I've been a Pratie Head for many's the long year... (Celtic Music)

It all started when my husband threw me out of the house...

... saying, "You're driving me crazy. You've got to find some musicians to play with."

I'd been living in Durham, NC for three or four months, and I hated it. I cried every day. When we married and left Cambridge, MA, I had to leave my musical life behind. I found a job in Durham, as a typesetter, but I missed performing and was very lonely...

... so when my husband complained about my moping, I obediently went out to a jam session at Salaam's, organized by the Nee Ningy Band.

That's where I met Bob and his girlfriend. They had just gotten back from overseas. They had sold everything they owned and had gone to Ireland for as long as their money held up. This was a good plan while they were in Ireland, playing in pubs and learning tunes and having a grand time. It wasn't so great, though, when they came back with nothing but their instruments and the clothes in their suitcases...

So they had come to Salaam's that night. They heard me sing and asked me to join them. That night, we also all met Chuck Jones, a wonderful singer and guitar-player. He joined up too, and with Rob Van Veld on bodhran, that was the new incarnation of the Pratie Heads.

Our first gig was St. Patrick's Day, March 17 1982, at the Station in Carrboro, NC. In this picture, we were busking on Franklin Street (during the Apple Chill Festival) in downtown Chapel Hill.

Every band should have a group therapist. (Part one)

And we started playing at weddings...

Ah, we all looked like such hippy country yokels back then!

I guess we still do, sometimes...

This wedding happened in the Lockridge Community in Durham NC. A bunch of people had purchased a turkey farm (on Turkey Farm Road) and a lot of land and were gradually building homes together - they shared a well, a community park, and a tractor.

Irish and Scottish music was very popular around here back then - Triona Ni Dhomnaill's band Touchstone and the Red Clay Ramblers had made it quite the rage!

Every band should have a group therapist (Part Two)

After we made "Flowers of the Forest," we were playing at Pyewacket Restaurant one night and the music booker said he'd like to try playing with us. So bassist Robbie Link joined us and we made another recording, "Todlin' Home."

The high point of that version of the band: we were hired to play at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC for a St. Patrick's Day concert. The tickets were very expensive, the hall was packed, the audience cried at the sad songs, and we were on the Diane Rehm show with some Sandanistas!

We made another recording with Robbie. Called "Kiss Quick, Mother's Coming," it was Scottish Country Dances, some of which we composed, most of which were from the 18th century. We did it for Carl Wittman, a Royal Scottish Country Dance master whom we adored. Carl was dying of AIDS while we were making the album for him. Sometimes I just busted out crying in the recording studio.

Then Robbie quit the band and we were a duo again.

We started getting a lot of work from the North Carolina Arts Council Touring Program.

Those were the days!

It was really hard to go on without Robbie - we missed the bass so much, and all these years later, we still do - but we were holding about eight contracts and had to revamp the music quickly so we could manage without him.

In those days, the North Carolina Arts Council Touring Program was a pretty great thing. They had a pot of money for their "approved" artists roster. Libraries, festivals, schools, local arts centers could apply for us to do a concert for them and the fee would be subsidized. In rural counties, the subsidy was 50 percent! That's a lot of help!

We traveled all over the state and played at wonderful festivals and a lot of schools (this pictures shows us in our Colonial garb, for our early America - early North Carolina - Revolutionary war gigs).

It's too bad people stopped thinking the arts were worth supporting. NCAC pulled the plug on the program, or at least on the money. Now, they have an online list of performers and that's all. We don't really get any work that way at all any more.

Flowers of the Forest: we recorded it in 1984

Click the picture to hear our long-ago rendition of this heart-breaking song about a disastrous battle.

Every band should have a group therapist (part three)

Our first gig together in 18 years: the Festival for the Eno

What a blast it was to play together again! We did some of our old stuff (and when I say old, I mean things we learned 20 years before!) and some new things and decided it was just too much fun - we couldn't stop - so we're still going.

We decide to make "Rag Faire."

Bob had a recording engineer living in his house in Oxford so we sort of traded recording time for rent. Our friend Paul took the photo, I painted the picture, and it was like falling off a log. So much fun.

The album is named after one of my favorite Peter Bellamy songs, "Rag Fair," about a poor guy just off the boat who meets a girl and gets robbed and loses his clothes and probably gets an STD and drowns his sorrows in a bottle of wine. We put the "e" on the end of the album title because there was a famous Japanese band by the name of Rag Fair and we didn't want to get buried by them in Google - in case anybody was ever looking for us...

Bob Vasile sings "Into the West" from "Rag Faire"

Click on the picture to hear the whole song for free. (But you can download it too for a couple quarters.)

This is a wonderful song about Irish immigration to America.

Bob and I try international music: "Mayn Shvester Khaye"

This gorgeous song in Yiddish, with words by Binem Heller and music by Chava Alberstein is on our album Rag Faire. In fall of 2009 we did a series of two-hour concerts of international music including French, Spanish, Latin American, Italian, German/Austrian, and American folk music. What a challenge! Learn more about this song (in English, "My Sister Khaye") on my lens called I love Yiddish music! (See below)

So then we did it again - murder ballads this time...

What a very un-sellable and almost un-performable subject!

Boy, we had a great time recording this album, but we knew perfectly well it was going to be hard to sell. For one thing, there are only some places where you can sing songs like "Lamkin," in which a rich guy doesn't pay his mason, so the mason sneaks into the house at night and kills the guy's wife and baby. Or like "Jesuitmont" (Justamont), in which a stepmother has her stepdaughter cooked into a pie. Some of the songs are light and funny but as a whole, this one is a bit of a white elephant. Still, I personally love it to pieces. Listen and see what you think...

Around the same time, we decided to clean up a bit and try to get more wedding gigs. That hasn't gone so well yet, but maybe when the economy improves a bit...

It seems like people don't really notice the difference between real music and canned music any more...

So I fiddle for my own pleasure.

Kleynkunst music from Warsaw, Poland between the wars: a Yiddish waltz

Click on the picture to hear the whole song for free. Or you can download it!

Bob joined me and bassist Jim Baird of World music group Mappamundi to record this song written by Lola Folman. A young mother thinks the boys in the street are baying for her, but they've really got her daughter in mind, how embarrassing!