Doug Kershaw

This is probably the best news I've had in a long time. Doug Kershaw is coming to play for the Wednesday on the Square concert series on April 16th. I thought he was dead, but apparently he's alive and pickin'. (That's only funny if you knew it was the title of one of his albums. Or if you read it out loud.)

Okay, for those of you who don't know, or might judge the man by his facial hair, Doug Kershaw is pretty much King of the Cajun fiddlers. He's also one of the reasons I decided to go to school in Louisiana. See, I had a father with a very prodigious and diverse record collection and after wearing all his Doug Kershaw records thin, I pretty much fell in love with the whole idea of Louisiana-ness without having ever been to Louisiana. In fact, the first time I came to New Orleans was to look for an apartment a month before starting at Tulane. Doug Kershaw did that.

It's now become a tradition when I come home to the lakehouse to blast "The Battle of New Orleans" from that now scratchy album while drinking cheap beer.

In other remote music news, I was sitting in Secured Transactions today when out of the blue my professor asked if anyone knew the singer Johnny Paycheck who in his hypo was buying a trailer. The weird coincidence is I met Johnny Paycheck when I was about 6 in Concord, North Carolina. My dad was a radio news man at the time at a country western station (I'm not making this up, I had a really weird childhood) and interviewed him for a show. So, I was able to answer the professor's question about his big hit "Take this job and shove it." (See International Institutions entry for usefulness of stupid information in law classes.)

After class, I mentioned to the professor that I had met Paycheck in his tour trailer when I was six, which he thought was pretty funny.

But I didn't find it funny when I wikipediaed his name later and found he had been convicted of statutory rape.

Ew.