At this moment I'm sitting in the downstairs guest space of Bob and Trish McWilliams house in Lawrence, Kansas. I'm surrounded by posters from countless concerts. Photos with descriptions of near every acoustic type artist that has toured through Lawrence for quite a few years. Some are friends and acquaintances, some I've never heard. Bob is the local folk and jazz guru and works at KANU at the University of Kansas. He produces many concerts a year in cooperation with West Side Folk. In addition to the posters on the walls there are scores of CD's, vinyl albums, folk and jazz publications. I feel right at home.

I've been writing a bunch. Nothing particularly brilliant. It's just satisfying to keep the paper wet with ink and making new sounds with the guitar. I've got a couple new songs out of the process. Finished one last night called "Tumbleweed", a deconstructionalist, simple three chord folk song. I have the feeling I'll tear it down and salvage it for parts soon. The other, I musta written when I was hungry and remembering the peach pie I made this summer. I play it with the slide, and it's called, 'My Peach Pie". Besides that I've been trying to sing and play Cordelia's Dad's version of "The Dying Californian" on the fiddle. Lordy, wish me luck. I'll probably be able to do that one in public sometime 'round year 2003.

Sunday night's show in Lawrence concluded week number three out of five of the fall tour. The first week was spent shuttling back and forth between Wisconsin and Iowa, crossing the Mississippi a half a dozen times, visiting cool little towns like McGregor IA, Winona MN, and LaCrosse WI. I did a lot of van camping in parking lots, back alleys and peoples driveways, and felt like I got to know southwest Wisconsin a bit. Route 35, which follows the Mississippi from Prairie du Chien to La Crosse was really wonderful. I'd stop at every other wayside to take out my fiddle and play to the Mississippi, which is amazing there because the dams make the river look so wide; more like a bay or a lake populated with many lush green islands.

Inland a bit the town of Gays Mills was having it's Apple Festival that weekend, and I was told there'd be some string band music. The folks of Gays Mills turned out to be a good natured blend of longtime settled middle America families, farmers, alternatype-back-to-the-landers, and artists. Well, I hung around that Sunday and wound up meeting Tim McGraw, who plays fiddle and fronts the Kettle Creek String Band, and Tim Foss and Kathy Casper, and a few others whose names I don't recall. In the evening we went out to Tim & Kathy's place out in the hilly netherlands. Kathy played piano, while the rest of us alternated between fiddle, guitar and banjo. Tim M. brought along some homemade dandelion brandy which set us up just fine and we settled in for a solid night of tunes. Tim Foss played his own Leyland Waltz, which I just love and have been learning. When I play it now it's like opening the door to the brief joy of that night.

Week number two officially began with a shot up to Ashland in northern Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Superior. The town immediately reminded me of my days in Newport, Vermont. In fact with the trees in vivid fall colors along the shores of the Chequamegon Bay, it was startlingly like northern Vermont along the shores of Lake Memphremegog. Sort of a hick hunting and logging culture balanced with the back to the land types as in southern Wisconsin. The college I played at, Northland College, is an environmental college, much like Sterling College in Vermont. To complete the sensation, I was re-aquainted with Josh, now a luthier, whom I first met at Sterling College in 1992. It's also like northern Vermont in it's acute sense of isolation from parts south. I spent the rest of the week yo-yoing between gigs in Chicago and Terre Haute, Indiana.

My third week of the tour was spent mostly in Nebraska, getting off the interstate and taking back roads as much as possible. North Platte had a cool little espresso shop for music on Thursday. My favorite gig hands down was the Listening Room in Hastings. Robin Harrell and all her volunteers have done a great job of building this venue over the last few years. Her hard work has been rewarded with a loyal audience who faithfully attend the concerts in the good old Knights of Pythias Hall downtown. So now after two days rest in Kansas it's onto Rolla, St. Louis, Little Rock, and Louisville. Gonna roll my tiny mobile home of a van some more, out the door, and where I ain't been before.

Thanks for your visit to this page. As always, I interested to know what you think of this site. How it can be improved. What you'd like to see. Where you'd like me to come do a show. Write me from my guestbook, keep in touch. See you around in your own town.

Blessings, Dana