No cover, all donations go to community radio station WCOM
Learn more via Aaron Keck’s interview of Art Menius on WCHL-FM 97.9 September 12, 2017
WCOM Benefit Concert September 16
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Author Archives: Art Menius
Jim Lloyd, Master Appalachian Musician
For information about booking Jim Lloyd
A veteran performer as both musician and storyteller, Jim is available for house concerts, festivals, public concerts, storytelling events, colleges, workshops, and residencies. For more information call Art Menius at 919 675-2787 or email
Jim Lloyd’s New Album is Play Guitar in Seven Days
Play Guitar in 7 Days: The new album from master Blue Ridge musician Jim Lloyd is now available to DJs and print media as a download or in hard copy CD.
Djs can download from Airplay Direct: http://bit.ly/JimLloydAirplayDirect
For CDs or other download options, media should contact Art Menius art@artmenius.com
Play Guitar in 7 Days
- Amelia Earhart (3:02) – Jim sings and picks the aviatrix ballad popularized in bluegrass music by The Country Gentlemen
- Darlin’ Cory (2:40) – one of the best known traditional songs in old-time & bluegrass, first recorded by Buell Kazee.
- Silver Bells (2:01) – a lovely demonstration of the rhythmic thumb picking guitar style Jim absorbed from his family. Selected for A Century of Heritage Guitar Music compilation.
- Cornbread & Butterbeans (3:14) – A celebration of the simple life recently popularized by the Carolina Chocolate Drops.
- Crazy (3:17) – The Willie Nelson – Patsy Cline standard picked with influences from both Chet Atkins and Doc Watson.
- Little Red Riding Hood (2:52) – a big hit for Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs done Lloyd-style
- Moody River Blues (2:47) – a song recorded by both Doc Watson and Pat Boone!
- My House Has Wheels (2:46) – A funny song from Southern Culture on the Skids
- Columbus Stockade Blues (3:16) – Doc Watson recorded and regularly performed this song
- Uncle Hiram’s Homemade Beer (3:17) – Dick Feller wrote and recorded this humorous warning to home brewers.
- St. James Infirmary (3:02) – Made a jazz standard by Louis Armstrong, this one has appeared in rock, pop, old-time, blues, R&B, and more genre.
- Must Come in at the Door (2:36) – a black gospel songs from the repertoire of Doc Watson
- Texas Rangers (4:07) – Jim sings a cowboy ballad best known from Tex Ritter’s recording.
- Forked Deer (2:13) – picking on a classic American fiddle tune
Recorded at Eastwood Studios
Produced by Wesley Easter & Jim Lloyd
America’s Superstar Companies Are a Drag on Growth
Anyway, as a result of this increased market power, the big superstar companies have been raising their prices and cutting their wages. This has lifted profits and boosted the stock market, but it has also held down real wages, diverted more of the nation’s income to business owners, and increased inequality. It has also held back productivity, since raising prices restricts economic output.
Read The FBI File For Renowned Black Musician Gil Scott-Heron
https://shadowproof.com/2017/08/30/gil-scott-herons-fbi-file/
Shadowproof obtained 28 pages of FBI records regarding Gil Scott-Heron under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Born in Chicago in 1949, Scott-Heron was a renowned African-American poet and musician, perhaps most famous for his 1974 album, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
The declassified records include a memo to the FBI Director about a party thrown by the socialist All African People’s Revolutionary Party, at which Scott-Heron was scheduled to speak. The memo states that its contents concern an “extremist matter.”
Play Guitar in Seven Days
Play Guitar in 7 Days: The new album from master Blue Ridge musician Jim Lloyd is now available to DJs and print media as a download or in hard copy CD.
Djs can download from Airplay Direct: http://bit.ly/JimLloydAirplayDirect
For CDs or other download options, media should contact Art Menius art@artmenius.com
Play Guitar in 7 Days
- Amelia Earhart (3:02) – Jim sings and picks the aviatrix ballad popularized in bluegrass music by The Country Gentlemen
- Darlin’ Cory (2:40) – one of the best known traditional songs in old-time & bluegrass, first recorded by Buell Kazee.
- Silver Bells (2:01) – a lovely demonstration of the rhythmic thumb picking guitar style Jim absorbed from his family. Selected for A Century of Heritage Guitar Music compilation.
- Cornbread & Butterbeans (3:14) – A celebration of the simple life recently popularized by the Carolina Chocolate Drops.
- Crazy (3:17) – The Willie Nelson – Patsy Cline standard picked with influences from both Chet Atkins and Doc Watson.
- Little Red Riding Hood (2:52) – a big hit for Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs done Lloyd-style
- Moody River Blues (2:47) – a song recorded by both Doc Watson and Pat Boone!
- My House Has Wheels (2:46) – A funny song from Southern Culture on the Skids
- Columbus Stockade Blues (3:16) – Doc Watson recorded and regularly performed this song
- Uncle Hiram’s Homemade Beer (3:17) – Dick Feller wrote and recorded this humorous warning to home brewers.
- St. James Infirmary (3:02) – Made a jazz standard by Louis Armstrong, this one has appeared in rock, pop, old-time, blues, R&B, and more genre.
- Must Come in at the Door (2:36) – a black gospel songs from the repertoire of Doc Watson
- Texas Rangers (4:07) – Jim sings a cowboy ballad best known from Tex Ritter’s recording.
