I also got a flood of digests last night. I stopped receiving them in January this year for no obvious reason. I tried re-subscribing a number of times without success. Thought I'd been blacklisted! Nice to see all the old familiar names still here - same old arguments?
Re David's banjo stardom I remember several years ago now being in one the busy pubs at the Newcatleton festival (a local festival of music and beer in the Scottish Borders) when a light went on that bright I thought it might be the coming of the Lord. No - it was a television crew. I saw the camera and launched into some Shetland tunes that I can actually play, but the camera stayed with us all through that five reel set and then somebody else started playing a tune I'd never heard of (it was "Nancy" - I know it quite well now). Anyway THAT'S when the camera moved in for a close up of the fingers and bow. It turns out it was a programme being made on the Border Reivers called "Debateable Lands". This programme features one very anxious looking fiddler near the end of the programme staring at the finger board trying to guess at what the tune might be doing with his bow moving at random intervals. To make a bad situation worse - the programme was based on George MacDonald Fraser's book "The Steel Bonnets" (a very good book in fact - I'd recommend it to anybody interested in Scottish Border history). In the book he claims near the end that the Borders face (craggy, thick-set and coarse I think) is still recognisable in faces to this day. In the book he cites Richard Millhouse Nixon as having the typical Border face. In the film it's me! Aaaaaaaargh!! Cheers Eric Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html