Heidi Muller News

Fall is here in West Virginia… after a rudely hot summer that appeared to have no end, like a circus it packed up and left in the night and Autumn arrived with a gorgeous full harvest moon. For me it means a return to teaching and projects after wonderful summer travels to Wallowa County, Oregon, where Bob and I taught at Wallowa Fiddle Tunes camp and joined our friends at the Summer Fishtrap Gathering. We made a cross-country drive returning through Glacier NP and Bear’s Paw Nat’l Battlefield and later I took a solo trip to Seattle and the Pacific Coast of Washington, and reveled in daily sightings of The Mountain.

We love the birds at this time of year… we’ve had a resident catbird singing his little head off in the tall oak tree. There’s a pair of something we can’t identify (we don’t actually see them) chortling daily to greet our chilly mornings. The leaves are coloring and letting go, while there’s a gentle golden light filtering through the trees. Dark comes not long after 7:00 pm– seems so early. Bob’s got his projects in the recording studio, several folks making CDs with his help… he’s also building box dulcimers for our school workshops coming right up in Pocahontas County. We’ve handed the Music Mentors program at the East End Family Resource Center to two young teachers who are coming over for dulcimer lessons, so they can keep the tradition going that we started five years ago. They already got new African drums this past summer so the place is hoppin’.

With the onset of autumn, I’ve been pondering how to “be” more in the midst of all my “doing.” Every week I spend a day teaching elementary and middle school children guitar and dulcimer in a town in the southern coalfields. I have a new dulcimer class in Charleston with eight feisty ladies, plus continuing lessons. It’s my turn to lead the Almost Heaven Dulcimer Club into Christmas music while our other teacher, Dave Haas, is busy with his prison ministry. There are performances popping up all over, especially this coming week… and I also have just taken the position of being Music Coordinator at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation here in Charleston, so add Sunday service music to the mix. It all feels good. I love the vibrant activity of it all, and this week we travel out to Marlinton two different times for teaching and performing, where we can drive past the fall colors of the higher mountains… So even though I love all this “doing” — it’s a gift to be able to make a living with music, and open people up to the music in themselves — the task for me is to keep watch on how I spend my in-between time, so I can maintain a quiet center and not lose myself in busyness and organization. Remember before computers, the way we used to renew ourselves? Reading, sewing, walking in the woods… October is the perfect time to visit the birds, watch the leaves drift down like feathers, and soak up the golden light of autumn.

The last week has been one of those joyful work weeks, where you hit the pillow with songs in your head, tired from doing what you love. After a delightful visit from Stephen Seifert two weeks ago — with all of us here working on taxes, then celebrating with a fab dulcimer jam late into the night — Gail Rundlett flew down from Boston to work on her new CD. Bob’s her recording engineer in this studio that we call Treehouse Recording. It’s our old diningroom. It looks into the upper stories of a tall, old oak tree with its resident squirrels and woodpeckers.

In the last seven days, Gail has done the basic work on 12 tracks. It’s her first solo CD since she released Full Circle in 1995 (you can find it on CDBaby). Since then, she also made recordings with her vocal group Taproot. This new work features her spritely dulcimer and some fingerpicked guitar, and as ever, her beautiful vocals that have gained her such a following in the Boston folk scene. In the last two days we brought in two players from the Mountain Stage band, Ron Sowell on harmonica and Ryan Kennedy on bass and lead guitar — great stuff! VooDoo Katz percussionist Mark Davis got the rhythms smoking with everything from drums to finger cymbals. Gail’s got more studio work ahead of her in Boston, featuring her son Julian and daughter Hannah. The project should be in final form by fall.

Gail and I go way back… over 35 years, in fact. We were roommates in college and we sang together at coffeehouses like the Sword in the Stone in Boston in the 70’s. We’ve done reunion concerts now and then over the years. It’s been fun to sing harmony and play guitar on this project… and we co-wrote a new dulcimer tune, and are playing it together on the CD. Bob’s also added his sweet cello and mandolin. Definitely check out Gail when you get a chance and stay tuned for updates.

