Tag: Fly Lines

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Idaho Playlist

Did you know that if you took any song written about Mexico, and changed it to Idaho, the meter still worked? That’s why Canadians sing “South of the border/Down Idaho way.“

What We Took

We took gear for trout. We took a 3-weight rod, a 4-weight rod, and two 5-weights, and we never took the 4-weight out of the luggage. I liked the flimsy 3-weight just fine until it got windy, but it got windy a lot so I finally gave it up for the 5-weight. Both rods I took were Winstons, a new Pure 5-weight that Trout Unlimited sent me because I won their annual spelling bee, and a Boron IIIX that I picked up at a Gordy & Son’s remainder sale because Winston came out with the Pure. Kris took her Helios 3D 5 weight. I fished it for just a bit. I’m used to big booming saltwater rods. I’m not used to big booming trout rods. That rod is a big booming trout rod.

We took floating lines and some 5x and 6x leaders I’d tied. We didn’t use the 6x, and I think the guides laughed at me for owning 6x tippet. We took some reels, a couple of Abels, a Ross, a Hardy, but I caught exactly one fish on the reel, and then I was reeling in my line for a pause in fishing when for some unfathomable reason a fish hit the skating fly.

We took waders and boots for Silver Creek, but didn’t take them on the Middle Fork. The guides strongly discouraged waders in the boats, something about getting thrown out, waders filling with water, and drowning. All things being equal I’d just as soon not.

Our gear was limited by the weight we could take on the bush plane, 30 pounds apiece, and I was already taking 11 pounds of guitar and case. I paired down and then paired down again. Instead of taking all ten foam hoppers that I’d tied, I only took five. Really. I’m stupid.

We took a bottle of Four Roses bourbon in honor of William Faulkner’s birthday, and poured the contents into a plastic water bottle to save weight. Happy birthday William!

I gave myself a new guitar case for my birthday, a Visesnut, maybe the best guitar case made (though they make a carbon fiber model for about $800 more). For years I’ve traveled with a cheap 3/4 size classical that I would stow in the overhead bin. Coming through Chicago Midway on Labor Day I talked to a guy who always checked his guitar with his luggage, and when I asked Kris if I should get a better case and check my guitars she immediately said yes please. Apparently with a guitar case on a plane I’m a nuisance.

We took too many clothes, but that’s probably because we had great weather. I discovered that I really liked wearing a fishing shirt on the water, the kind with lots of pockets, because, well, pockets. When I just wore a knit pullover I wanted pockets.

I bought a new pair of shoes for the trip, Simms Riprap wet wading shoe. They worked great, except that I didn’t wear socks until the final day on the water. I should have worn socks. They’re better with socks.

What We Lost. Where We Didn’t Go.

Kris destroyed her IPhone on Silver Creek by dunking it. I destroyed my Nikon Coolpix W300 waterproof camera on Silver Creek by ignoring the warnings about cleaning the seals and then dunking it. If you ignore the warnings it’s not waterproof. I had to take pictures the rest of the trip with my GoPro, which was better for stills than I thought it would be. Kris had to use my phone. She takes most of the photos I post, and is better at it than I am.

We didn’t go to McCall or Couer d’Alene, both of which my parents loved 60 years ago. I’m sure they haven’t changed. We didn’t fish the Henry’s Fork.

What We Ate.

On the way out of Boise we stopped by the Basque Block and bought a baguette and cheese, which got us to Ketchum. Ketchum is a strange mix of college town sans college and affluent resort, but I enjoyed the Pioneer Saloon, where I had a long conversation with an older south Idaho rancher and his daughter about barrel racing, how I could never break 20 seconds as a kid, and why I don’t much like horses. Some of us just aren’t really horse whisperers.

The guides kept us fed on the river, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In order of dinner entrees: fried chicken, pork chops, fajitas, salmon, steak. It was always excellent, though Idahoans could use some advice on how to serve tortillas. I got two deserts on my birthday, though one may have been for William Faulkner.

