The Origins

Grandma Palmer gave me a harmonica when I was 7 years old. She always used to play that romantic 40s jazz, and some old time folk music, and she always used to sing that tune, “I’m my own Grammpaw”. It was simple enough to learn how to pick that tune on the harmonica, and that’s where it started.

A few years later my mother called me out sick from school one day, to go buy me a guitar. We drove the next town over to Bob’s Trading Post and found something just right. Bob told me I could get a special 10% discount if I promised to get him tickets to my first big tour! I guess I won’t be able to make good on that deal, cause Bob is long gone. And even though his trading post still sits on Main St, with the bay windows and those sun-warped guitars all stained from the sunlight, and even though I never did hear what came of it all, I still think of Bob, and I think of how its taken me so long to get here, and I think how grateful I am for that guitar.

So when that red sulky sun hits low and long in the winter evenings, I remember that time; that beloved early childhood time of my first discoveries with music. Those Jim Post and Woody Guthrie records, the Joni and Dylan tunes and all the wirery folk poets from the 50s and 60s and 70s.

Times are strange. Lots of violence in the news and I know it feels as though something has been brewing in this here United States and the pots too hot and its gonna boil over any minute. And I don’t hear much of anybody getting it all right and straightened out, cause its like we all lost track of the truth and there are so many competing stories and who has time to figure it all out? We got wealthy merchants and crooked politicians and stoogely officials and corrupt educators and there’s drugs that kill the first time you use it and there’s plastic everywhere and in everything, and the whole world looks like it’s going to explode in war.

Something new, yet somehow old feeling, like a good pair of suede boots, something wild and reckless and hopeful has begun pouring from my chest, into these songs. I just figured to share it all with you on account of being gone so long. I hope this music helps you along as much as it has helped me.

See you out there on the road, in the venues, in the sweet moments between the chaos.