Tuesday, January 10

Before he got eighty-sixed at Laurel Hill for riding around in his golf cart, drunk, Uncle Wayne was a regular at bluegrass festivals throughout the south.

He had a disability pension from the Air Force, for being crippled with arthritis from a fall on the ice in Korea, and could afford to go to festivals, and drink, without having to hold a job, and Uncle Wayne cut a wide swath on the circuit for years.

Potter was a bluegrass stalwart. Once ABC filmed a special called Red, White, and Bluegrass, about parking-lot pickers, and featured Potter, who had presence, more than the acts on stage. Doyle Lawson was miffed about that.

Bill Monroe once asked Potter to pick rhythm guitar and sing lead with the Bluegrass Boys, but Potter refused, saying he didn't want to live on a bus. At the time, he was divorced from his common-law wife, Suzette, and living in her VW van, in Navarre Campground, heating water for coffee in a tin can.

Janice used to write for Bluegrass Unlimited. As a free-lancer writer she interviewed Ernest, when he played out at the beach--know what I mean, Vern?--and said he was sexy. She interviewed Jerry Reed, when he played at the Ocean Opry, before he made the buddy movies. That is, movies with his pal, Buddy Reynolds.

David "Jug" Brown was a writer, as country music songwriters call themselves. When the Gillis Brothers were folk masters at Wolf Trap, and had the picture in the program with Owen playing fiddle with them, Darrell McCall was also a folk master. He invited David to attend, as his guest, but Jug couldn't get off from his job driving a cement truck to go.

Lowell has a bluegrass band. Lowell won the Martin guitar Balder plays at a festival, had Randy Wood set it up, and sold it to Balder.

Gerald is a fan. He supports the groups Owen and Balder are in by buying their records.

So it was natural our boys would be exposed to the music, and the atmosphere of bluegrass festivals, and the good country people you meet at bluegrass festivals, from an early age.

A bluegrass festival was a good place to take kids, growing up.

They could play, safely, with other kids their age, outside. They could listen to grown-ups tell stories around the campfire. They could hear music being played, live, on acoustic instruments. If they played themselves, they could join a jam session and would be invited to play a song they knew. Older musicians would show them licks.

There were no black people, no Yankees, and many of the women were stay-at-home moms, who raised kids, sewed, cooked, and kept the house in order.

Average Americans. White folks. Working people.

African-Americans were welcome, if they acted right. Anyone who loved bluegrass loved jazz, blues, rhythm-and-blues. Black music. Why, black music was almost as original an American art-form as bluegrass music.

Yankees were welcome. Everybody knows I love Yankees. Bless their cold little hearts.

Feminists were welcome. You can't keep a woman down on the farm after she's seen TV. Can't keep them barefoot and pregnant. They want to be liberated. Who can blame them? They deserve a break today. At McDonald’s.

I saw a parallel between what I was doing in my life, as an artist, and the bluegrass way of life, where the artists went where the fans were, knew their fans firsthand, produced their own records and sold them at festivals, after a show, worked on the bus, dug privies, sweated and got dirty, shared recipes, minded other people's children, called on the sick, held benefits for victims of illness or accident or death. Took care of their own. Kept it in the family. Stuck with their friends.

Made white liquor, grew pot.

Rock and roll, then the Nashville Sound, pushed bluegrass musicians off the Grand Ole Opry. Bluegrass bands had to record albums to sell in truck stops. Yuppies buying cowboy boots made them switch to Hushpuppies, or running shows. Or maybe it was weight problems and bad feet. Age. The population aged. Their fan-base aged.

But always young, hot pickers came up. Pickers steeped in the tradition, and the values. The lore.

I was a hot young underground writer, once. Selling pamphlets after poetry readings.

The bullfight poster! The Chianti bottle with a candle in it! The beat chicks!

Now I'm old. An old beatnik.

2007 is the 50th anniversary of my high school graduating class.

I still have my dream, though.

I dream of playing the swinette on stage, at Americana music festivals, selling my books at the record table afterwards. A swinette, you stretch two horsehairs across a hog's ass and pick it with your teeth. Brew mounts the steps, walks across the stage with great dignity, takes a stuffed Miss Piggy doll out from under his robes, lifts her skirt, presses her butt to his face, and squeals like a stuck pig. Great cry and little wool, as the Devil said when he sheared the hogs.

