playing blues like this one for instance I'm standing on the corner with the dollar by hand I'm looking for the first woman looking for a man I said how long will I have to wait I get you now baby all must I hesitate there's a nickel at a dime is a dime I got the house full of chips and I wanted their mind I said how long do I have to wait can I get you now baby all must I hesitate on the dollar city God we trust woman what a man but you want to see that dollar first I said how long I get you now all must I hesitate lunch better get to a gospel song oh glory how happy I am you would change where she was around oh glory how happy I am where Jesus walked in the province land happy I am I said now how long I get you now baby let's die hesitate can I get you now baby all must I hesitate well that's the kind of music that evolved in the southeast is that kind of happy bouncy kind of sound back in those days of course they're what they didn't have the accessibility to transportation communication all the things that we have now so when something grew up in a certain area I tended to kind of be there you know the styles were kind of regional and they didn't at first anyway didn't kind of cross over too much so there's a whole region here in Mississippi we're going to head over there I'm actually doing a tour to Mississippi in April real looking forward to that but anyway here's Mississippi and it was a whole different style that that kind of evolved down there if you look at this map you can see this area here where the Mississippi River would flood and it was real flat that's the area that's called the Mississippi Delta believe it or not I would have think the Delta would be down here at the end you know like that's what typically would be but that's what they call that the region the Delta and often would flood and that's one of the reasons there was such great soil there for agriculture big big area for farming and stuff and this area up north was called the Hill Country and even in just Mississippi there there grew up different styles that were pretty distinct back in the old days the original days they played primitive instruments that were mostly handmade this is a one string instrument called a Diddley bow see I'm gonna switch guitars the original Diddley bows are the most primitive form anyway they would take a piece of bailing wire or they would take a broom and unwind the that wire that's around the bottom of those old-style brooms and make a guitar string out of it and they would nail it on the side of a porch you know kind of similar to this and they would play it with a slide of course you can't fret that right so they would get some kind of slide I'm using a three-quarter inch socket wrench I got a funny story I was playing up in Maine and you know there's all kinds of things you can use for slides but I was playing in Portland Maine and I heard that for the first time someone told me you can use a socket wrench I never thought about it there's a famous blues artist called John Hammond Jr. that played with a socket wrench right so I immediately went right out to the local Sears store and I walked in a fella said can I help you and I said yeah I need a socket wrench just one and he said what size and I said well I don't know I have to try a few on so I go over to the socket wrench section and I'm trying to put these things on my finger you know he's looking at me and I never told him what I was doing and we got we got back to the cash register I picked up you know I paid for it and he said he said well you know if you ever break that you could bring it back you get a new one for free I haven't broken one yet but I keep losing it's made out of a candy ten my daughter's on a high school French trip right and as a gift she brought me home this can't a tin of candies from Maxim's of Paris a famous chocolate store I guess and so I thought man I would make a beautiful Didley bow you should you should look at this up close after the show you can come and look at all the instruments but quite different sound my side I'm still my hot baby by the river side well I'm going back to play don't ever tan show the Didley bow and it's funny because I always get one of two responses consistently some of the people say wow how do you get so much music out of just one string it's amazing and the other people say wow it's only one string even I could do that well it's actually very simple to play I've done workshops even with kids I'll show you some slides later that I mean really I could teach any any of you guys and this one too could teach any of you in about 10 minutes how to do it this is a what I call a cigar box guitar although I made this one out of a peppermint bark candy tin my wife likes to shop in those kind of junk stores you know that are she called a shabby chic or whatever and and she finds me all these crazy tins and boxes and things like that and I make guitars out of them this music from the Delta was basically the roots of rock and roll pretty much in fact this next song that I'm gonna play was played on the stage of Woodstock by the band from the 60s called canned heat you remember those guys take a tip from my mama please don't you cry no more take a tip from my mama please don't you cry no more that's quite young mama left me when I was quite young all my wicked son take a tip from my mama please don't you cry no more down the road I blues guys that will talk a day on the cigar box guitar the diddly bow and the cigar box guitar were common in the in the south at that time and the diddly bow especially was kind of thought as a kids toy you know BB King muddy waters