Pickle My Bones in Alcohol

Jun 3, 2021 | Covid-19 Diary, Dead Water

Late to the party, I know, but I had a Covid test this morning, the throat and nasal swab thing. At the time of writing this, I haven’t had a result back. As I’m double-jabbed I’m not particularly concerned about it, but I do appreciate the irony of maintaining a diary for all these months and finally requiring a test just as I planned to close down the daily posts.

Yesterday, there were 139 new cases recorded in Edinburgh City, around 16.5% of the 835 new cases in Scotland.

The test itself was simple enough, and expertly conducted. The most difficult part was navigating round the airport’s outer extremities to get to the testing centre.

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The rest of the day has largely been spent at my desk, but, as I mentioned a week or so ago, I’ve been watching The Blacklist an episode or two at a time. I think that, had it debuted in the last couple of years, the 22-episode season approach might have been condensed; season one has been a bad guy of the week plus an incremental shift forward in the series story arc. It’s diverting enough, but could be tighter.

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Music : I can’t remember when I first heard Hedy West, though I’ve a suspicion it was on a compilation/sampler album. I do know that the first song I heard her play and sing was Cotton Mill Girls. I have several of her recordings now, including one released for free by a fellow who saw her in a Boston coffee shop in the early sixties and just happened to have a reel to reel recorder and a good quality microphone about his person. She was the real deal, building her work around songs her grandmother and relatives.

She spent time in the UK and Germany in the latter part of the sixties and early seventies, and recording for Topic allowed the full breadth of her repertoire to shine. Hedy’s still mentioned with awe by the likes of Martin Simpson. She has a very direct style which obscures the subtlety of both her banjo playing and her vocal phrasing.

Three videos tonight. The first is the very traditional The Wife of Usher’s Well (Child 79), the second the crowd-pleasing Cotton Mill Girls, and the third Little Sadie, in a TV studio with Pete Seeger and Mississippi John Hurt. You can tell it’s folk music because of the body count.