The Shank of the Day
- by Linn Barnes
The Shank of the Day
-Linn Barnes
At the shank of the day,
with the sun burning down,
with the winds standing dead still,
with the measure of time suspended
in the vast furnace of late summer, where
even the crows are quiet and the vultures don't fly.
Now, even music loses the drive to be
heard and the strings protest
the hands of the player,
wilted and dripping,
unwilling to add even one more
measure to this late summer mix.
And while it is not exactly sadness,
but rather a portrait of soggy melancholy
which, troubling as it may be,
rattles not the hidden hive of the heart,
while we sit motionless beneath a dying oak
and watch the leaves begin to fall unchallenged
to the waiting and bone dry earth below.
Fund-Raiser for Kid Pan Alley
- by Linn Barnes
As September rolls in, things are bustling and changing in spite of the continuing heat.. It will be in the 90's today with no let up in sight. But the tell-tales are at work. The light is shifting to a Fallish slant and the leaves are blowing and falling in the early rounds. There's much more to come, but you gotta start somewhere...
Allison and I had a great rehearsal this morning for the benefit program for Paul Reisler's "Kid Pan Alley', s truly wonderful creation for stimulating exactly that among the young: Creativity through song writing. We are going to play a short program with a variety of other artists. Right now it looks like we'll be playing Harp and standard guitar and, this is the killer, harp and harp-guitar duets, which we think will be interesting and fun for this varied audience a little later in September. We're going to do a bit of a bouillabaisse of tunes: a March from Galicia, the northernmost province of Spain, an air from Ireland, a fancy gig from Ireland, four 16th century lute pieces combined with two blues by Mississippi John Hurt, and a composition. We're to try and cram it all into twenty minutes which may work if we play presto through the whole deal...
A Celtic Christmas
- by Linn Barnes
It is with great pleasure that I announce to all interested folks that Allison and I have released a new CD: 'A Celtic Christmas', on Oak Leaf records. This is a compilation of our favorite pieces played for our annual Christmas program in Washington at the Dumbarton Concert Series for the past 38 years. It is an inside look at what for us has been a work of love over the last many years.
Greetings, once again...
- by Linn Barnes
Mes amis,
I decided to link my blogging to my website for Barnes and Hampton. The 'old' blog I now pronounce 'fini'. We shall start afresh here in novelle blogland. More to come...