Hope you’re all staying warm and dry out there, and are enjoying the snow shoveling if you live in one of those places where it’s been coming down. It’s actually one of my favorite thingso. I don’t need to shovel much of it here in Charleston but I put in my time growing up in New Jersey.

Along with our snow days here, I got an email from my friend Doug Imbrogno at the Charleston Gazette that he used my song “Snowdance” to accompany his new slide and video show online at the paper! You can watch and listen at http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201002110451.

My favorite shot is the train, and then the ending. Enjoy!

PS — I’m now on MySpace — check out my new pages at www.myspace.com/heidi.muller and myspace.com/heidimullerbobwebb, which is where the music files are posted.

PS to my last post: the Good Road tour is starting out with some new paraphernalia for Dan and Heidi fans! I’ve got gorgeous new Good Road Tour t-shirts, bumper stickers, and a Good Road songbook — 28 songs and a few poems I’ve written between 1981 and 1999. Remember your Inland Folk and musical friends at the holidays! None of it is available online yet, so come to a concert and be one of the first to sport the new stuff!

In a few short hours I’ll be taking Southwest to the Northwest. You might say I’m flying North by Southwest…

I’m excited! Dan Maher and I will meet up in Leavenworth, WA on Friday to begin our first leg of the Good Road 20th Anniversary tour. Then we head further into snow country to the Merc Playhouse in Twisp, out to Rick Singer’s in Spokane on Sunday and down through Rattlesnake Grade to see our friends at Fishtrap in Enterprise, OR. It will be great to sing with Dan again, not to mention dredging the depths of perilous puns for four days. I hope we can stand it. I’ll be doing the driving. Ankles away!

Hope you can join us… expect solos and duets and lots of fun stories. We’ll look for you there.

Just want to give a shout out to my friends in Wallowa County, Oregon today… they’re having their first annual Juniper Jam music festival! Wish I could be there. Tumbleweed is happening this weekend, too, in Richland, WA. Just about every notable Northwest musician is playing at one of those events… and then there’s Bumbershoot in Seattle, that’s so big it sort of creates its own weather. Greetings to y’all from West Virginia.

I’ve been absent from this blog for so long, with no real excuse except life has been rather ordinary. A cross-country trip to Oregon ordinary? Well, no… I just didn’t think to blog about that. Playing in Seattle for the P-I Tribute ordinary? Well, no, that was fabulous and meaningful. I think it comes down to blogging. I’m a private person and telling stuff to the world isn’t easy for me.

Take social networking. I’m not especially ready for that either, but my friend who makes incredible furniture, Jim Probst, has been talking to me about it. I actually signed onto LinkedIn to accept an invitation from Bing Futch (dulcimer friend from Florida). Then I got hooked up with a couple of other people there, but I still haven’t finished posting all my essential info. My dulcimer friend Gail Rundlett and my buddy Jayney have nudged me to get on Facebook. I don’t know if I want to be everybody’s friend… I don’t want to spend more and more time on my computer. What ever happened to hiking in the woods? I must admit, I got a page on MySpace and have never finished it, but I’m thinking of finally doing it. I found my old Kerrville buddy Paul Edward Sanchez there this week and he had only recently put up his page. Made me think I really oughtta get to it. Then there was a great little story on NPR this week about Twitterature — literature dished out in tweets. Now, that was cool!

Since everyone’s spending time on social networking sites, I wonder if anyone reads blogs anymore? Just in case… I was going to write about how great it is to have a whole month of time to myself, no gigs. I have these daily radiation treatments I go to but they only take 15 minutes, and they’ll be done in September. (Another thing I haven’t blogged about, but there you go.) I was honored to receive a Professional Development Grant from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts, which I used to attend the Summer Fishtrap songwriting workshop in July with Linda Waterfall. That was the impetus to drive cross-country to northeastern Oregon, since Bob got hired to teach mandolin at the Wallowa Fiddletunes Camp. We ended up doing wonderful things 30 miles apart, and got to see the Needles at Custer State Park on the way out and Arches National Park on the way back. One of my favorite things was driving across the Rockies at 11,158′ on I-80 in Colorado… oh, let’s not forget the Jolly Green Giant statue in Blue Earth, MN, westbound, and the triumph of *not* running out of gas on Hwy 212 as we coasted into Crow Agency — next time, gas up in Belle Fourche!