a lot of those guys say that they learned how to play the blues on a cigar box guitar or a diddly bow the guys that that played back in those those days played in kind of places like this they called them barrel houses they called them barrel houses they were pretty rough places I mean a lot of these guys in this time were sharecroppers it was just kind of one small step above slavery it was still very oppressive system and a lot of them just you know they never lived outside of their plantation or their immediate area like I said before the transportation was very few real roads or anything like that one way to get around was on the train but you had to have money to do that number one and there weren't too many trains either so anyway they would work all week and working really hard and then Saturday night would be the night where they would go out to the barrel houses and they drink a little homemade whiskey a little moonshine stuff like that maybe there would be a guy coming around with a guitar they would they would all dance and get crazy and the guys around at the time at that time were some of these guys Willie Brown Charlie Patton Sunhouse they were the original guys that were playing what we now call the Delta Blues and this is happens to be a guitar called a Resophonic guitar it's made out of metal you see the picture of Sunhouse there he's got a steel guitar the first ones were made back in the 20 1928 I think was the the first ones that were made you may have heard of the term dobro well the people or the guys that invented the guitar in the beginning that the steel guitar were the Dope era brothers and they eventually sold the name of the company or whatever that became national so national steel guitars are well known by miss by musicians but they're made out of metal and they have a aluminum cone inside that makes that funky sound and they have cover plates on the top I got this guitar in Maine actually but it was made by a guy from Colorado named Larry Pugribra who was a kind of a genius inventor and a sculptor and this is a kind of a one-of-a-kind guitar as you can tell this is a 1953 Rambler apparent appropriately enough hubcap see the insignia on it I thought when I first got it I thought it was a Thunderbird right maybe so I never did really know and people were always asking me what kind of hubcap is it and I said well I think it's a Thunderbird well I was playing up in Maine and I was way out in some back road way up in the woods in Maine and I passed this place I think every state's got a few of these trailer mobile home out in the middle of nowhere and there's like 10,000 hubcaps on you know on a wall I saw one of those places and I turned around right in the middle of the road there was nobody around came back and I thought now these guys will maybe be able to identify this for me right so I pulled in and a guy and a woman came out and I showed him the guitar told him story and they got this big book out and we're all paging through the books looking for the you know something that looks like this and for sure it wasn't a Thunderbird and we couldn't figure out what it was so the woman says let's go inside Harold will know so we walked inside and there's Harold he's sitting on a big easy chair look like a throne or something you know and he was a real big heavy guy looked like he hadn't moved in a couple weeks or something and he had everything he needed to live within arms reach just everything was piled around him and I sat and talked with him for a long time they were they were tickled that I stopped and you know they were really excited about just seeing somebody I think but anyway we were all talking and finally he he goes honey get my camera he took some pictures and then the moment came where he was going to identify the guitar right he says give it to me so he took it and he's looking at it like this he goes Ramble in 1953 can you tell the difference between this style and the Piedmont style that I played earlier this one's a lot this kind of stuff is more like Delta Blues it's a lot more guttural a lot of kind of heavy groove a little more dark sounding if you will this guy is what we now call the king of the Delta Blues Robert Johnson these guys in the last photo and Robert Johnson guys like this were rock stars back then because no like said nobody could travel right but these guys were able to travel from place to place and play at these barrel houses sometimes go to different states and they were just revered Robert Johnson actually when he first started out he was following around these other guys Sun House Willie Brown and he would follow them around and come to their shows and and they thought he was a nuisance you know they didn't want to deal with him some little kid you know get out of here well Robert Johnson went away for about two years they didn't see him nobody knew where he was or anything finally he came back and he had remarkably become so proficient at playing the guitar that no one could believe it and the legend grew up and I don't know if he started it or somebody else did but but the legend grew up that he got so good because he went to the crossroads and he sold his soul to the devil I tried it it didn't work but anyway I'm staying at the crossroads trying to fly the ride relation foothills is what I earlier called the hill country there's a there's a little town up there called Tupelo have you ever heard of that before some famous guy was from Tupelo do you know what I'm talking about Elvis Presley yeah I was from Tupelo tell a little story about him later but anyway so in that hill country area there was another