Books

I’ve already written about Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, which stands alone as a peculiarly great book about Idaho. Hemingway famously died there, but he didn’t really write anything important in Idaho except maybe A Moveable Feast, and that’s about Paris. But did you know that Hemingway’s buddy Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho?

Ezra Pound is at the heart of American literature, he really is. I like some of his poems very much, and there is still no writing more beautiful to me than Pound’s The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

Ezra Pound circa 1913, doing his best Bob Dylan, from the Paris Review.

That said, I suspect I wouldn’t have much liked Pound in the flesh. Since college, whenever I’ve thought of Idaho, I’ve wondered how Pound could have been bred and born in Hailey? I finally looked it up. Turns out he was born there because his broke father took a political appointment in Hailey’s general land office. He was born and then a month later Mom left one of the most beautiful places on earth for New York City because she wouldn’t raise her son in such a God-forsaken wilderness. Dad soon followed. It explains a lot.

Baseball

When we left Ketchum and civilization, the Astros had clinched the American League West. When we got back to Salmon they had clinched home field advantage over the Yankees and the Dodgers. It was a good way to return to WiFi. That whole Ukraine thing happened with the President too.

Birds

Kris birds, seriously birds, as in she’s permanently attached to a pair of binoculars and a birding guide, and she spent as much time in Idaho looking at her copy of Peterson’s New Birder’s Guide as I spent playing the guitar. There are birds, eagles and ospreys, that fish for a living, and we saw ospreys but we never saw an eagle. She was thrilled with the osprey skull found at a campsite.

There is a small bird on the river, called an ouzel by the guides but the American dipper by the guidebooks. It lives in the rocks by the river and is a delight and joy. They’re the only aquatic songbird in America, and one dusk when we heard a bird song I said to Kris that sounds like a mockingbird. Of course I always tell Kris every pretty bird song is a mockingbird, even when in Idaho where there are no mockingbirds, but for once I was sort of right; it was an ouzel. The New Birder’s Guide said its strong sweet tones sound like a mockingbird. And they do.

Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren – American Dipper, from Wikimedia Commons.

Music

After Kris got tired of my collection of Josh Ritter (which is surprisingly extensive, and his Wolves is a great favorite), she found a bunch of songs with Idaho in the name or the lyrics and an internet comment that said there are a lot of songs with Idaho in the name or the lyrics, none of which have much to do with Idaho. Like I said, you can substitute Idaho for Mexico anytime you want, and it looks like lots of songwriters do.

Victor Wooten, a well-known jazz bassist and the bassist for Bella Fleck and the Flecktones, was born in Idaho. His parents were military, and he apparently stayed about as long as Ezra Pound.

