I spent ninety percent of my money on wine, women and song and just wasted the other ten percent.
–Ronnie Hawkins
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I wasn’t going to post anything today but while I was doing a few morning exercises a song came on that really sparked me. I realized soon after that I had never played it on the blog which I found kind of remarkable since I consider it one of my favorites. It’s a song called Come Love from the great Canadian rocker Ronnie Hawkins. I say Canadian because though he hails from Arkansas he gained his greatest fame and settled down in Canada.
He played his music and lived his life on his own terms– that being hard and furious– from the 1950’s onward. A lot of great musicians played behind him over the years as part of his band, The Hawks, most notably the entire group that later formed The Band. You can see them in the photo above as they learned the chops that carried to their own greatness. A renowned showman, Ronnie also was famed for his own version of the Moonwalk many years pre-Michael Jackson.
This song is not one of his hard chargers although its guitar lines do have a bite in them. It has a really cool flow to it. When I hear it I think that it sounds how I would like to go through life, like a cool trickle of water in an easy flowing stream.
Just saying…
Give a listen and have a great day.
Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone’s task is unique as his specific opportunity.
It’s hard to believe that Paul Simon has been a major part of the American songbook for over 50 years, since The Sound of Silence arrived back in 1964. If you want to get technical, Simon has been writing and recording since 1957. So it’s closer to 60 years. And through all that time, he has continued to move forward, never opting to cruise by on a well-built reputation and a deep body of stellar work.
For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Forgive me.
I’ve been going to Alexandria, VA, a lovely and historic town that hugs the Potomac River just a few miles below Washington DC, for a long time, often several times a year. Outside of my link with the Principle Gallery and the relationships that have grown from that, I never thought I had a connection of any sort with that area.
Had a very nice visit in Alexandria. On Friday the weather always seemed on the verge of a huge thunderstorm, which had me a little apprehensive– even more than I normally be on the day of a show– about prospects for the opening reception of this year’s show, Part of the Pattern, at the Principle Gallery on that evening. However the storm never really hit with much force and the reception turned out well.
This is another new painting headed to the Principle Gallery this weekend for my show there, Part of the Pattern, which opens next Friday, June 3. This piece is 14″ by 34″ on paper and is titled , The Untold Want. The title was taken from the title of a very short poem from Walt Whitman that contained the phrase that spawned and became the title of the Bette Davis movie, Now, Voyager.
I was going through some older posts from this blog when I came across a couple that featured some of my paintings on the website
Redtree Times 