Thanks Marty, today we’ll hear a band of students play the title track from their first album.
When I came up with the idea of doing the New Jazz In Jonesboro concerts at TheArts@311 I was a jazz student at ASU. So it stood to reason that I would recruit the New Jazz House Band, known as NJHB, from my fellow students.
We had our first session at the HairyLarryLand studio in Jonesboro at the very end of 2012. We recorded four songs, all original compositions. I was the only one who had played any of them before so it was kind of like jumping off into the deep end. No rehearsals, just put the music up on the stand, talk for a minute, and record it.
I took what we recorded and released our first album, “Circular Logic”.
Fiddler Ed Larkin, at 78, plays for the square dances at the World’s Fair, Tunbridge, Vermont in a photograph by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress.
Joan Baez at The Newport Folk Festival, “Gentle On My Mind,” 1968.
“It’s knowin’ that your door is always open And your path is free to walk That makes me tend to leave my sleepin’ bag Rolled up and stashed behind your couch
And it’s knowin’ I’m not shackled By forgotten words and bonds And the ink stains that have dried upon some line That keeps you in the back roads By the rivers of my memory That keeps you ever gentle on my mind
It’s not clingin’ to the rocks and ivy Planted on their columns now that bind me Or something that somebody said because They thought we fit together walkin’
It’s just knowing that the world Will not be cursing or forgiving When I walk along some railroad track and find That you’re movin’ on the back roads By the rivers of my memory And for hours you’re just gentle on my mind
Though the wheat fields and the clothes lines And the junkyards and the highways come between us And some other woman’s cryin’ to her mother ‘Cause she turned and I was gone
I still might run in silence Tears of joy might stain my face And the summer sun might burn me till I’m blind But not to where I cannot see You walkin’ on the back roads By the rivers flowin’ gentle on my mind
I dip my cup of soup back from a gurglin’ cracklin’ cauldron In some train yard My beard a rustlin’ coal pile And a dirty hat pulled low across my face
Through cupped hands ‘round a tin can I pretend to hold you to my breast and find That you’re waitin’ from the back roads By the rivers of my memory Ever smilin’, ever gentle on my mind…”