- Forked Deer (2:13) – picking on a classic American fiddle tune
Recorded at Eastwood Studios
Produced by Wesley Easter & Jim Lloyd
Classic Eno Festival Live Radio Show
Through an arrangement with the Festival for the Eno and the Southern Folklife Collection, I have been empowered to create a series of one-hour radio shows for all-volunteer non-commercial WHUP-LP radio in Hillsborough, NC. 
Classic Eno Festival Live airs each Saturday at 11 AM Eastern on the 100 watt community station which live streams at whupfm.org. At any time, the two most recent shows are available for listening at https://whupfm.org/show/classic-eno-festival-live/.
I produce the show from live sets recorded in quite good quality at the Festival for the Eno in Durham, NC during the 1980s and early 1990s. Since July 1 we have broadcast episodes featuring the Seldom Scene, Red Clay Ramblers, George Higgs, Big Boy Henry, Lightnin’ Wells, Joe & Odell Thompson, the Badgett Sisters, and the Branchettes.
Paul Oliver, Pre-eminent Authority on the Blues, Dies at 90 – NYTimes.com
Paul Oliver, a Briton who wrote some of the earliest and most authoritative histories of one of America’s great indigenous musical forms, the blues, died on Tuesday in Shipton-under-Wychwood, Oxfordshire, England. He was 90.
He is one of the last of the generation of amateur scholars who created serious study of and writing about American roots music. I was fortunate briefly to have met him.
Meet Ninja Phil — THE BITTER SOUTHERNER
http://bittersoutherner.com/the-south-in-labor-phil-cohen-jackson-project
Phil Cohen earned his nickname by being one of the most effective labor organizers ever in a region that has never been kind to unions. But Cohen is more than just an organizer: He is also a songwriter, an accomplished wildlife photographer, and now, the author of a powerful memoir that offers an uncommonly up close and personal look at the struggles of organized labor in the South.
Story By Art Menius | Photographs by Kate Medley
Delta’s unready when you are
By Art Menius
Concourse C, LaGuardia Airport, 5:32 AM July 18, 2017
Ann Coulter got her $30 back from Delta. Ann Coulter didn’t get the seat she paid Delta for, and she got her $30 back. We didn’t get the flight, including the seats, we paid Delta for, and we got to spend the night pretending to sleep in different parts of LaGuardia Airport. We didn’t get $30 back.
Ann Coulter got her $30 back from Delta. She had a Twitter fit, insulting Delta, its employees, and at least one fellow traveler. We did as advised, didn’t insult anyone, and went through a hassle dealing with rerouting our checked bag, then had to go back in through security. Eventually, after considerable effort by two Delta staffers, we received boarding passes for our rebooked flights the next morning, slept on the floor near C17, got rudely kicked out and sent back to baggage claim, then directed up to ticketing to rest in a wheel chair and on a baggage cart. At 4:15 AM we shuffled back through security yet again, and up to hang out near C15 the remaining two hours until our automatically rebooked flight started boarding.
We ended up there because our route home from a week in Prince Edward Island was Halifax to Toronto and then Toronto to LaGuardia on Delta’s Canadian partner WestJet leading to an 8:30 Monday night Delta flight home to RDU. Wicked weather delays meant that our flight from Toronto left around two hours late. We still had a chance to make our connection even then, but the monitor reported that our flight to Raleigh had been cancelled.
Finally coming upon a gate agent who wasn’t besieged with people, we learned that we had been automatically rebooked on a 7:15 AM Tuesday flight not directly to Raleigh but via Detroit. She explained that we needed to rush down to WestJet baggage to get our bag rerouted. Only with the help of an airport employee were we even able to find a WestJet baggage agent who rerouted our bag only when Becky insisted at first resistance, and I at the second. She seemed to accomplish what she said was impossible in less than a minute.
The large number of weather related cancellations meant that all the airport area hotels were booked, leaving us to fend for ourselves in LaGuardia without any guidance on the rules, where things are, or anything else. No fun ensued.
The weather delay does not obligate Delta or any airline to billet passengers the way it would with mechanical issues or overbooking. Good customer service and simply decency does obligate them, however, to provide stranded travelers with some assistance or at least information. Gate C21 was able to get three wheelchair handlers stat. Why couldn’t those of us coming off the Toronto flight be greeted, as the WestJet flight attendant said would be the case, by Delta representatives who would let us know the status of our connecting flights, explain our options, let us know what crashing at the airport entailed – we were fortunate heretofore to be ignorant of this aspect of human endeavor – and perhaps do more to help us find a room than to direct us to the Port Authority desk in baggage claim.
After paying several hundred dollars is it too much to ask to be treated decently during a very stressful and confusing experience filled with various unsatisfactory options. I’m just saying that Ann Coulter got her $30 back for behaving badly after not getting the right seat while we got to sleep on floors and in wheelchairs for having 14 hours added to our trip. We did get a text at 4:17 AM telling us the flight we would be on. I guess that is something.
When folk music was a real ‘hoot’: How the Old Town School began – Chicago Tribune
“One student stepped up to the mike,” the Tribune reported in April 1958. “(He) asked the audience to smile, took a snapshot, then hitched his guitar around his neck and sang, ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.'”
And so began what is now a 60-year tradition of student performances at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, which had opened Dec. 1, 1957, and helped propel the folk music craze that was sweeping the country.
Art Menius 