http://ladymuleskinnerpress.com Writings by Burgin Mathews Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:08:43 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en [caption id="attachment_505" align="alignleft" width="257" caption="Darwin Lee Hill, 2007"][/caption] Darwin Lee Hill is the host of "Darwin Lee's Real Hillbilly Music Hour," a vintage country show on AM radio station WHVW in Poughkeepsie, New York.  He has hosted the Sunday afternoon show for over fourteen years.  He has been a country music ... http://ladymuleskinnerpress.com/2009/06/the-last-great-real-hillbilly-dj-an-interview-with-darwin-lee-hill/ Thirty years ago the Muppets made their first feature movie. In the years to follow they would make others—good ones, too (and some, a little later, not so good)—but that first one, the one titled, simply, The Muppet Movie, is surely their greatest. It is, for that matter, one of ... http://ladymuleskinnerpress.com/2009/02/the-muppet-movie-at-thirty/ [caption id="attachment_206" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Ernest Mostella"][/caption] Ernest Mostella was a fiddle maker from Alabama’s St. Clair County, a rare practitioner of African American fiddle traditions surviving into the 21st century. When I met him he was in his nineties and full of excited vitality, still operating a power saw to carve ... http://ladymuleskinnerpress.com/2008/12/ernest-mostella/ I tell you what. We’ve played for bigger audiences, but we’ve never played for any greater audience, I guarantee it.  – Mack Vickery, Live! At the Alabama Women’s Prison Johnny Cash started it with Folsom Prison. Playing prisons had been an important part of what Cash did, but Columbia, his record company, had ... http://ladymuleskinnerpress.com/2008/11/mack-vickery-live-at-the-alabama-womens-prison/ In a world full of sinners, hypocrites, whoremongers, and thieves, William Carlton (W.C.) Rice saw himself as a modern-day Noah: ordained by God to prophesy destruction, to call the unsaved and endangered to salvation, and to build with his own hands a vessel for his and for others’ deliverance. He ... http://ladymuleskinnerpress.com/2008/11/wc-rices-miracle-cross-garden/   Roy Orbison had a line in a song called "My Best Friend." It was a line that says, "A diamond is a diamond and a stone is a stone. But man is part good and part bad." You know, I recognize the fact that I'm part good ... http://ladymuleskinnerpress.com/2008/11/hank-williams-as-luke-the-drifter/