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IRISH AND FRENCH IN MEXICO

SCULLY – THE IRISH FRENCH FOREIGN LEGIONNAIRE – 5/30/2020 The Irish, when their great wave of immigration crashed on American shores, were widely reviled. In the industrial north many businesses wouldn’t hire them – so the men often joined the army, for food, lodging and a small wage. But they were treated terribly in the …

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CORONA BLUES

MARCH 22, 2020 – DEAR BLOG READERS: I’M GOING TO TURN THIS CORONA BLUES BLOG POST INTO A SINGLE, LONG, COVID-19 SERIES OF POSTS – STARTING WITH MY FIRST ONE, ON MARCH 13, THAT MIXED MY EARLY CORONAVIRUS AWARENESS WITH HOW IT WAS IMPACTING MATAMOROS – AND MOVING CHRONOLOGICALLY AFTER THAT POST, TO SUBSEQUENT COVID …

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The Art of Tom Russell

MARCH 3, 2020 For a number of decades I’ve known and admired Tom Russell’s work as a gritty folksinger-songwriter, cowboy poet, Southwest musician – but somehow the notion of him as a painter passed me by. Never even occurred to me he was the artist of his CD covers. I first saw prints of some …

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Brownsville/Matamoros – Then and Now

FEBRUARY 20, 2020 On Valentine’s Day I went to Brownsville to do a book signing at the Brownsville Historical Association museum, which is where I’d done some research on the Matamoros novel. The plan was to talk a little about the history of the town, do a 10 minute reading from the book, sing two …

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Tom Russell and Ramblin Jack Elliott, too

FEBRUARY 11, 2020 So some nice reviews have been rolling in for Matamoros, both the book and the CD. And then I noticed this paragraph from Jim Hynes’s review of the CD in The Daily Ripple on 1/29/2020: “Dylan had a lengthy song called “Brownsville Girl” but the preeminent comparison is the similarly literate Tom …

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So Long, The River

FEBRUARY 10, 2020 The songs on the Matamoros CD tell the stories of the characters in the book. Sometimes backstories of those characters, sometimes tales of what happens to them after the book ends, sometimes pieces of the narrative arc of the novel, but from the character’s subjective point of view, influenced by his dreams …

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