style that evolved and the characteristic of this style was just that the guys would come up with some length a lick and they would just play it like over and over and over and over again till it became kind of hypnotic and almost translate and this guy I actually saw him play in the 70s he came to Penn State and I went to see him play he was a great guy's name was Mississippi Fred McDowell from the hill country he was one of the early hill country players but he had a he had a habit when I saw him a couple times and every time he would play he would come down sit in front of the audience you'd sit and he would look out and he would say I don't play no rock and roll it's how he started every show I don't play no rock and roll I think the Rolling Stones recorded a couple of his numbers and maybe people were relating to that and place a rock and roll I don't know but he would start every show I don't play in a rock and roll I played blues and specials blues and specials in the 70s he started touring around a lot of these guys got so-called rediscovered and they were touring some of the colleges and let's say when I got to see him play but that young lady next to him did anybody recognize her Bonnie Ray yeah she was just in I don't know she about 20 years old I think I heard it she went to Radcliffe in you know in Boston and he used to come up there to play in Cambridge and they got to know each other and so she toured with him a bunch and when she plays her slide guitar which you hear a lot of it stuff that you can hear the Mississippi Fred McDowell influence here's a song off of one of her early albums that Fred recorded it's called the Cook-a-mo-Bloose Gration the conditions were so horrible in the south that migrated north some of them went to Chicago Gary Davis he went to New York but a lot of the guys from the Delta ended up in Chicago there were factories there and jobs and though it was conditions were still pretty harsh it was better than what they were experiencing in the in the Delta so the next town up the river on the way north pretty much the big town was Memphis and a lot of guys congregated there this is Beale Street actually got the play on Beale Street three or four times and now what a great place you could see BB King's Blues Club on the right there it's at the top of the hill and all these historic clubs that were really rocking back in the day and characters like BB King would show up there and also in Memphis we mentioned him before this guy Elvis Presley you know he became famous in a sense because he was singing a lot of her in the early days singing a lot of the old black blues songs and he was accepted on on the radio because he was white he sounded black though the people that would hear him they would say that's that's a black guy but he was actually white so he was actually able to you know he was accepted in certain circles he recorded his first song at the Sun Studios in Memphis which I got to visit in fact this microphone is exact same kind of microphone he used back in those days and recorded at the Sun Studios in the day you could go into Sun Studios and Sam Phillips was the owner he owned it and he had a deal you could come in and if you paid him $5 you could record whatever song you wanted and he could make a disc right there and give it to you well Elvis came in and he recorded his first song you know what it was happy birthday he recorded happy birthday for his mother is a birthday present and Sam Phillips said well that's that's great do you know any other songs and he ripped into this one song he learned back in Tupelo one of the blues guys Arthur big boy crud up he Elvis used to sneak out at night go down to the back alley so the blues guys were playing and that's big influence on him here's the one that became a hit he recorded at Sun Studios and Sam Phillips immediately sent it to the local DJ who started playing it the phones ran off the hook and the rest is history that's all right mom that's all right for you that's all his early days where he got his influence he was also in the gospel and he used to go to the Pentecostal churches down there in the area and in the movie and I guess it's true but that's where he got all his shaking and stuff you know when he would get all jibed up and start jumping around but anyway all right the next stop north is Chicago there you go isn't that cool a kid showed me how to do that I never want to figure it out here it is Chicago and one of the guys that moved up to Chicago is part of the great migration was this guy muddy water the great muddy waters you've heard of them right oh my god then the left there he is in the early days in the middle there's a picture of his cabin in Mississippi they've done a plantation and on the right was his house in Chicago which you could tell it's a big upgrade still not too fancy but way better than what he had before muddy waters was amazing he was one of the first guys well along with BB King that started playing electric guitar and he put all his blues that he learned in the Delta and like I say he used to play cigar box guitar and everything and he started playing electric and man what a what a great change that was in fact he was became real popular and he was hanging out with guys like this you recognize that guy on the left Mick Jagger I'm mentioning this because the roots of rock and roll are really the blues in fact Elvis the Rolling Stones guys like Eric Clapton a lot of those British guys were really the first bunch of albums were just covers of old blues songs and muddy used to say because his career was kind of in a slump when he met the Stones