Time to Gig

Getting primed up for my gig with Rob Moorman and Company tonight at 6:30 at The Whitehorse Tavern in Burton, Texas. It's a lovely old country type beer joint, that also serves up country style food (for lunch for the most part). It's run by an ex-student of mine, who eventually became my boss as an assistant principal. Allison Crowson is a heckuva musician herself; superb vocalist, piano player and accordion squeezer. We always enjoy the place.

We'll wrap up our Labor Day tour at Home Sweet Farm in Brenham at 4pm. We love the venue and Brad Stufflebean and his wife Jenny have brought in some stupendous musical talent since they opened their doors. Always a good time.

On the subject of talent, The 4Star Concert venue, which has been open a little over a year, brings in some of the best regional talent around. Spent last Saturday night, after our Home Sweet Farm gig, being blown away by guitarist Van Wilks. Back in the day, when I attended college in San Marcos in the early 70's, Wilks would blow into town and blow everyone away. Forty years down the road, his chops have done nothing but become more stupendous.

For anyone who still pulls up my blog for some reason, I'll use my Harp Train 10 amp at the tavern. It's a lower volume gig, so the amp needs to kept a the lowest volume setting, which tends to rob its tone. To compensate, I run through my Lone Wolf delay, Lone Wolf reverb, and Lone Wolf octave pedal. It gives back what the low volume takes away.

I always use my Fender Custom Princeton Reverb at Home Sweet Farm (no pedals) for a bit more volume. It matches up perfect to the venue. I blow through both amps with a vintage Shure green bullet (actually it's more of a Robin's egg blue) w/controlled reluctance element, which is my favorite mic. 'Nuff for now.

The Crime Fighting Bluesmen Are Orphans

My crime fighting bluesmen series of crime novels are officially out of print due to my publisher closing up shop. I doubt anyone reading this also read some of my 'woe is me' blog stories about my knack for choosing publishers who chose to go out of business shortly after getting the manuscript for my first novel accepted, so I won't go into great detail. Just that it happened twice in the past and this one makes three. So, I went from being an author with four published novels, down to one. River Bottom Blues, The Devil's Blues and Howling Mountain Blues became orphans overnight and just when I put the finishing touches on my WiP (work in progress). 

The good news is that Fahrenheit Press, publisher of The Oaxacan Kid, has my latest submission and they have an interest in the orphans. Whether they get re-published or not remains to be seen, but I have high hopes that they see the light of day once again. I actually opened up my blog today to remove the links of those books to Amazon and realized I failed on my goal to enter blog posts more frequently. 

So, those readers who planned to grab one or more of the first three books, but never got around to it will be out of luck until a reprint happens. In the mean time, The Oaxacan Kid is still alive and well and available at Amazon (link is in sidebar of blog) and Fahrenheit Press. BTW, they are running a buy two/get a third one free thought the month of August 2019--just in case you see something else you like their.