  • b-52s, Private Idaho. I could do without ever hearing this song again.
  • Riders in the Sky, Idaho (Where I’m From). Ranger Doug is a great Western Swing guitarist, and Too Slim is responsible for the Paul is Dead Hoax.
  • Bryan Lanning, Idaho. It is stunning that there are so many songs called Idaho. This may be the only pop anthem called Idaho.
  • IDAHO, To Be the One. And this may be the only band called Idaho. I’d change my name, just because it’s so hard to google.
  • Gregory Alan Isakov. Idaho.
  • Gorillaz, Idaho. Bon Iver meets Harry Nilsson, and I’m not sure it works,.
  • BoDeans, Idaho. I’m just a BoDeans kinda guy. They’re from Wisconsin.
  • Jeffrey Foucault, Idaho. I liked this. Foucault is also from Wisconsin, and this song would have worked if sung about Mexico.
  • Y La Bamba. Idaho’s Genius. A Spanish lament out of Portland that mentions Idaho. I should have had these people on our Portland playlist.
  • Hot Buttered Rum, Idaho Pines. Bluegrass. Tennessee mountain music about Idaho.
  • Caitlin Canty, Idaho. Clean voices, clean guitars. Good Nashville.
  • Down Like Silver, Idaho. This is also Caitlin Canty, with Peter Bradley Adams. She must have a thing for Idaho.
  • Ron Pope, Twin Falls Idaho. Road song. More ok Nashville, but it’s kind of the problem with songs about Idaho: they don’t have to be about Idaho. It’s convenient. It’s exotic. It’s a place to yearn for in a sadly yearning sort of way.
  • Rick Pickren, Here We Have Idaho. This is the state song. It’s kind of a polka song.
  • Jeremy McComb, Bury Me in Idaho. McComb was born in Idaho. McComb sounds like he’s from Nashville. What is it with Nashville and Idaho?
  • Old Bear Mountain, Idaho. More Idaho Bluegrass.
  • Ronee Blakly, Idaho Home. This was from Robert Altman’s Nashivlle. Inauthentic old-time Nashville meets Idaho, and Blakly is still authentically great.
  • Clare Burson, Take Good Care. I don’t know what this song has to do with Idaho.
  • Cori Connors, Idaho Wind. I don’t know what this song has to do with Idaho.
  • Rosalie Sorrels, Way Out In Idaho. Sorrels was part of the 50s-60s folk movement, and recorded a number of Idaho timber and mining songs. They’re very earnest.
Tony Rees, John Renbourn and Stefan Grossman, 1978, Norwich Folk Festival.
  • John Renbourn, Idaho Potato. For guitarists of a certain type and age, Renbourn is a hero. This is classic Renbourn. If I were picking out a road trip playlist, this would be my Idaho song.
  • Drew Barefoot, Idaho. Instrumental that would fit just fine on an Ennio Morricone Spaghetti Western soundtrack.
  • David Robert King, Bad Thing. This guy listened to too much Tom Waits as a child. This is off his album “Idaho.”
  • The Eisenhauers, Idaho. Every time this came on I had to pick up the phone to see who sounded so great. They’re Canadian. I think they thought they were writing about Mexico.
  • Amy Annelle, Idaho. Annelle is from Austin, and has a troubled medical history and a lovely voice. Apparently writing about Idaho in Austin isn’t quite the thing that it is in Nashville. She’s the only Austin musician on the list.

All those songs called “Idaho?” You may not believe it but every one is a different song. If I ever write a song I think I’ll call it Idaho, and it will never mention Idaho once.

Reckless Kelly is from Idaho. I think of them as an Austin band. My fail.

One song named Idaho stood out: Idaho by Afroman. “Idaho, Idaho, Idaho baby/potatoes ain’t the only thing they grow.” Then the song gets obscene. Really really party rap obscene. Don’t listen to this with your children. Don’t listen to this if you’re squeamish. I’m squeamish, but it was funny to listen to once or twice.

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Chicago Flyfish, Smallmouth, September 1, 2019

We fished with Kurt Nelson, co-owner of Midwest Waters Anglers. I picked Midwest by the worst possible method: I googled Chicago – flyfish – guide, and they were the first website that popped up. It’s a good website, and I got lucky, Kurt’s a fine guide. Illinois isn’t exactly a destination fishery, and Kurt said most of his clients lived in the City or are in Chicago for family or business. Like me probably a lot of people get to Kurt via Google.

Midwest Waters apparently guides several rivers around the City, and where we fished was the most urban, but Kurt said his other rivers were blown out from rain. We fished the 28-mile DuPage River, in Chicago suburbia, from Plainfield eight miles down river to Joliet. We were usually isolated by vegetation, but sometimes we floated past backyards, and sometimes we could hear the whack of golf balls from the golf course and race a golf cart. We passed under roadways and train tracks and power lines that sizzled with current. We passed by large engines that we couldn’t see but that were too large for tractors and too immobile for trains. There were some kayakers, but not many–during the summer there would be a tube hatch, but not this late. For such an urban place the river and the banks were surprisingly clean.

