I know most of the people you're talking about. Tish is a sweetheart. Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez "Sweet Tequila Blues" is a favorite of mine. The songwriting talent at the festival is what draws me back every year. I don't attend some nights because i've seen some of the artists 5 or 6 times. My sister is a software engineer/songwriter, guitar banjo and mandolin player in Austin. She comes every year as well. She's won some awards in the newfolk songwriting contests at KFF. I just play well enough to keep the tune handy. ;o) Lost my wife to cancer back in July so don't know if i can handle all the memories we had together there for this next season at KFF. Bittersweet.
Tish Hinojosa - In The Real West
I enjoy that song by Tish, and
Sweet Tequila Blues is the Taylor/Rodriguez song I heard in the Cambridge funky shop. Small world. It's also my favorite Taylor/Rodriguez, followed perhaps by the duo's rendition of
Angel of the Morning (written by . . . hmmmm, Chip Taylor, who also wrote Wild Thing, and recorded by, most notably, Merrilee & the Turnabouts and Juice Newton). Those songs are among those that hooked me on the duo and eventually on Rodriguez's and can't-sing-a-lick Taylor's solo work.
Cosy Sheridan?
Lucy Kaplansky?
Diane Ziegler?
Hudson and Frankie?
Or my favorite far-leftie since the very late 1970s, UT's own Nanci Griffith.
Hudson and Frankie, along with Lyle Lovett, are sidewalk people in front of the Woolworth's on the cover of Nanci's 'Last of the True Believers,' the album with Rita and steel-guitar-playing Eddie and their Love at the Five and Dime, a Nanci song that Kathy Mattea later recorded, which Nanci reprised on One Fair Summer Evening and perhaps Anderson Fair, both live albums.
I'd enjoy hearing your KFF stories and I'd love to meet you and your sister.
Please accept my condolences regarding your cherished wife. Perhaps a KFF someday in the future in memory of her life. I'd be honored and humbled.
The November 4 six-CD Dylan basement tapes? I made a mistake and bought the complete set, which means I didn't get the full Ben Rollins' song-by-song notes in the non-complete CDs.
Last time I checked, some, but not all, of the notes were available at http://www.bobdylan.com/us/news/basement-tapes-track-track.