or and the Stones recorded a couple of his songs as they also did for Mississippi Fred McDowell and a couple of the other guys and muddy used to say all of a sudden he was well-known he would tour with the Stones he would open the show and big big audiences and muddy used to say thems be boys you know he brought him back into prominence well here's a good old muddy water song let's see switch guitars again yeah those are the days Stones that picture is from what was it I think it was called the checkerboard lounge in Chicago where they they got those pictures and they filmed that but they got a lot of their stuff Jim said well I've been told my mom I'll be a son of God I mentioned and all those British guys it was called the British invasion back then but anyway we're gonna move take another move again from Chicago and this time we're gonna go all the way over to the Northeast because kind of in the 60s mostly when the kind of when the British invasion was happening there was a thing called the you know the folk movement that was going on in Greenwich Village and they were rediscovering all these guys from the South that had played and there was an interest in the music again a lot of the old blues men were being so called rediscovered and they were they were happy about that because all of a sudden they were touring all over the country and even in Europe all over the place and there was a center for activity in Washington DC where my guitar teacher the original one was from DC and he got steeped in that tradition which is where I got a lot of my stuff and was influenced by him New York City of course Greenwich Village Boston Cambridge had a big scene Philadelphia had a big folk scene at that time this guy here was from Boston I think it was in the 90s when I first started playing out professionally full-time somebody said well you like blues you got to meet this guy from Boston Paul Rochelle Paul taught me how to play slide and a lot of other a lot of stuff about the old Pete Mont the country blues Delta stuff he taught me all of that stuff there's him playing a resiphonic guitar a real special one made by the national company and but the funny thing about Paul or the great thing was he got to hang out with a lot of these old blues guys when they were touring and they would stop in in Cambridge the story was the promoter that brought him into town called Paul up because he knew he was into the music this kind of music and he would have Paul essentially babysit these blues guys it would come through he met Son House Sonny Terry Brown and McGee John Lee Hooker all of these guys played there and Paul during the day would hang out with them to just to make sure that they got to the show and they were in good shape and all that stuff some of them really like to drink you know so that was part of it you got it some of them you could get him something or or make sure they didn't get something one way or the other but anyway he would show up to these shows and and the great thing was he would be hanging out and get them to tell all the stories you know so he got to know Son House and all these people and I got to hear some of the stories as a result of him this guy here you may know Dave Van Ronck have you ever heard of him from New York City well I got to take lessons from Dave in the late 90s which was fantastic I met somebody I was playing in the Berkshires and somebody said oh you ever think about taking lessons from Dave Van Ronck and I said no you kidding me how you know how can you take lessons from Dave Van Ronck to me he was a God you know and they said well he's given lessons I don't know I have his his wife is my cousin or something and here's his phone number so I called him up one day and nothing just left a message week went by maybe two weeks I don't know how long and all of a sudden the phone rings one day and I pick it up and he says hello this is Dave Van Ronck he had a real gravelly voice if you recall and I said oh my god Dave Van Ronck well we set up lessons and I went down here for about two years I would take the train down to New York subway get over to the Sheridan Square area if you're in Greenwich Village if you're familiar and go to his apartment and sit there and take lessons from one of my my first lesson was just me learning his method of musical notation which guitar players know called tablature it's not with regular notes it's more of a graphic graphic way I won't explain it but anyway he had a certain kind of tablature and he gave me the song ready freight train but his tablature was so kind of hard to figure out that he just explained the tablature and he said no here play this come on back next week I already knew the song right but there were a couple little glitches in it that you would only know if you really got the tablature right so I worked really hard all week I just I go man I gotta get this right get on to New York the next week and I play he said go ahead play it so I played the song he looks up and he says maybe this isn't gonna be so bad after all I gotta tell one other quick Dave Van Rong story you know he taught me all kinds of stuff about guitar he he was a big student and fan of Reverend Gary Davis who was a very complex guitar player a lot of stuff up the neck and Dave was really fun to that he was really into early jazz and the guys like Jelly Roll Morton and he would transcribe those very complex pieces for guitar but anyway taught me all that stuff but one one day I'm with him and I said Dave teach me so much about the guitar but what about the voice can you teach me anything about that and he says yeah he says what