We put in at a canoe launch near Plainfield. Kurt fished a StealthCraft drift boat with a 30 HP Yamaha jet motor. That’s a pretty big motor, but we only used it as a convenient snag for my fly line.  Even with the obstacle I would rather fish from a drift boat than just about anything, and this was a big comfortable boat. There are, after all, always obstacles just waiting to snag your fly line. My feet never got wet, and I’m certain that thanks to the boat it never rained. Ok, maybe not that last.

There was steady current from bank to bank, without a lot of river drama: we weren’t reading seams or casting to rocks. We did look for eddies, but they were always where a tree or bank cut stopped the current for a few feet. There was some water clarity, not much but some. It was also overcast, which didn’t help visibility. Kurt said it was usually clear enough to sight cast, clear in part because of invasive zebra mussels. We fished for smallmouth, though I did cast for carp once or twice, casting to mud puffs in the water. Kris caught a nice fish early on a medium yellow popper, ten minutes from the launch. It was dark green with bronze fins, a couple of pounds, exactly what a smallmouth should be.

Over the course of the day I fished a big deer hair frog and medium yellow poppers, Bougles, both cast to the banks then drifted like dry flies with periodic pops or gurgles. I never catch fish with frogs, and I didn’t disappoint this time. Consistency is important, and bad juju with frogs is one of those things at which I’m consistent. They always look so excellent, cost so much, and then fail me because, well, me. I just can’t fish them with conviction.

Kurt Nelson photo

I caught some fish on the poppers, at least one anyway, and Kris happily fished poppers most of the day. Most of the fish I caught were on a purple conehead woolly bugger variant, maybe a size 6 or 8, tied with grizzly hackle and lots of green rubber legs wrapped behind the conehead. I fished them like a dead drift nymph, waiting for any line tick or hesitation. That was new for me and woolly buggers, which I usually retrieve like a streamer. Since the fly often ticked along the bottom I must have hook set a thousand times for the five or six fish I caught. If Kurt had charged by the hook set he’d be a rich man. 

I really should learn to take pictures of the flies I fish. I never take enough pictures.

I caught my biggest fish, about two pounds, when for some reason I let the line rest midstream on my a backcast, and then Kurt yelled did you see that! when I picked up to cast. Of course I didn’t see it. I was facing the bank and my back was to the fly. I lay the fly down and the smallmouth came again for it. Luck, dumb luck, I wish I could be as consistently good with luck as I am consistently bad with big deer hair frogs. 

Kurt Nelson photo

There was lots of riverside vegetation, and lots of floating grass from the week prior’s rain. I did plenty of vegan fishing in the trees, and most retrieves required grass removal. There was river grass piled at my feet where I cleaned the line and my fly.  Sorry Kurt.

I reckon we cast a thousand times between us, and by the end of the day my shoulder ached and my forearm began to cramp. We cast, and then cast some more, and then cast for a while. By late in the day we were worn out and lazy, just flinging the fly to any old place and maybe letting it sit just a wee bit longer than strictly speaking could be considered fishing as opposed to hanging out.

We didn’t take our own rods, and one of the things I realized was how much I like to fish with guides’ stuff. They pick their stuff well. Kurt fished nice Hatch reels, but more striking were the rods, one piece rods, which I’d never cast before. Used to be ferrules were considered a design flaw and the fewer the better, but even then one piece rods were rare. These were Loomis IMG Pros, 8’10, 7 weight for me and 8 weight for Kris, and casting was a joy. Yeah, there were lots of tangles in grass and trees, but I never minded taking risks with that rod, and most of my casts did more or less what I wanted them to do, which was first not to hook me or anybody else and second to go somewhere in the vicinity of the bank.

Kurt fished short leaders, maybe 7 feet, but they were longer than what I usually use for bass, and they were tapered a bit, with a butt of maybe 25 pound and a 16 pound tippet.  He said that sometimes he used a mid section, but that because of the floating grass he wanted fewer knots. The leader worked well though, and the flies turned over. The grass I caught was usually on the flies anyway, and the single knot was rarely a problem.  