Fall brings teaching again for Music Mentors in Charleston and Clay Community Arts in Kermit… Elderhostel at Cedar Lakes… and the Great American Dulcimer Convention and Dulcimer Chautauqua on the Wabash… and then the Good Road 20th Anniversary Tour in the Pacific Northwest. August is my time for working on projects — my Good Road Songbook and a Christmas CD with Bob. I’ve started a couple of new dulcimer books that I hope will see the light of day in a month or so. We’re also writing and recording music for a documentary film here in West Virginia. And I’m rearranging my office from top to bottom with feng shui. That’s my ordinary life. How’s yours?

It’s been an interesting week. I was in West Virginia, reading the Seattle Post-Intelligencer online during its last days in print in Seattle, checking out blogs and Horsey cartoons… On Tuesday the articles of its closing down were so sad. The staff video did me in. Next thing I knew a little voice in my head said, “Who will blow the whistle?” And along came a new song, called “Goodnight PI.” You can find it on my home page… give it a listen.

The Seattle PI has been a whistleblower with its investigative reporting… it’s been a liberal voice and has given a voice to those who deserve one, but are often not heard. I always loved the PI when I lived in Seattle. I still have copies from the baseball playoffs in 1995. Randy Johnson was always my favorite baseball dude. Arts and entertainment writer Gene Stout was a great supporter of local musicians and venues. A small staff of 20 is continuing with the online publication, but they are dropping investigative reporting, which is one of the great losses in this changeover. We need newspapers. It’s not fun to read everything online, even if you print it out, it’s just more and more 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper. You certainly can’t hide behind it in a coffeeshop. We need newsprint!

Just last Saturday I read a clipping my friend Jayne sent me about the old three-masted schooner Wawona. People had given up on ever fixing her up, and the city wanted its prime Lake Union waterfront for other uses. A few weeks ago, they towed her, already mastless (the masts were removed for safety reasons), across the lake where they would start to disassemble her piece by piece. I’ve been to shanty sings on the Wawona. It was a wonderful piece of maritime history where children learned and good pirates from all over could share a sense of wonder about the great tall ships. Now she will disappear board by board…

I didn’t know when I started the song that the Wawona would make an appearance. Jayney didn’t know when she sent me the clippings that I’d use them in some way. Newspaper clippings. From newsprint. The P-I… On my yellow pad, it came together:

“Now my friend just sent a clipping from a paper she had saved.
They towed the great three-masted ship Wawona to her grave.
What is it about Seattle? Is there no honor for her past?
A giant of a masthead now lies beside the mast.”

Seattle PI, rest in peace. Wawona, your spirit will always be on the high seas and in our hearts. Thanks for a great run.

For more information about the Wawona, visit www.nwseaport.org.

Happy sunny day from Mt. Dora, Florida! Bob and I drove down yesterday for the Central Florida Autoharp and Dulcimer Festival. I can report after one hour that this is a high-energy festival full of happy people. I can hear the fledgling hammerheads tapping out Mary Had a Little Lamb… a harmonica wafting from the distant recesses of the church (the choir loft? the organ bench? the secret spiral staircase?)… mountain dulcimer people are bumping headstocks and tailblocks from room to room… This is definitely a great place to be.

So we all just wish the dulcimer players from chillier climes had hopped onto the freeway alongside us. And too soon we’ll be heading back north. I wish we could take the time to go to Ybor City or look for manatees… could be a nice time to go AWOL… after all the snow and shivers up in Charleston.

And — the Waltz Book is done! More on that later. Gotta go teach.

All my CDs, Patchwork Dreams, Bill Staines dulcimer books, and Wallowa Songs From the End of the Road CDs can now be ordered online directly from my website using PayPal! I’m excited to offer this option in addition to the printable order form. I’ll still have several titles available at CDBaby, and the End of the Road CD is also available there by digital download. Thanks to my webmaster Janis at Second Chance Productions for her help in setting this up!