Castlebay: Fred Gosbee and Julia Lane in Library Park, Bath, Maine. Credit: Martin Kummer. (Photo permission and courtesy of Castlebay.) Fred Gosbee grew up, fittingly, in Harmony, Maine. He was immersed from the day he was conceived in the traditional music of his family, whose elder members played and sang Irish and Scottish songs….
Marshall Dodge on the Maine Coast. Photo permission and courtesy of the Maine Public Broadcasting Network. I memorized my first “tall tale” when I was eight–years–old. It was 1958. My Uncle Bob had made a fallout shelter. It was the height of the Cold War. He wasn’t taking any chances. On March 11th of…
Painting by Mauritz Frederik Hendrik de Haas (1832–1895), Dutch–American painter. Beating to Windward in the English Channel (1872). Oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Art Collection of New Bedford Free Public Library. (Photo by Janice Hodson, Curator of Art, March 2016.) When I think of the ocean, especially the areas of the Atlantic sweeping away…
The crocuses are beginning to bloom! A sign promising the fullness of new growth. (Photo by A. Keith Carreiro, March 2016.) I am putting aside my regular blog posting this week to write, instead, about the progress made to date on the Penitent – Part One. While writing the past ten posts, I have been following…
Edward D. “Sandy” Ives, Director of the Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History [NAFOH], taken on stage at the Folksongs in February Festival held in Hauck Auditorium at the University of Maine at Orono on Feb. 11th and 12th, 1977. Photo taken at the end of the Saturday night performance of February 12th. Gordon Bok…
Stephen King (Rock Bottom Remainders (1994). Credit: Tabitha King 1994. Photo permission and Courtesy of Stephen King. While attending the University of Maine at Orono, I met many unique individuals there who left a lasting impact on my life. There was this one young fellow in particular who started writing a regular column in the…
(My Guitars – Storytellers All: Photo taken February 2016) Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart. —Andrés Segovia (21 February 1893–2 June 1987) Since the start of this New Year, I have been on a weekly reflective journey…
(Photo (c. 1941) of my Uncle Bob, U.S. Navy Air Corps.) My Uncle Bob Lawton was born and grew up on Sluice Pond, which is part of the Wyoma section of, Lynn, Massachusetts, “Where,” he would always quip, “I could swim, skate, sled, and ski in my backyard.” Uncle Bob was an inveterate storyteller. He…
(Left to Right: Photo of Dad, Vavo, Nina and Visitors to the Farm, c. 1928.) Although I am an only child, I had the opportunity to be raised by a variety of people in my extended and immediate family. When I became a toddler, my parents worked full-time and that left me in the loving…
Image above: “The Boyhood of Raleigh by Sir John Everett Millais [1829-1896], oil on canvas, 1870. A seafarer tells the young Sir Walter Raleigh and his brother the story of what happened out at sea.” Most dictionaries define a story as a narrative account of a real or imagined event or events. Within the…