The fly line was a bass line with an aggressive front taper, maybe a Rio smallmouth line? I fished a streamer for a bit, a pretty white baitfish thing tied on maybe a size 4, on an intermediate tipped sinking line. That line was a monster. It was also a magnet for grass, so I didn’t fish it long.

Kurt pointed out something interesting, something that explained a lot to me about smallmouth.  Some fish fight the hook, some fish don’t, and then there are variations in between. I’ll never understand, for instance, the Gulf Coast popularity of speckled trout: it’s like catching grass on an Illinois river. Once hooked it’s done, and even the hook-up isn’t all that exciting. Largemouth are great fun but it’s mostly fun in the violence of the first few minutes, especially for bigger fish. Smallmouth never give up. They take like largemouth and then they don’t stop until they’re in the net. Then they swim away.

Like I said, Illinois is not a destination fishery, but Chicago is a destination city. While I’m in no hurry to fish the DuPage again, I’ll fish again near Chicago next time I’m there. I’d fish with Kurt again in a heartbeat. It reminded me of the Broken Bow in Oklahoma, not the river itself, but how the river fits in its space. If you live near there, in Dallas or Tulsa for the Broken Bow or Chicago for the DuPage, if that is your river, it is a very good river. No one will ever know and appreciate that river like the angler who gets to fish it three or four times every summer, year after year. You can learn a lot on the DuPage, not because it’s magnificent, or beautiful, or any sort of superlative, but because of days floated and green and bronze fish, some lost, some caught, some watched, because special knowledge of that river is yours. You could learn everything you need to know about fly fishing on that river, and with Kurt. I liked the river, but I was a visitor for a day. It would be an entirely different place if it were home. It could be a good home.

Follow Fifty Flyfish on Facebook. Illinois was state 14.

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Alabama Packing List

What We Took.

Rods

On the Tallapoosa we didn’t expect big fish. We threw a lot of stuff in the car, helter skelter, but we intended to fish with five weight rods, and that’s all we set up for the float. Kris had her Helios D3, and I had the new Winston Pure that Trout Unlimited had sent me for my high school graduation.

So far I’ve caught largemouth, bluegill, longear, redeye, Alabama bass, and a really big catfish on the Pure. It’s an excellent trout rod I’m sure, and someday I plan to catch a trout with it. With the rod Trout Unlimited also sent a Cheeky Reel, which must be the single gaudiest unobtrusive reel ever made. It’s an electric blue and green. It’s also disk drag, smooth and silent, and I don’t fish much with five weight disk drags, smooth and silent. After I put it on the rod I never really noticed the reel was there. Like I said, at once gaudy and unobtrusive.

I have lots of five weight reels, so I loaded the new reel with something different for streamers and poppers, a Scientific Anglers half-weight heavy MPX line. I don’t know what MPX stands for, but I’m used to big weight forward lines for redfish and bass and I liked the MPX. It’s probably the worst possible combination with the Pure, mixing a medium slow rod with a half-weight heavy line to make it faster, but there you are. The combination worked fine for Alabama, where neither the bass nor the legislature is big on subtlety.

I do have one beef with the Winston rod. It has a hook keeper, a rather large, sharpish hook keeper which when combined with the cigar grip and my choked up hand position rubbed my index finger raw. Does anyone actually use hook keepers? Why are they still put on rods? I guess I’ve got lots of rods with hook keepers and cigar grips, but that combination on the Pure really rubbed me the wrong way. All afternoon. And it’s an ugly hook keeper too, and ugliness isn’t part of the whole Winston thing.

Flies

My leaders were a highly technical design: Three or four feet of 20 pound fluorocarbon joined to three or four feet of 16 pound fluorocarbon by a blood knot. They worked fine.

