"Once In A Very Blue Moon" by Pat Alger

Shot of me performing this song 8/2004

 

The blue moon this year was on Halloween, and I missed posting then. The next one isn't until August, and I don't want to wait. So here goes. It seems like it is only once in a blue moon that I post on this blog. I am going to try to do better going forward! 

Below is a link to my performance of this Pat Alger tune that I learned from Nanci Griffith. Clive Gregson is accompanying me on mandolin. thanks Clive! Recorded at the California Coast Music Camp

Once in a Very Blue Moon

"Night Rider's Lament" by Michael Burton

I've been thinking about all the boom and bust cycles I have seen in my lifetime now that we are on pause in NYC due to COVID-19. Folks have been staying home and NYC is looking more and more like a ghost town. Hopefully, it is only temporary.

I am remembering all the real ghost towns I saw during my travels out West. This shot posted below is one I took at Bodie, a ghost town and now a state historic public park in an extremely remote part of the Eastern Sierras of California. It is at an elevation of 8379 feet. One tiny long dirt road is all that leads into the town. Windswept and lonely, there is literally nothing nearby.

This town was founded in 1876 with the discovery of gold. During its heyday in 1879, it had a population of nearly 7,000 people.  A visitor in 1881 wrote that Bodie was “a sea of sin, lashed by the tempests of lust and passion”.

A tale is told that a young girl wrote in her diary, upon learning she and her family were moving to Bodie, “Goodbye God, I’m going to Bodie”.

I took the shot below of the Swazey Hotel in Bodie. This building served as a clothing store, a casino, and finally as the Swazey Hotel during Bodie's active years. By 1915, Bodie was all but abandoned.

Today, Bodie is preserved in a state of "arrested decay". Only a small part of the town survived, with about 110 structures still standing. When I visited, we walked the streets of the empty town and were able to look into shop windows and see goods left there when the town was abandoned. We also visited the town cemetery on a high hill where 150 grave markers still stand.

When the Boom Goes Bust

These memories of trips I took while living out west remind me of this song I recorded many years ago. Many things may have passed me by, but then as the song goes:

"...Ah but they've never seen the Northern Lights
They've never seen a hawk on the wing..."

I wouldn't trade my travels for anything....

I hope we can travel again soon! The song below features Clive Gregson on mandolin. Thanks Clive for the great back up! Recorded at the California Coast Music Camp

Night Riders Lament

"Carolina Pines" by Kate Wolf

This is a shot I took of the  Redman-Hirahira House in Watsonville, Ca.
 It was built by local architect, William Weeks in 1897 for James Redman, a sugar-beets farmer.

In the 1930's, a Japanese-American family, the Hirahira's, bought the house and the farmland surrounding it. During WWII, the Hirahira family were forced to vacate the house and lands when they were re-located by the US government and the military to Manzanar detention camp located in a desolate spot on the Eastern side of the Sierras.

As many as 10 percent of the population of Watsonville, Ca where this house is located, were forcibly removed from their houses, businesses and all they knew. They were bused to various internment camps during WWII. It has stood empty in the fields between Highway 1 and Highway 152 in Watsonville since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake made it uninhabitable.

I stopped at Manzanar while travelling down Highway 395 by the Eastern Sierras. This was the internment camp for the Japanese who were living on the West Coast during WWII. When I first moved to California, I had no knowledge of this shameful piece of US history. One of my co-workers in LA who was of Japanese descent mentioned to me that she grew up there during part of her childhood, and it was from her that I learned of the history of this place. It is so hot, dry and incredibly remote. Not so hard to imagine how awful it must have been to be forced to move there, leaving all the comforts of home behind and loosing most of your possessions and properties simply because your ancestors were born in Japan. Don't forget, these were all US citizens who had committed no crime except that of looking like the enemy. 

The ultimate irony is that many of the young men from there volunteered to fight for the freedom of the US in WWII, while the rest of their families were locked up at this camp. Their unit was one of the most decorated in Europe and also incurred the most casualties. Not much is left there now, but the interpretive center, some markers of what used to be there and this cemetery standing alone at the foot of the Sierras.

This is a shot I took of the memorial at Manzanar in 2009 on my cross-country road trip.

 

Only a few of the innocent Japanese-Americans who died  during their illegal internment at Manzanar during remain in this lonely cemetery on the Eastern side of the Sierras.

From Wikepedia: "On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the Secretary of War to designate military commanders to prescribe military areas and to exclude “any or all persons” from such areas. The order also authorized the construction of what would later be called “relocation centers” by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to house those who were to be excluded. This order resulted in the forced relocation of over 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were native-born American citizens. The rest had been prevented from becoming citizens by federal law. Over 110,000 were imprisoned in the ten concentration camps located far inland and away from the coast. Manzanar was the first of the ten concentration camps to be established"

The Manzanar cemetery site is marked by a monument that was built by prisoner stonemason Ryozo Kado in 1943. The characters on this monument are translated to mean "Soul-Consoling Tower" .

There are many places across the USA that are also desolate and abandoned, mostly for economic reasons. Dreams lost and shattered, houses and towns abandoned in the wake of economic ruin. This song sung by me (with Sylvia Herold on harmony vocals) and written by Kate Wolf, captures the feeling a continent away. Recorded at the California Coast Music Camp

Carolina Pines