Song 213: Once again, the playlist rolls around to 7 weeks since the last time I posted a song by a personal friend, so this week's track is New Dirt Road by Richard Meyer, who also wrote the song. There is no YouTube video of the song, but you can hear an m4a of it by checking out the playlist page on my website (daveelder.com). Richard acted as editor for the Fast Folk Musical Magazine for many years, including a few when I put in some time there as well, and while we didn't always agree on our musical points of view, I always respected Richard for the time and effort he put into the FF operation, in the service of music and songwriters that he believed in and wanted to help promote. The FF gatherings and song swaps usually centered around a songwriter's newest piece, but at one song swap Richard said he wanted to do one of his older tunes, and he played this song. I told him I thought it was the best original I'd ever heard him do, and when it appeared on his 1992 release The Good Life, I thought the recording sounded even better than his live solo version. I liked this song so much that when he played a set at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival one July afternoon, I asked him to play this tune, and he did. I later designed and coded Richard's website, back in the era before CSS, when everything had to fit in an HTML table, and while I still think my stage/spotlight design looks good in the archive, I could never get it to center the way it should have. Sadly, Richard lived out his last few years in a nursing home, due to a disease that had plagued him to varying degrees for most of his time as an adult, and that disease ended his life in the spring of 2012.
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