A month or so before we went to Kansas Alabama I lost most of my bass and sunfish flies, four fly boxes worth. They were returned by a Good Samaritan, but not before I’d frantically tied a bunch of new flies, including (at the suggestion of a Kansan I’d been emailing) some Barr’s slumpbusters. Other than the disreputable baseball tie-in, I really like that fly, and fished it about a third of our river time in Alabama. I also tied some BBBs, woolly buggers, and clousers, and used none of them. I tied everything but the BBBs on size 8 streamer hooks, so they should be fine as well for our New York/Vermont/New Hampshire trout swing at the end of June. Of course the whole point of that trip is to learn something about dry flies, so I shouldn’t use them. I really shouldn’t.

The rest of the time we fished poppers. Craig didn’t bother calling them anything but Boogles, which is exactly right. I know there are people out there who tie their own poppers, but I never could get them painted in a way that made me happy, so I am happy to use Boogles. Craig fished with an intermediate size, neither as large nor as small as the ones I usually use. I’m going to have to buy some intermediate Boogles. East Alabama Fly Fishing has an excellent discussion on popper colors, and when to use them. It’s the kind of cool stuff that Craig and the guide service owner, Drew Morgan, are thinking about.

New Shoes

I’m a biting bug magnet. This spring alone I’ve suffered from infestations of gnats, mosquitoes, and fire ants. There’s nothing quite like a couple of hundred fire ants together with your feet in a pair of Keen sandals.

I figure that I’m not likely to pay more attention, so I bought a pair of cornflower blue Converse high tops for our trip to Kansas Alabama. Paired with running socks and some supplemental arch support for the aged they’re pretty comfortable. There’s reasonable traction, and I don’t have to worry about fire ants between my toes. Plus the cornflower blue matches my eyes when I stick my foot in my mouth.

The laces will catch a fly, so it’s another reason to debarb hooks.

I think Kris prefers snake boots, and the Chuck Taylors probably don’t provide much snake protection.

Restaurants, Barbecue

Coming into Alabama, the lady at the visitor center sent us to a Dick Russell’s for barbecue. It wasn’t really so much a barbecue place as a plate-and-three place, with an incredibly good two instead of three and pretty mediocre barbecue as the meat. I had turnip greens and black-eyed peas, and I’d go back for them. They also didn’t have white sauce barbecue, which southern Alabama is known for: Mayonnaise, vinegar, brown sugar, mustard, horseradish, salt and pepper. It sounds awful for pork or beef, but is supposed to be great on chicken.

In Montgomery everyone I talked to told us to eat at Central, which was around the corner on the same block as our hotel. It was the kind of elegant modern American place which seems to be everywhere and because of which the world is better off, and on a Saturday night it was crowded. One of the servers suggested Cahawba for biscuits the next morning for their breakfast biscuit sandwiches. The cheese in the eggs was a bit much, but the biscuits were excellent. I’ve never baked a decent biscuit, though from time to time I try. Because of my own failures I admire the craft of a good biscuit.

Back in Mobile heading home we ate breakfast at Time to Eat, which had the only Amnesty International and Human Rights Campaign stickers on doors in Alabama, and a smoking room. We accidentally ate in the smoking room. It had good grits, and the view of the locals coming in to smoke and drink coffee was pretty memorable.

In Louisiana we tried to get po’ boys in Lafayette, one of the great po’boy towns, but everyplace was closed for Memorial Day.

Where We Didn’t Go

We didn’t see Birmingham, home of both the AA Birmingham Barons and the former Negro League Birmingham Black Barons, for whom Willie Mays, Satchel Paige, and, of all people, Charlie Pride played. Pride and another player were apparently traded to the Barons in 1956 by the Louisville Clippers for a team bus. Everyone seems to like Birmingham, and it was once, along with Memphis and Atlanta, the industrial heart of the South.

The Northern part of the state is supposed to have gorgeous waterfalls. Our guide Craig Godwin said it was the prettiest part of the state.

