When I was living by myself in Atlanta, if Owen was playing anywhere nearby, on the weekends, I would go and hear him.

He was playing with Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver, so they played big festivals, with good bands. Although once I went to see them play in a church in Bainbridge, Georgia, by themselves. But that was a more intimate gathering than two shows a day at a festival.

They played Everett's Barn. That was an intimate setting. One band, two sets, plus the house band.

Once at a concert in Gainesville, Georgia, Ralph Stanley's fiddle player was sick, so Doyle loaned Ralph Owen. Owen knew the Stanley Brothers book, from playing with the Gillis Brothers, who knew the songs as well as Ralph and Carter Stanley. And Carter was dead.

Barry Abernathy, Doyle's banjo player, lived in Ellijay, and I went up there several times.

Once Owen and I drove across the mountains from Ellijay to Dahlonega a night early and met the band there the next day. I wrote a screenplay about that festival.

One weekend Owen and Malcolm Holcombe stayed with me and played at Eddie's Attic, in Decatur, opening for Dayna Kurtz. That was an interesting evening.

When Owen changed bands, and started playing with James King the second time, the first festival he played with King was the Lewis Family Homecoming at a state park in Lincolnton, Georgia, up by the South Carolina state line.

Both states claim Little Roy.

South Carolina claims he's from Georgia and Georgia claims he's from South Carolina.

Doyle was playing the same show.

Owen dedicated a song to Doyle's bus driver.

"Someone Took My Place With You."

King was the host of a show at Hoofer's Gospel Barn, in LaGrange, Georgia. Melvin Goins' Windy Mountain was one of the bands King invited. Goins had a banjo picker named Billy Rose I liked.

Owen says Rose is playing bass with James King now.

Owen had just been at the IBMA convention, in Kentucky, and brought back a souvenir marketing promo CD case that looked like a film tin made to look like a can of Dapper Dan hair pomade.

In connection with the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?

This encouraged me.

The movie, with its bluegrass soundtrack, a movie Billy Bob Thornton had made, which was not released yet, Daddy and Them, and an album John Prine made, which included the song he wrote for Daddy and Them and sang with Iris Dement, that gave the album its name, In Spite of Ourselves, convinced me that New York was going to be looking for a book to cash in on this movie and record album trend, a writer to be the Hick of the Moment, as Frank McCourt had been the Mick of the Moment, with Angela's Ashes, but the hour passed, I missed my chance, it's passé now, it's been done.

Sorry Charlie.

You were a day late and a dollar short.

Bluegrass climaxed.

I don't think I'm going to be Hick of the Moment, now.

Hick of the Moment is an oxymoron, like legend of the underground.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? was the moment and the moment passed.

Wall-eyed disc jockeys, Ku Klux Klan rallies, and Grandpa went to shit and the hogs ate him. Ha ha, a hick.