Well, I've done it again, let lots of time pass with no news on this blog. It seems that the only time I can slow down enough to put anything in here is when I'm in airports on the road. Here I am at Logan, waiting to go to Fort Worth for the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly. More of that later, but first let me recap a little.
It's been quite a spring. After finishing the MA leg of the ECHO Storytelling tour in late March, I was home for a couple of weeks, and then off on a ten day tour that took me from North Carolina to Vermont, and from songs of the Civil War through songs of the earth and sea to memorial songs for a socialist professor at UVM. I started at the Living History Weekend in Plymouth, NC where they reenact the battle in which Confederates captured the town in late 1864, opening up the Roanoke River to get supplies to General Lee's army in Virginia, and event that may well have extended the war by a year. I was a bit uncomfortable with some of the lingering Confederate sentiment in evidence, but it is a lesson to bed learned that these feelings do not die and that the healing of deep wounds caused by that war is still not complete. Consider that in terms of all the conflicts in the world today, and we can see what an enormous job we have before us to learn to live in peace.
From NC I headed to Chestertown, MD where I did a concert for the Center for the Environment and Society of Washington College. This event arose from my singing at the installation of Eileen McLellan as the Riverkeeper for the Chester River two year ago with Robert Kennedy Jr. as the keynote speaker. He is President of the Waterkeeper Alliance (www.riverkeeper.org), and organization worth checking out. It was great to be back in Chester, singing for a great program under the direction of a great man in his own right, Dr. Wayne Bell.
My next stop was the Harve de Grace Maritime Museum in Havre de Grace, MD for a "Music of the Waters" Earth Day concert. This is a new museum, only a couple of years old, but with a great director in Brenda Guldenzopf, and headed, I think, for great things. There is a great passion in the Chesapeake for the history of the fisheries and the watermen who've plied those waters, and this museum will do them credit.
From there I headed for Burlington, VT where I sang three songs at a memorial service for Will Miller, a professor in the Philosophy Department. Will was well known for his encyclopedic knowledge of modern political affairs, his strong defense of socialist solutions and his untiring work in support of peace, social justice and ecological sanity. It was a great honor to just be with the hundreds who came to pay him tribute, and even more to sing several songs he would have wished to hear.