Everything That Glitters (Is Not Gold) by Balsam Range
This is my current favorite band of all time, and the singer, Buddy Melton, is my current single favorite artist of all time. He taps into such sweet emotion with his voice.
I got to meet him tonight after this performance (that I recorded with my own phone), where he stood around and casually chatted with me one-on-one for about 20 minutes, in no hurry at all.
One of the many things we talked about was my hometown, and I was shocked to find out that he used to hang out in my hometown when he was younger and knows it very well. Still has friends there. He’s from North Carolina, right around Andy Griffith’s hometown, but the music folks down there seem to be very closely involved with and familiar with my people.
We also talked about Hurricane Helene, which hit us the same as it hit them. (For more details on that, see The Practical Woodsman podcast Ep. 37.)
One of the best nights of my life. Enjoy.
Ps. He has a firm handshake
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
