Yoshiaki Matsuda – he was the first real Japanese person I ever met. Small and wiry, only a little older than I, he had an infectious laugh and a beautiful tenor singing voice with a hint of silky vibrato. I spoke no Japanese, he spoke only a little broken English, but we had a great summer working together. You see, when I was still in high school, I had a great job. I worked at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in Savannah, Georgia. I thought of myself as a budding scientist at the time, and I was making money while working in what I thought might be my career field. Yoshiaki, or Yoshi as he was known there, was a visiting oceanographic graduate student from Japan. He and I worked long hours together on a research project designed to determine [...]

Christ the Lord is Risen Today — Alleluia!

To be honest, I thought Gatorland would be another of those theme parks with fiberglassed, high-tech, imitation reality. Oh, I thought there would probably be an overfed gator or two lounging in the sunlight, but I expected little more. I was utterly and pleasantly surprised. First of all, Gatorland predates some of the other more famous parks – by quite a bit. Gatorland appeared in the Orlando area in 1948, and since that time it has expanded from 16 acres to more than 100 acres. Patty and I came mostly to see if we could get some photos of gators that we could use in a video for our song “Gators for Sale or The Ballad of Lord Chesterfield.” We weren’t disappointed in that quest. There were gators ranging from six inches long to massive gators that weighed in at [...]

The Barberville Pioneer Settlement for the Creative Arts in Barberville, Florida is a tiny place. It’s hard to even call it a real place. It’s kind of like a tangible memory preserved in time – a complete, self-contained artistic settlement comprised of area structures dating from the late nineteenth century. Rustic, but excellently preserved buildings include a schoolhouse, a church, a post office, a train depot, a blacksmith shop, a barn, and more. Gardens, livestock, and a raucous population of peacocks also share the space. And at least twice a year, the settlement becomes the weekend home of a folk music festival. Sound Traveler has just returned from participating in the 2011 Spring Frolic at Barberville, and we’re still smiling from the memories. One of the great things about a folk festival is that you get to see a lot [...]

Sometimes when we’re performing I might say, in an attempt to be humorous, “The next song is an original, not our original, but an original nonetheless.” There are people who are only interested in groups that produce original songs. These folks can be rather insistent on their preference. There are others who get bored pretty quickly if they don’t recognize what you are playing. “Play something that we know and can dance to,” they might say. There is a good reason to play covers. Cover songs have been around for a long time, and the ones that survive usually have some merit. Audiences already know how the song is supposed to feel. Audience members also know some, if not all of the words, even if they don’t understand each word that you say; they already know the message. Often audience [...]

It is the opening sequence of The Muppet Movie. The singer appears a little green, well really very green as he plays his banjo and sings one of the most powerful songs I’ve ever heard. The voice is weirdly compelling, despite the fact that it is clearly a “put-on” or character voice. The melody is alternately complex and whimsical as it slides through some unexpected changes, yet it is fully simple enough for one to sing along with, even upon first hearing. Then there is the lyric. What a lyric! Dispassionately the song begins by giving a brief, bottom-line, somewhat scientific description of a physical weather phenomenon – rainbows. It concludes by demonstrating the emotional impact produced when our spirits dance in the refracted light of a seemingly magical event. The writer, as evidenced by the lyric, chooses the latter [...]

We’ve been so many places and done so many things this past week. We played two performances at the Sarasota Folk Festival, at the beautiful Oscar Scherer State Park. While we were there we also taught a class on “Playing Well with Others.” If you go to you tube and type in Sukiyaki Sound Traveler, you can see us play one of our songs from the festival. On Sunday night, after the gathering, we leaned back, sipped some wine, and shared a beautiful evening in the vacant campground before going to sleep. Once we had drifted off, rumblings could be heard in the distance. Soon the rumblings were directly overhead, and we were caught in a deluge of seemingly biblical proportions. Our tent was buffeted (not Jimmy Buffeted) by vicious wind and rain while the flashes of lightning and crashing [...]