We didn’t try enough barbecue, and we didn’t catch a redfish on the coast. The same server who suggested Cahawba for biscuits suggested the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, Montgomery having been Zelda’s home. It didn’t open until noon on Sunday, so we didn’t make it.

Playlist

I didn’t know that Charlie Pride played for the Birmingham Black Barons, or he would have been included.

  • Alabama Shakes. This is one of those bands I follow because of their appearance on Austin City Limits. There’s just nothing not to like, except that I guess they may not exist any more.
  • Emmylou Harris. I probably have more Emmylou Harris music than anything else. For someone who doesn’t write many songs, she’s consistently had the best taste in music, and has a liberating way of making other people’s songs her own. I actually needed to cut 50 or so songs so I could hear something else, but I just never got around to it. She was a military brat, and didn’t spend much time in Alabama after she was born there, but being born there was enough of an excuse to listen to Emmylou. And of course there was “Boulder to Birmingham.”
  • John Prine, “Angel From Montgomery.” I had versions by Susan Tedeschi and Bonnie Raitt, but oddly I first knew the song from a high school John Denver record. It was a good version.
Handy’s Memphis Orchestra, 1918.
  • Paul Simon, “Loves Me Like a Rock,” “Kodachrome.” First I ever heard of Muscle Shoals, sometime circa 1973.
  • Arthur Conley, “Sweet Soul Music.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Wilson Pickett, “Land of 1000 Dances,” “Hey Jude,” “Mustang Sally.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band, “Old Time Rock & Roll.” Muscle Shoals.
  • James & Bobby Purify, “I’m Your Puppet.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Clarence Carter, “Snatching it Back.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Jimmy Cliff, “Sitting in Limbo.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Etta James. James, from California, had a long and strange career, and she recorded a lot of fine rhythm & blues, but none finer than what she recorded in 1967 in Muscle Shoals. “Tell Mama,” “I’d Rather Go Blind.”
  • Aretha Franklin, “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” “I Never Loved a Man.” Muscle Shoals.
  • The Staple Singers, “I’ll Take You There.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Percy Sledge, “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Just try not to sing along. Muscle Shoals.
  • The Rolling Stones, “Brown Sugar,” “Wild Horses.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Ma Rainey, “Bo-Weevil Blues,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “See See Rider.” Rainey made some of the first important blues recordings, and the available versions are pretty poor quality. She said she was born in Georgia, but scholars think she was born in Alabama five years before the year she admitted to. Charlie Pride did the same thing in minor league baseball, and this is now known in baseball circles as Dominican Aging Syndrome.
Ma Rainey, 1917.
  • Hank Williams. What a lot of great songs in a too short life. There’s a Williams museum In Montgomery, but it closed before we got to it.
  • Erskine Hawkins, “Tuxedo Junction.” I had versions by Hawkins, Glen Miller, Duke Ellington, and Manhattan Transfer. Tuxedo Junction was a blues bar in Birmingham. One of the great happy songs.
  • W.C. Handy. Ma Rainey is the mother of the blues, and Handy is the father. I had the Louis Armstrong plays W.C. Handy recording. If I’d known “Loveless Love” was by Handy I would have included the Billie Holiday version. I probably should have included Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” as well, in honor of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, but it’s a tough song to contemplate, as is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. One was enough.
  • Alabama, “Dixieland Delight,” “Song of the South.” I liked these more than I thought I would.

On principal I did not download “Sweet Home Alabama.” I meant to download a selection by St. Paul and the Broken Bones, but never got around to it. If you’ve never watched the Muscle Shoals documentary, Muscle Shoals, do. Muscle Shoals is some of the best of Alabama because, well, it’s some of the best of all of us.

Guitar.

I took the Kohno since we were driving, but then worried about the heat of the day when it had to live in the car while we went down the river. I worked on the Allemande movement of the first Bach Cello suite, the Duarte transcription that I always associate with Segovia. I’ve been told that Duarte was kind of a jerk, but it’s a good transcription, and the Allemande is actually my favorite movement. I can’t remember it for anything.