Swinette-pickers of the world, unite!

Sex, drugs, and Flatt and Scruggs!

In January 2006 I finished writing a long book that summed up everything I'd been doing to that point.

BLUE-COLLAR REDNECK: WHY WON'T NOBODY HIRE ME TO BE A WRITER?

A memoir. 125,000 words. In three parts, like a job interview. "Employment History," "Education," "Honors and Awards."

I finished the book and started writing another book, as I do.

I called the new book AFTER BLUE-COLLAR REDNECK: AN ONLINE JOURNAL (OLJ), an homage to May Sarton's After the Stroke: A Journal.

I used to work with a black guy who called Lemonhart 151° rum "I fit one."

He also called his wife, Evelyn, "Typhoon Evelyn." "Typhoon Evelyn come."

His wife hadn't joined him on an accompanied tour yet, and he was living in the barracks, partying with the bargirls in the village.

I felt like I had gotten something out of my system. Unburdened myself. Like I had reached a turning point. Like I was making a fresh start. After the hurricane.

(We had had relatives from Hurricane Katrina underfoot for four months. They had just returned to Slidell, to live in a FEMA trailer. That was a relief.)

So. An online journal. Something brisk, and easy to write. Nothing weighty.

I had written, and published, over 100 books on the worldwide web, at The Daily Bugle, roman-feuilleton.com, and The Daily Bulletin, so it wasn't exactly a fresh start.

But I needed a new attitude.

I was trying to will myself into a better attitude. To accept writing and publishing on the worldwide web, or through small, independent presses, and not get down about the failure of New York to publish my books. To see that as New York's failure, not mine, and go about my business.

LitVision Press had recently published Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family, and AFTER BLUE-COLLAR REDNECK: AN ONLINE JOURNAL (OLJ) would be about me making a side-trip to Fairhope, Alabama, to read and sign books, at Page and Palette bookstore. About barnstorming for poetry along the Redneck Riviera. In the family car, your father's Oldsmobile. Out of the trunk of which I sold books. Like a bluegrass musician.

But what to write after that?

I liked to have one manuscript out there being read by New York editors and agents (BLUE-COLLAR REDNECK), one book in progress (AFTER BLUE-COLLAR REDNECK), and a projected book, the book I would write when I finished the book that I was in.

2007 would be the 50th anniversary of my high school class in Delray Beach. I was thinking about writing a book for the class reunion, THE CLASS OF '57 HAD ITS DREAMS, after the Statler Brothers song.

I had a dream. I was going to be a writer. Like the writers I was reading.

I would write series of related books, books like Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Black Spring. Castle to Castle, Rigadoon, North. Or, later, A Fan's Notes, Pages From a Cold Island, Last Notes From Home.

Post Office, Women, Factotum, Ham On Rye.

Then I got a Bluegrass Unlimited magazine in the mail and saw that there was going to be an Everglades Bluegrass Festival, in Ojus, in February.

I decided to go down there for that and call it research. I could visit Delray Beach while I was there.

That was it.

The bluegrass, underground writer connection.

THE CLASS OF '57 HAD ITS DREAMS, BY JACK SAUNDERS, THE SWINETTE-PICKER OF AMERICAN LETTERS.

Isn't there a jam band called Blueground Undergrass? Of course there is. Rev. Jeff Mosier. He's played with Dread Clampitt.

For the last several books I have been writing about the relation between, or among, roots music, folk art, vernacular writing, independent films, and repertory, or community theater.

The do-it-yourself, no-logo ethic versus corporate publishers, record companies, movie studios, Broadway, commercial broadcasting, slick magazines, galleries and dealers, museums. Critics. Grants and prizes.

Well, you'll see.

Read on. Enjoy. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. Picture Mel Brooks singing "Dancing in the Dark" an octave too high. Fred Astaire trying for a comeback, in The Band Wagon. Get on the band wagon.

What else are you going to do? Quit?

What--and leave show business? No, it's press on to Boulogne, brave boy.

As Tristram Shandy said.

I would write a book like Tristram Shandy.