what you need to do is more of this like that he said wow Dave isn't that bad for your voice he said no it's good for your voice here's one of his early songs that I learned actually the guy my first guitar teacher taught me this song one of my early songs that I learned how to play actually Dave told me the story I used to love to pump them for stories we would do the lesson and then I try to get them talking you know so I could stay a little extra he would start on the stories and he had a lot stories about Bob Dylan in fact in the early days he said Bob Dylan when he first came to town he slept on Dave's couch and they called Dave back in those guys in those times the mayor of McDougal Street McDougal Street in the village he was kind of one of the kingpins of the scene and he ran a couple of clubs or booked the clubs and ran some of these coffee houses as the host and so he was he was the guy you wanted to get to know if you want to come to New York and play that that sorry that that picture on the right is from Bob Dylan's free Bob Dylan's freewheeling album one of his early albums and that woman he's with us was his girlfriend at the time and that's taking picture taking in the village her name was Susie Rottolo and I actually got to meet her one time that's kind of cool I never met Dylan of course but met Susie Rottolo so here's a song Dave Tommy it's an old Bessie Smith song if I take a dose to jump into the ocean ain't nobody business if I go to church on Sunday go out on the town ways I hell on what you want to just mess with me for baby let me drink my wine what you want to mess with me big part of that he called it the folk scare in the 60s so he was playing bringing back a lot of these songs that guys like blind boy fuller and blind Blake all those guys were playing in the old days he was playing them and bringing them to new audiences mad a girl at the cavalry Bob will go my god drunk was my fault I'm drinking tequila leaving the song so my dog things are very rich topics for exploration even the way the British guys came over and brought the music back to this country really fantastic but what about the future of the blues well there's a lot of modern players that came out Stevie Ray Vaughan is one of them you probably heard of now there's a guy named Joe Bonamassa there's a whole bunch of kind of new artists playing modern blues Kev Moe you may have heard of I mean there's a bunch of them but here's something here's the future of the blues for me we have a little place in old line Connecticut where I'm from it came from there today and it's a little kind of a coffee shop called nightingales nightingales acoustic cafe it's a non-profit and we have shows there every Saturday every Tuesday we have a picking party stuff like that but we try to work as much as we can with with young kids here's a couple of our kids that have really been doing great they started out a lot of the kids say we had our first show at nightingales and just a just an opportunity for them to get out and play me with other kids and explore things it's really wonderful but the group on the picture on the upper left is from our diddly bow workshop we did we built I made some kits and stuff and we assembled these diddly bows made them out of a stick and an Altoids tin and there's a bent over quarter that we used for the bridge and taught these kids how to play the diddly ball the woman or the young girl on the right and the top is named Sophia Griswold she came to our picking party a couple months after she got her first guitar and just blew everybody away and just started getting real good now she's at Berkeley College of Music and one of the things she's done among many other things and she's still in school she applied and was accepted to be part of the pop band that was the featured band at the World's Fair in Dubai she went to Dubai for six months and they put her up over there and she was part of their you know their their showpiece pop band there were kids from all over the world it was a guy from I think it was Brazil that was a singer his name was Nacho and Cuban guys were playing the drums you know and just amazing stuff but she has some great videos from that experience she's back in school now but the kid on the right and at the top and then right below that named Braden Sunshine he was 14 years old when he first played at Nightingale's Cafe and that picture from the bottom was when he was a finalist on the show The Voice you ever heard of that American Idol The Voice so he applied and made it through all the trials and he made it to I think number nine on The Voice we were so excited about that this kid on the bottom in the middle named Jake Kulak he's down in New York City now living in Brooklyn playing blues doing great and this these young girls on the left are a group of local girls that write original music and they're into country music and they've already been to Nashville and all this stuff so we're real excited to be a part of these kids and and their development so I'm gonna conclude my program thanks for coming with an original song and it's one that I wrote about my early days the early days was influenced by Woody Guthrie a lot and all I wanted to do was hitchhike and hop freight trains which I did hitchhiked all over the country and hopped a couple freight trains and got to see the whole United States really fantastic but I wrote this song about my early early life called rambling don't make no excuse freight train just to see this land first night in some of the club so I come up once in a while so sign up and you can follow me around thanks for coming everybody