In 2005 Michael Pellecchia returned to his native yankee soil after 25 years in Texas, where they ran him out on a rail after discovering he had been a cultural spy all along. Too late: his work was done.  Gunny sack and horns in hand he made his way north to New England with the goods and spilled them out on the barn floor for the rest of us to rummage through.  We will never get to the bottom of the musical depths he pillaged lo those many years.  “Music is hell young fella’,” he cried, and they were off again: “a-one, a-two, a-one, two, three FOUR!”….

One morning in the 1980s, as Dan Beller-McKenna was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered his pedal steel had been changed into a monstrous verminous book.  As he turned to the first page he was swallowed whole into the belly of the beast and was spit out again dripping with pretension in the spring of 2005, only to find his steel sitting right where he'd left it.  In the interim he'd forgotten how to speak the native tongue. Good thing Shoeless-Dan stumbled into Michael when he too returned to his native north.

He glided in on a white Econoline back before anyone can remember saying only, "Yeah, I can fix that for you, but you must never ask my name or from whence I came."  We adduced he was Bruce (Stelter, that is: it was printed on the bill he gave us, after all) and we decided he had descended from a den of musical deity (whispered rumors posited the Bay area).  Once he took up his six string lyre, the dog laid her head on his lap and became docile.  Strange songs that sang of far away places rolled off his tongue and sprang from his fingers.  We followed.

On the mere basis of a seemingly innocent encounter at an elementary school holiday feast, Joanne Connolly answered an e-mail and found herself enmeshed in the musical web of Big Red. When we saw a professionally trained musician we knew we couldn’t let her get away. Trapped between a snare and a hard place she sang her way out. Way out; so far out that the medicine men told her to leave some air for the rest of us. But she does it so well that we let her take all the breath support she wants. Sing it!